Criterion has announced their April release slate of releases and it’s pretty good mix of classic and contemporary titles that should please both crowds.
First up, arriving on both DVD and BluRay, and featuring a great cover, Jean-Luc Godard’s “Vivre Sa Vie” makes a bow on the label in a single disc edition. Featuring the lovely Anna Karina, Godard’s greatest muse, the story revolves around would-be actress who winds up a prostitute instead. The film, one of Godard’s landmark New Wave masterpieces, features some of his most iconic sequences set among a tableux of daydreams and dances. The extras are extensive and include an audio commentary by film scholar Adrian Martin; a 1962 television interview with Karina; a 1961 French television expose on prostitution; an illustrated essay on “Le Prostitution,” the book that inspired the film and a booklet further essays and interviews.
Olivier Assayas’ “Summer Hours” was on our favorite films from last year, and it arrives here in a 2-disc DVD and single disc BluRay set courtesy of Criterion’s recent deal with IFC. The film, an evocative look at the shifting cultural tides of a French family, has been given the deluxe treatment here. The set will feature a short, behind-the-scenes look on the making on the film as well as, “Inventory,” an hour long documentary, shot partly in the Musée d’Orsay that will look at the film’s approach to art (indeed, French art history is a key thematic element to the flim). A trailer, essay by Kent Jones and an interview with the director round out the features.
Ang Lee’s Civil War epic, “Ride With The Devil,” may seem like an odd choice, and it’s certainly already available on DVD, but it arrives on Criterion for the first time in a full director’s cut. Featuring thirteen minutes of additional footage, Lee’s film can now be seen as it was fully intended. Arriving in single disc DVD and BluRay editions, there isn’t much in the way of extras, but with separate commentary tracks – one featuring Lee and producer/screenwriter James Schamus and the other with DOP Frederick Elmes, sound designer Drew Kunin, and production designer Mark Friedberg – over a nearly two a half hour film, there will be plenty to chew on.
Last fall, Criterion dropped some hints about legendary director Sidney Lumet stopping by their offices and now we know why. Lumet’s 1959 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ tale about a drifter trying to go straight, “The Fugitive Kind,” arrives in a 2-disc DVD set that will make MGM’s still available bare bones edition a nice coaster. Starring Marlon Brando in the prime of his career, Anna Magnani, Joanne Woodward, and Maureen Stapleton the film is just one of five productions of Williams’ work that Lumet would put to celluloid. You can find three more of them in the set in “Three Plays By Tennessee Williams,” an hour long television presentation of three one-act plays directed by Lumet. The set also features an interview with Lumet, an essay by scholar and critic David Thomson and a new documentary on Williams’ work in Hollywood, including “The Fugitive Kind.”
Finally, another box-set of Criterion’s scaled down, bargain version of their releases, Essential Art House, arrives in its fifth volume. This set features bare bones editions of previous releases including David Lean’s “Brief Encounter,” Frederico Fellini’s “8 1/2,” Milos Forman’s “Loves Of A Blonde,” Francois Truffaut’s “Jules And Jim” and Yasujiro Ozu’s “Floating Weeds.” The only new title in the bunch is Gillo Pontecorvo’s “Kapo,” his little seen 1959 film about a young woman in “a Nazi concentration camp who saves herself from death by assuming another’s identity and becoming a ruthless warden.”