La Antena (Esteban Sapir, 2007)

“Inventive, elegiac, gently surreal.  If David Lynch had been around in the 1920s, it’s exactly the kind of film he would have made.” – Ian Berriman, SFX.CO.UK

In the year XX, an entire city has lost the ability to speak save for the mysterious Voice (Florencia Raggi), a hooded singer whose soothing songs are heard on a program broadcast under the media monopoly of Mr. TV (Alejandro Urdapilleta).  When Mr. TV’s nefarious schemes escalate and he kidnaps the Voice with plans to use her vocal chords to extend his power, her eyeless son Tomás, also gifted with the power of speech, becomes the only hope for her and the voiceless city.  An inventor (Rafael Ferro), his ex-wife (Julieta Cardinali), and their devoted daughter Ana (Sol Moreno) race to save Tomás, the Voice, and the city from Mr. TV’s despotic plot, dodging the mogul’s silhouetted henchmen and his evil righthand, the Mouse Man.  A cautionary tale on media control, Esteban Sapir’s La Antena is a stylized sci-fi thriller drawing heavily on silent cinema, film noir, and German expressionism that is “in a word: Unmissable” (Kat Brown, Empire Online).

Special Features:

• Interview with filmmaker Esteban Sapir
• Making of La Antena: a documentary featurette on the making of the film
• Deleted and alternate scenes
• Picado fino, Sapir’s 1996 debut feature
• Trailers
• 42-page booklet of script excerpts and storyboard art

“Calle Eclipse” Edition – Package includes:

• La Antena on Blu-ray or Standard DVD featuring over 2 hours of bonus material
• High quality 720p HD Digital Download of the Film Available on Street Date
• Instant Download of the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Leo Sujatovich in Apple MP4
• 27″ x 40″ Theatrical Poster Autographed by Sapir
• 27″ x 40″ Mondo Poster by Tyler Stout
• Alimentos TV Dinner Biscuits

The Stars Look Down (Carol Reed, 1940)

The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents The Stars Look Down.

Carol Reed’s adaptation of A. J. Cronin’s novel presents the hardscrabble existence of a northern England mining town. Davey Fenwick (Michael Redgrave) escapes the dangerous Scupper Flats seam for a college education and plans to improve the lot of his coal-mining community.  Trapped in an unhappy marriage and forced to return to his grimy home, Davey is embroiled in a labor dispute and then a mining disaster.  Starring Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood on loan from Gainsborough Pictures to Grand National and filmed both on location and on elaborate sets at the Denham and Twickenham Studios, Reed invests The Stars Look Down with a gritty documentary look and a poetic naturalist style that garnered him international acclaim, launching him to further cinematic accomplishments.

Disc Features:

• New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New interview with Billy Elliot director Stephen Daldry
  
• Comparison between the English and American versions
• “Michael Redgrave: My Father,” Roger Michell’s 1997 BBC Omnibus documentary narrated by Michael Redgrave’s son Corin Redgrave
• Trailer
• PLUS:  A booklet featuring a new essay by film critic Dave Berry and Graham Greene’s review for The Spectator.

Wuthering Heights (Yoshishige Yoshida, 1988)

The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents Wuthering Heights.

Yoshishige Yoshida’s violent and erotic vision of Emily Brontë’s classic novel transposes its story from 19th century Yorkshire to medieval Japan to create a distinctive version of an English masterpiece.  Gone are the foggy, north English moors, the titular farmhouse, and Thrushcross Grange – replaced with a steaming, volcanic mountainside and the rival East and West mansions.  Onimaru (Yasaku Matsuda) is the orphan boy adopted into the Yamabe family of the East Mansion, responsible to appease the Mountain of Fire’s god.  His forbidden love for Kinu (Yuko Tanaka) is frustrated when she marries into the West Mansion, inspiring Onimaru’s vengeance and madness.  Yoshida’s brooding and claustrophobic Wuthering Heights celebrates the novel’s uncertainty and Gothic darkness while incorporating Shinto folklore and ritual, transgressive sexuality, and the romantic rebelliousness of the Japanese avant-garde.

Disc Features:

• New 2K digital film restoration, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Introduction by Yoshishige Yoshida
• New audio commentary by Japanese film scholar David Desser
• Making of documentary
• A new video piece by musician and scholar Philip Brophy on Wuthering Heights, Takemitsu Toru’s score, and the Japanese Gothic
• Theatrical trailer
• PLUS:  A booklet of essays by Wuthering Heights scholar Hila Shachar and Japanese film scholar Isolde Standish

Frontline (Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, Jane Kennedy, and Rob Sitch, 1994-1997)

The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents Frontline.

