Criterion has announced their lineup for November 2018, which includes Kenji Mizoguchi‘s A Story from Chikamatsu, Billy Wilder‘s Some Like It Hot, David Byrne‘s True Stories, and Orson Welles‘ The Magnificent Ambersons.
Take a look below for more information about each title and head over to criterion.com to check out their full catalogue.
A Story from Chikamatsu
One of a string of late-career masterworks made by Kenji Mizoguchi in the early 1950s, A Story from Chikamatsu (a.k.a. The Crucified Lovers) is an exquisitely moving tale of forbidden love struggling to survive in the face of persecution. Based on a classic of eighteenth-century Japanese drama, the film traces the injustices that befall a Kyoto scroll maker’s wife and his apprentice after each is unfairly accused of wrongdoing. Bound by fate in an illicit, star-crossed romance, they go on the run in search of refuge from the punishment prescribed them: death. Shot in gorgeous, painterly style by master cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, this subtly sensuous indictment of societal oppression was heralded by Akira Kurosawa as a “great masterpiece that could only have been made by Mizoguchi.”
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* New interview with actor Kyoko Kagawa
* Mizoguchi: The Auteur Behind the “Metteur-en-scène,” a new illustrated audio essay by film scholar Dudley Andrew
* New English subtitle translation
* PLUS: An essay by film scholar Haden Guest
1954 * 102 minutes * Black & White * Monaural * In Japanese with English subtitles * 1.37:1 aspect ratio
BLU-RAY EDITION
SRP $39.95
STREET 11/6/18
DVD EDITION
SRP $29.95
STREET 11/6/18
Some Like It Hot
One of the most beloved films of all time, this sizzling masterpiece by Billy Wilder set a new standard for Hollywood comedy. After witnessing a mob hit, Chicago musicians Joe and Jerry (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, in landmark performances) skip town by donning drag and joining an all-female band en route to Miami. The charm of the group’s singer, Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe,at the height of her bombshell powers) leads them ever further into extravagant lies, as Joe assumes the persona of a millionaire to woo her and Jerry’s female alter ego winds up engaged to a tycoon. With a whip-smart script by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, and sparking chemistry among its finely tuned cast, Some Like It Hot is as deliriously funny and fresh today as if it had just been made.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* Audio commentary from 1989 featuring film scholar Howard Suber
* New program on Orry-Kelly’s costumes for the film, featuring costume designer and historian Deborah Nadoolman Landis and costume historian and archivist Larry McQueen
* Three making-of documentaries
* Appearance from 1982 by director Billy Wilder on The Dick Cavett Show
* Conversation from 2001 between actor Tony Curtis and film critic Leonard Maltin
* French television interview from 1988 with actor Jack Lemmon
* Trailer
* PLUS: An essay by author Sam Wasson
1959 * 121 minutes * Black & White * Monaural * 1.85:1 aspect ratio
BLU-RAY EDITION
SRP $39.95
STREET 11/13/18
2-DVD EDITION
SRP $29.95
STREET 11/13/18
True Stories
Music icon David Byrne was inspired by tabloid headlines to make this sole foray into feature film directing, an ode to the extraordinariness of ordinary American life and a distillation of what was in his own idiosyncratic mind. Byrne plays a visitor to Virgil, Texas, who introduces us to the citizens of the town during preparations for its Celebration of Specialness. As shot by cinematographer Ed Lachman, Texas becomes a hyperrealistic late-capitalist landscape of endless vistas, shopping malls, and prefab metal buildings. In True Stories, Byrne uses his songs to stitch together pop iconography, voodoo rituals, and a singular variety show-all in the service of uncovering the rich mysteries that lurk under the surface of everyday experience.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* New, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by director David Byrne and cinematographer Ed Lachman, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, supervised by Byrne, on the Blu-ray
* New documentary about the film’s production, featuring Byrne, Lachman, writer Stephen Tobolowsky, executive producer Ed Pressman, coproducer Karen Murphy, fashion-show costume designer Adelle Lutz, consultant Christina Patoski, actor Jo Harvey Allen, and musician Terry Allen
* CD with 23 songs, containing the film’s complete soundtrack compiled here for the first time (Blu-ray only)
* Real Life (1986), a short documentary by Pamela Yates and Newton Thomas Sigel made on the set of the film
* No Time to Look Back, a new homage to Virgil, Texas, the fictional town where True Stories is set
* New program about designer Tibor Kalman and his influence on Byrne and role in the film, featuring Byrne and Kalman’s wife, artist Maira Kalman
* Deleted scenes
* Trailer
* PLUS: An essay by critic Rebecca Bengal, along with, for the Blu-ray edition, new pieces by journalist and author Joe Nick Patoski and Byrne, a 1986 piece by actor Spalding Gray on the film’s production, some of the tabloid stories that inspired the film, and a selection of Byrne’s preproduction photography and writing about the film’s visual motifs
1986 * 89 minutes * Color * 5.1 surround * 1.85:1 aspect ratio
BLU-RAY EDITION
SRP $49.95
STREET 11/20/18
2-DVD EDITION
SRP $29.95
STREET 11/20/18
The Magnificent Ambersons
Orson Welles’s beautiful, nostalgia-suffused second feature-the subject of one of cinema’s greatest missing-footage tragedies-harks back to turn-of-the-twentieth-century Indianapolis, chronicling the inexorable decline of the fortunes of an affluent family. Adapted from an acclaimed Booth Tarkington novel and characterized by restlessly inventive camera work and powerful performances from a cast including Joseph Cotten, Tim Holt, and Agnes Moorehead, the film traces the rifts deepening within the Amberson clan-at the same time as the forces of progress begin to transform the city they once ruled. Though RKO excised over forty minutes of footage, now lost to history, and added an incongruously upbeat ending, The Magnificent Ambersons is an emotionally rich family saga and a masterful elegy for a bygone chapter of American life.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* Two audio commentaries, featuring film scholars Robert Carringer and James Naremore and critic Jonathan Rosenbaum
* New interviews with scholars Simon Callow and Joseph McBride
* New video essay on the film’s cinematographers by scholar François Thomas
* New video essay on the film’s score by scholar Christopher Husted
* Welles on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970
* Segment from Pampered Youth, a 1925 silent adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons
* Audio from a 1979 AFI symposium on Welles
* Two Mercury Theatre radio plays: Seventeen (1938), an adaptation of another Booth Tarkington novel by Welles, and The Magnificent Ambersons (1939)
* Trailer
* PLUS: An essay by critic Molly Haskell and (Blu-ray only) essays by authors and critics Luc Sante, Geoffrey O’Brien, Farran Smith Nehme, and Jonathan Lethem, and excerpts from an unfinished 1982 memoir by Welles
1942 * 88 minutes * Black & White * Monaural * 1.37:1 aspect ratio
BLU-RAY EDITION
SRP $39.95
STREET 11/20/18
2-DVD EDITION
SRP $29.95
STREET 11/20/18
