Boutique DVD/Blu-Ray label The Criterion Collection always has a terrific monthly line-up, and its August 2024 releases are no different. Highlighting late summer’s Criterion announcements are a pair of comedian Albert Brooks films that have been out of print on DVD for quite some time. The first is Brooks’ 1979 directorial debut, the reality TV spoof “Real Life,” and the second is the 1996 comedy “Mother” co-starring Debbie Reynolds. The films are the third and fourth Brooks films to join Criterion following the release of “Defending Your Life”(1991) and “Lost In America” (1985).
Also joining the collection is a pair of films from Ukrainian filmmaker Kira Muratova. Facing decades of censorship, her first two solo movies, “Brief Encounters” and “The Long Farewell,” have long been readily available, and these releases should be a real discovery for the majority of cinephiles.
Additionally, director and trailblazer Martha Coolidge’s “Not A Pretty Picture” is described as a “metacinematic experiment in recreating trauma” and essentially an examination of a date rape she experienced at 16. The film is also essentially known as her narrative feature film directorial debut after years of working as a documentary filmmaker in the early to mid-1970s. Coolidge is also known for directing “Valley Girl,” “Real Genius” and “Rambling Rose.”
Also reupped to a 4K/UHD edition is the previously released “The Last Emperor” from Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci. The film was nominated for nine Oscars at the 60th Academy Awards and won all nine prizes, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS / THE LONG FAREWELL: TWO FILMS BY KIRA MURATOVA
Nobody made films like Kira Muratova. Uncompromising and uncategorizable, the Ukrainian iconoclast withstood decades of censorship to realize her singular vision in hypnotically beautiful, expressionistically heightened films that remain unique in their ability to evoke complex interior worlds. Her first two solo features, Brief Encounters, and The Long Farewell, are fascinatingly fragmented portraits of women navigating work, romance, and family life with a mix of deep yearning and playful pragmatism. Long suppressed by Soviet authorities, these films became legendary—along with their maker—and they now make for a revelatory introduction to this most fearlessly original of artists.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New 4K digital restorations, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks
• Interviews with scholars Elena Gorfinkel and Isabel Jacobs
• Archival interview with director Kira Muratova
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Jessica Kiang
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
1967 • 96 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Russian with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio
Kira Muratova’s first solo feature already displays her sui generis approach to cinema, in an impressionistic portrait of women at work and in love. Through an intricate play of flashbacks and shifting perspectives, Brief Encounters reveals the tangled romantic triangle that connects a hard-nosed city planner (played by Muratova herself), her free-spirited geologist husband (legendary Soviet protest singer Vladimir Vysotskiy), and the young woman from the countryside (Nina Ruslanova) whom she hires as her housekeeper. Blending observational realism with striking New Wave–style experimentation, Muratova crafts a wryly perceptive study of two very different women bound by chance and each navigating her own career, dreams, and disappointments.
THE LONG FAREWELL
1971 • 94 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Russian with English subtitles • 1.37:1 aspect ratio
With its daring formalist freedom, Kira Muratova’s pointillist family portrait so perplexed and unnerved Soviet censors that it effectively halted her career for years afterward. A kind of psychological breakup movie, The Long Farewell traces the growing rift that develops between an emotionally impulsive single mother (stage legend Zinaida Sharko, transcendent in one of her first film roles) and her increasingly resentful teenage son (Oleg Vladimirsky), who upends her world when he announces that he wishes to live with his faraway father. The seemingly simple premise is rendered anything but by Muratova’s dreamy, drifting style, with off-kilter framing, editing, and dialogue continually pushing cinema’s aesthetic and expressive boundaries outward.
