The Criterion Collection and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment have confirmed the titles to be released in the UK on Blu-ray in February 2019.
On 4 February comes 24 Frames. The final film from Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami creates a dialogue between his work as a filmmaker and his work as a photographer, bridging the two art forms to which he had dedicated his life.
Following on 18 February is the jazzy gangster film Tokyo Drifter. Director Seijun Suzuki’s onslaught of stylized violence and trippy colors is a delirious highlight of the brilliantly excessive Japanese cinema of the sixties.
On 25 February arrives the Oscar-nominated La Vérité. Featuring an astonishing performance by Brigitte Bardot, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s affecting and intricately constructed film renders a harsh verdict against a hypocritical and moralistic society.
24 Frames (2017) | Blu-ray | 4 February 2018
For what would prove to be his final film, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami (Close-up) gave himself a challenge: to create a dialogue between his work as a filmmaker and his work as a photographer, bridging the two art forms to which he had dedicated his life. Setting out to reconstruct the moments immediately before and after a photograph is taken, Kiarostami selected twenty-four still images – most of them stark landscapes inhabited only by foraging birds and other wildlife – and digitally animated each one into its own subtly evolving four-and-a-half-minute vignette, creating a series of poignant studies in movement, perception, and time. A sustained meditation on the process of image making, 24 Frames is a graceful and elegiac farewell from one of the giants of world cinema.
Special Edition Blu-ray features:
- 2K digital master, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- New interview with director Abbas Kiarostami’s son Ahmad Kiarostami, who helped finish the film after his father’s death
- New conversation between Iranian film scholar Jamsheed Akrami and film critic Godfrey Cheshire
- New short documentary about the making of the film by Abbas Kiarostami collaborator Salma Monshizadeh
Tokyo Drifter [Tôkyô nagaremono] (1966) | Blu-ray | 18 February 2018
In this jazzy gangster film, reformed killer Phoenix Tetsu’s attempt to go straight is squashed when his former cohorts call him back to Tokyo to help battle a rival gang. This onslaught of stylized violence and trippy colours got director Seijun Suzuki (Branded to Kill) in trouble with Nikkatsu studio heads, who were put off by his anything-goes, in-your-face aesthetic, equal parts Russ Meyer, Samuel Fuller, and Nagisa Oshima. Tokyo Drifter is a delirious highlight of the brilliantly excessive Japanese cinema of the sixties.
Special Edition Blu-ray features:
- New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Video piece featuring new interviews with director Seijun Suzuki and assistant director Masami Kuzuu
- Interview with Suzuki from 1997
- Original theatrical trailer
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Howard Hampton
La vérité [The Truth] (1960) | Blu-ray | 25 February 2018
Beautiful, troubled Dominique Marceau (Brigitte Bardot) came to bohemian Paris to escape the suffocation of provincial life, only to wind up in a courtroom, accused of a terrible crime: the murder of her lover (Bande à part’s Sami Frey). As the trial commences and the lawyers begin tangling over Dominique’s fate, the Oscar-nominated La vérité, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot (Les Diaboliques), delves into her past, reconstructing her struggle to find a foothold in the city. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of an impulsive young woman misunderstood and mistreated by those around her, and of her ultimately tragic affair with an up-and-coming conductor. With an astonishing performance by Bardot, Clouzot’s affecting and intricately constructed film – a huge late-career success for the French master – renders a harsh verdict against a hypocritical and moralistic society.
Special Edition Blu-ray features:
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Le scandale Clouzot, a sixty-minute documentary from 2017 on director Henri-Georges Clouzot
- Interview from 1960 with Clouzot
- Interview with actor Brigitte Bardot from the 1982 documentary Brigitte Bardot telle qu’elle
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau
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