The Criterion Collection and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment have announced the titles to be released on Blu-ray in the UK in June 2023. On 19 June comes Fists in Pocket, a truly unique work directed by Marco Bellocchio, that continues to rank as one of the great achievements of Italian cinema. Following on 26 June, Charlie Chaplin's first full length feature film as director, The Kid is released. A nimble marriage of sentiment and slapstick, the film is an expressive masterwork of silent cinema.
FISTS IN POCKET (Italy 1965) | Blu-ray | 19 June 2023
Tormented by twisted desires, a young man takes drastic measures to rid his grotesquely dysfunctional family of its various afflictions, in this astonishing 1965 debut from Marco Bellocchio. With its coolly assured style, shocking perversity, and savage gallows humour, Fists in the Pocket [I pugni in tasca] was a gleaming ice pick in the eye of bourgeois family values and Catholic morality, a truly unique work that continues to rank as one of the great achievements of Italian cinema.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- New 4K digital restoration, approved by director Marco Bellocchio, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Interviews from 2005 with Bellocchio, actors Lou Castel and Paola Pitagora, editor Silvano Agosti, critic Tullio Kezich, and filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci
- New interview with scholar Stefano Albertini
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by film critic Deborah Young
THE KID (USA 1921) | Blu-ray | 26 June 2023
Charlie Chaplin was already an international star when he decided to break out of the short-film format and make his first full-length feature. The Kid doesn't merely show Chaplin at a turning point, when he proved that he was a serious film director—it remains an expressive masterwork of silent cinema. In it, he stars as his lovable Tramp character, this time raising an orphan (a remarkable young Jackie Coogan) he has rescued from the streets. Chaplin and Coogan make a miraculous pair in this nimble marriage of sentiment and slapstick, a film that is, as its opening title card states, "a picture with a smile—and perhaps, a tear."
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- New 4K digital restoration of Charlie Chaplin's 1972 rerelease version of the film, featuring an original score by Chaplin, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- New audio commentary featuring Chaplin historian Charles Maland
- Jackie Coogan: The First Child Star, a new video essay by Chaplin historian Lisa Haven
- A Study in Undercranking, a new program featuring silent-film specialist Ben Model
- Interviews with Coogan and actor Lita Grey Chaplin
- Excerpted audio interviews with cinematographer Rollie Totheroh and film distributor Mo Rothman
- Deleted scenes and titles from the original 1921 version of The Kid
- "Charlie" on the Ocean, a 1921 newsreel documenting Chaplin's first return trip to Europe
- Footage of Chaplin conducting his score for The Kid
- Nice and Friendly, a 1922 silent short featuring Chaplin and Coogan, presented with a new score by composer Timothy Brock
- Trailers
- PLUS: An essay by film scholar Tom Gunning
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