Based at an unspecified commercial network, the Australian television series Frontline goes behind the scenes of the ratings-obsessed world of commercial current affairs.  Covering everything from the use of hidden cameras, foot-in-the-door bullying interview techniques, and checkbook journalism, the comedy’s three seasons takes a satirical look at the egos, the dubious practices, and the occasional hypocrisy of a medium that purports to objectively present the news.  By rejecting the three-wall, laugh-tracked sitcom format and utilizing a realist camera-style and cameos by actual Australian political and media personalities, Frontline was a TV phenomenon at the time of its airing and remains as hilarious and as topical now as it was when it debuted nearly twenty years ago.

Disc Features:

• All three thirteen-episode seasons, digitally restored with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Select episode introductions featuring original cast members and creators
• Behind the Frontline, John Tabbagh’s hour-long documentary on the making of Frontline, recorded in 1995 during the show’s second season
• Promotional spots
• PLUS:  A booklet featuring an interview with Frontline guest star Harry Shearer

Wicked City (Yoshiaki Kawajiri, 1987)

“The best parts of John Carpenter’s The Thing and Videodrome packed into a sexy sci-fi actioner.” – Adam Groves, FRIGHT.COM

There is Earth, our familiar world, and then there is the Black World, a parallel dimension that very few people are aware of.  For centuries, a pact between the two worlds has ensured our peaceful coexistence, but terms must be negotiated and renewed to continue the relative harmony.  With little time before the expiration of the existing treaty, a militant faction of Black World radicals commit themselves to preventing the establishment of a new peace accord.  Two agents from the elite organization called the Black Guards – defenders of the balance between the two worlds – are charged with ensuring the success of the treaty.  Director Yoshiaki Kawajiri (Ninja Scroll) blends stylish eroticism, graphic horror and pulse-pounding action as these two agents from distant worlds struggle to protect a key figure to the peace process, a centuries old psychic with plans of his own.  Long out of print and unavailable in North America, Wicked City finally returns!

Special Features:

• Introduction with cartoon historian and Wicked City distributor, Jerry Beck
• Audio commentary with Japanese film curator, Jasper Sharp
• Interview with director, Yoshiaki Kawajiri
• Original theatrical trailers
• Character biographies
• Original Japanese and English-dubbed language options
• 16-page booklet with image gallery and concept art

Black World Edition – Package includes:

• Wicked City on Blu-ray or Standard DVD
• High quality 720p HD Digital Download of the film
• Instant Download of the 10-track Wicked City soundtrack
• 27″ x 40″ Theatrical Poster
• Unofficial Wicked City black tie and cufflinks set

Taking Off (Milos Forman, 1971)

The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents Taking Off.

Miloš Forman’s first film in the United States is an affectionate satire of the generation gap dividing America in the late 1960s and early ’70s.  In Taking Off, Forman casts his focus specifically on middle class New York, the Tyne family, and the bourgeois mores that divide Larry and Lynn Tyne (Buck Henry and Lynn Carlin) from their runaway daughter Jeannie (Linnea Heacock).  Through the Society for the Parents of Fugitive Children, Larry and Lynn delve into the counterculture in an effort to understand their wayward child and begin to step out of the hegemony of America’s silent majority.  Punctuated by musical sequences, including performances by a young Carly Simon and a still unknown Kathy Bates, Taking Off humorously captures the tensions between a challenged conservative America and the hippie movement already struggling with its own contradictions.

Disc Features:

• New digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Optional remastered uncompressed stereo soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Clara Kuperberg and Julia Kuperberg’s Miloš Forman: Taking Off in America, an hour-long, 2011 interview with the filmmaker discussing his journey from Czechoslovakia to Hollywood
• Before Taking Off: Miloš Forman’s Road to America, Robert Fischer’s 30-minute newly edited and illustrated archival interview with Forman on his time in Czechoslovakia and his opportunity to film his first American movie in New York City
• Two Europeans in New York, a 16 minute interview with co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière
• New interviews with co-writer John Guare, Buck Henry, Carly Simon, and Kathy Bates
• I Miss Sonia Henie, Karpo Acimovic-Godina’s 1971 short film made in collaboration with Forman and Buck Henry, as well as Tinto Brass, Mladomir “Puriša” Ðjordjevic, Dušan Makavejev, Paul Morrisey, and Frederick Wiseman
• Theatrical trailer
• Photo gallery
• PLUS:  A booklet of essays by film critics J. Hoberman and Dave Kehr, and writer and documentarian Luc Lagier