Criterion has announced their new list of releases coming to shelves December 2014 and it’s definitely not the flashiest of line-ups and, in fact, a rather limited one as it contains only three new Criterion titles along with one new edition to their Eclipse brand.
First off we have Terry Gilliam‘s Time Bandits arriving on December 9. Previously released by Criterion on Laserdisc, the film now makes the jump to DVD and Blu-ray with a new 2K digital restoration and a new piece exploring the creation of the film’s various historical periods and fantasy worlds along with previously released features such as an audio commentary and interviews.
In this fantastic voyage through time and space from Terry Gilliam, a boy named Kevin (Craig Warnock) escapes his gadget-obsessed parents to join a band of time-traveling dwarves. Armed with a map stolen from the Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson), they plunder treasure from Napoleon (Ian Holm) and Agamemnon (Sean Connery)–but Evil (David Warner) is watching their every move. Featuring a darkly playful script by Gilliam and Monty Python’s Michael Palin (who also appears in the film), Time Bandits is at once a giddy fairy tale, a revisionist history lesson, and a satire on technology gone awry.
Also on December 9 is Safe from Todd Haynes, a film I actually haven’t seen but have heard a lot about as it features a breakthrough performance from Julianne Moore. The release features a new 4K restoration of the movie along with an audio commentary with Haynes, Moore and producer Christine Vachon, interviews with Haynes and Moore and Haynes’ 1978 short film The Suicide.
Julianne Moore gives a breakthrough performance as Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife in the late 1980s who comes down with a debilitating illness. After the doctors she sees can give her no clear diagnosis, she comes to believe that she has frighteningly extreme environmental allergies. A profoundly unsettling work from the great American director Todd Haynes, Safe functions on multiple levels: as a prescient commentary on self-help culture, as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis, as a drama about class and social estrangement, and as a horror film about what you cannot see. This revelatory drama was named the best film of the 1990s in a Village Voice poll of more than fifty critics.
Liliana Cavani‘s The Night Porter, starring Charlotte Rampling, is also a December 9 release with a new 2K digital restoration, new interviews with Cavani and screenwriters Barbara Alberti and Amedeo Pagani and a fifty-minute 1965 documentary by Cavani, composed of interviews with female partisans who survived the German invasion of Italy.
In this unsettling drama from Italian filmmaker Liliana Cavani, a concentration camp survivor (Charlotte Rampling) discovers her former torturer and lover ( Dirk Bogarde) working as a porter at a hotel in postwar Vienna. When the couple attempt to re-create their sadomasochistic relationship, his former SS comrades begin to stalk them. Operatic and disturbing, The Night Porter deftly examines the lasting social and psychological effects of the Nazi regime.
Finally, on December 16, the Eclipse Series 41, Kinoshita and World War II will hit shelves, featuring five films from Keisuke Kinoshita.
Hugely popular in his home country of Japan, Keisuke Kinoshita worked tirelessly as a director for nearly half a century, making lyrical, sentimental films that often center on the inherent goodness of people, especially in times of distress. He began his directing career during a most challenging time for Japanese cinema: World War II, when the industry’s output was closely monitored by the state and often had to be purely propagandistic. This collection of Kinoshita’s first films–four made while the war was going on and one shortly after Japan’s surrender–demonstrates the way the filmmaker’s humanity and exquisite cinematic technique shone through, even in the darkest of times.
