The Criterion Collection and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment have announced the titles to be released in the UK on Blu-ray in March 2019.
On 4 March comes Ugetsu (released in the UK as Ugetsu monogatari), Kenji Mizoguchi's exquisite ghost story and fatalistic wartime tragedy, which reveals essential truths about the ravages of war, the plight of women, and the pride of men.
Following on 18 March is Death in Venice, a late-career masterpiece from Luchino Visconti based on the classic novella by Thomas Mann and a meditation on the nature of art, the allure of beauty, and the inescapability of death.
On 25 March arrives To Sleep with Anger. A slow-burning masterwork of the early 1990s, Charles Burnett's sublimely stirring film is a portrait of family resilience steeped in the traditions of black mysticism and folklore.
Ugetsu [Ugetsu monogatari] (1953) | Blu-ray | 4 March 2019
By the time he made Ugetsu, Kenji Mizoguchi was already an elder statesman of Japanese cinema, fiercely revered by Akira Kurosawa and other directors of a younger generation. And with this exquisite ghost story, a fatalistic wartime tragedy derived from stories by Akinari Ueda and Guy de Maupassant, he created a touchstone of his art, his long takes and sweeping camera guiding the viewer through a delirious narrative about two villagers whose pursuit of fame and fortune leads them far astray from their loyal wives. Moving between the terrestrial and the otherworldly, Ugetsu reveals essential truths about the ravages of war, the plight of women, and the pride of men.
Blu-ray Special Edition features:
- Audio commentary by critic, filmmaker, and festival programmer Tony Rayns
- Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director, a 1975 documentary by Kaneto Shindo
- Two Worlds Intertwined, a 2005 appreciation of Ugetsu by Masahiro Shinoda
- Process and Production, a 2005 interview with Tokuzo Tanaka, first assistant director on Ugetsu
- Interview from 1992 with cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa
- Trailers
- An essay by film critic Phillip Lopate and three short stories that influenced Mizoguchi in making the film
- Cover by Michael Boland
Death in Venice (1971) | Blu-ray | 18 March 2019
Based on the classic novella by Thomas Mann, this late-career masterpiece from Luchino Visconti is a meditation on the nature of art, the allure of beauty, and the inescapability of death. A fastidious composer reeling from a disastrous concert, Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde, in an exquisitely nuanced performance) travels to Venice to recover. There, he is struck by a vision of pure beauty in the form of a young boy named Tadzio (Björn Andrésen), his infatuation developing into an obsession even as rumors of a plague spread through the city. Setting Mann’s story of queer desire and bodily decay against the sublime music of Gustav Mahler, Death in Venice is one of cinema’s most exalted literary adaptations, as sensually rich as it is allegorically resonant.
Blu-ray Special Edition features:
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Luchino Visconti: Life as in a Novel, a 2008 documentary about the director, featuring Visconti; actors Burt Lancaster, Silvana Mangano, and Marcello Mastroianni; filmmakers Francesco Rosi and Franco Zeffirelli; and others
- Alla ricerca di Tadzio, a 1970 short film by Visconti about his efforts to cast the role of Tadzio
- New program featuring literature and cinema scholar Stefano Albertini
- Interview from 2006 with costume designer Piero Tosi
- Excerpt from a 1990 program about the music in Visconti’s films, featuring Bogarde and actor Marisa Berenson
- Interview with Visconti from 1971
- Visconti’s Venice, a short 1970 behind-the-scenes documentary featuring Visconti and Bogarde
- Trailer
- PLUS: An essay by critic Dennis Lim
To Sleep with Anger (1990) | Blu-ray | 25 March 2019
A slow-burning masterwork of the early 1990s, this third feature by Charles Burnett is a singular piece of American mythmaking. In a towering performance, Danny Glover plays the enigmatic southern drifter Harry, a devilish charmer who turns up out of the blue on the South Central Los Angeles doorstep of his old friends. In short order, Harry’s presence turns a seemingly peaceful household upside down, exposing smoldering tensions between parents and children, tradition and change, virtue and temptation. Interweaving evocative strains of gospel and blues with rich, poetic-realist images, To Sleep with Anger is a sublimely stirring film from an autonomous artistic sensibility, a portrait of family resilience steeped in the traditions of black mysticism and folklore.
Director-approved Blu-ray Special Edition features:
- New, restored 4K digital transfer, approved by director Charles Burnett, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New interview program featuring Burnett, actors Danny Glover and Sheryl Lee Ralph, and associate producer Linda Koulisis
- A Walk with Charles Burnett, a new hour-long conversation between Burnett and filmmaker Robert Townsend that revisits Burnett’s films and shooting locations
- Short video tribute to Burnett produced for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Governors Awards ceremony in 2017
- PLUS: An essay by critic Ashley Clark
- New cover by Charly Palmer
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