NOT A PRETTY PICTURE
1975 • 82 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.33:1 aspect ratio
Trailblazing filmmaker Martha Coolidge made her feature debut with this unflinchingly personal hybrid of documentary and fiction. Centered on an intense reenactment of Coolidge’s experience of rape in her adolescence, the film casts Michele Manenti (also a survivor) as the director’s younger self, and observes the actor and her castmates as they engage in a profound dialogue about what it means to recreate these traumatic memories, and about their attitudes concerning consent and self-blame. A high-stakes experiment in metacinema that broke new ground with its uncompromising examination of date rape, Not a Pretty Picture brings a stunning immediacy to questions about the on-screen representation of sexual violence and the limits of artistic catharsis.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Martha Coolidge, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Interview with Coolidge conducted by filmmaker Allison Anders
• Old-Fashioned Woman (1974), a documentary by Coolidge about her grandmother
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Molly Haskell
REAL LIFE
1979 • 99 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
Decades before reality television reigned supreme, there was Albert Brooks’s debut feature, Real Life, a brilliantly deadpan, stylistically innovative satire about the perils and pitfalls of trying to capture the truth on film. The writer-director plays “Albert Brooks,” a narcissistic Hollywood filmmaker who plans to spend the year in Phoenix embedded with Warren and Jeanette Yeager (Charles Grodin and Frances Lee McCain) and their two children, deploying an arsenal of cutting-edge equipment (including the over-the-head Ettinaur 226XL camera) to capture an American family’s ordinary day-to-day. Chronicling the project’s disastrous fallout, as the meddlesome Albert can’t help getting too close to his subjects, this pioneering mockumentary is more relevant than ever amid today’s media landscape.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Albert Brooks, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
• New interview with Brooks
• New interview with actor Frances Lee McCain
• 3D trailer directed by Brooks
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
MOTHER
1996 • 104 minutes • Color • 2.0 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
Reeling after his second divorce and struggling with writer’s block, sci-fi novelist John Henderson (Albert Brooks) resolves to figure out where his life went wrong, and hits on an unorthodox solution: moving back in with his relentlessly disapproving, cheerfully passive-aggressive mother (Debbie Reynolds), whose favorite son has always been John’s younger brother, Jeff (Rob Morrow). It’s an experiment that, however harebrained, delivers surprising results. Brooks’s film perfectly blends the writer-director-star’s biting wit with insight and inviting warmth, while giving him a formidable foil in the delightful Reynolds, triumphant in a comeback role that’s equal parts caustic and charming.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Albert Brooks, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
• New interview with Brooks
• New interview with actor Rob Morrow
• Teaser directed by Brooks
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by critic Carrie Rickey
THE LAST EMPEROR
1987 • 163 minutes • Color • 2.0 surround • 2.35:1 aspect ratio
Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor won nine Academy Awards, unexpectedly sweeping every category in which it was nominated—quite a feat for a challenging, multilayered epic directed by an Italian and starring an international cast. Yet the scope of the film was, and remains, undeniably powerful—the life of Emperor Puyi, who took the throne in 1908, at age three, before witnessing decades of cultural and political upheaval within and without the walls of the Forbidden City. Recreating Qing-dynasty China with astonishing detail and unparalleled craftsmanship by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, The Last Emperor is also an intimate character study of one man reconciling personal responsibility and political legacy.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• 4K digital restoration, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features
• Audio commentary featuring director Bernardo Bertolucci, producer Jeremy Thomas, screenwriter Mark Peploe, and composer-actor Ryuichi Sakamoto
• 218-minute television version
• The Italian Traveler, Bernardo Bertolucci, a film by Fernand Moszkowicz tracing the director’s geographic influences, from Parma to China
• Footage taken by Bertolucci while on preproduction in China
• Two documentaries about the making of the film
• Program featuring cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, editor Gabriella Cristiani, costume designer James Acheson, and art director Gianni Silvestri
• Archival interview with Bertolucci
• Interviews with composer David Byrne and cultural historian Ian Buruma
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by film critic David Thomson, interviews with production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and actor Ying Ruocheng, a reminiscence by Bertolucci, and an essay by Fabien S. Gerard
