It would seem that the Criterion Collection have ended their partnership with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment when it comes to the monthly duo of releases of Criterion titles in the British market and teamed up with Spirit Entertainment instead. Together, they have announced two excellent-looking titles for October release in the UK. The first is Martin Scorsese's Kafkaesque cult classic After Hours, which is being released on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK and willl also be released on 4K Ultra HD. The second, Tod Browning's Sideshow Shockers, is headlined by the director's long-UK banned masterpiece Freaks, but also features two carnival-themed silent features by the director, The Unknown and The Mystic.
AFTER HOURS (USA 1985) | Blu-ray | 4K UHD | 9 October 2023
Desperate to escape his mind-numbing routine, uptown Manhattan office worker Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) ventures downtown for a hook-up with a mystery woman (Rosanna Arquette). So begins the wildest night of his life, as bizarre occurrences—involving underground-art punks, a distressed waitress, a crazed Mister Softee truck driver, and a bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweight—pile up with anxiety-inducing relentlessness and thwart his attempts to get home.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD & BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- New 4K digital restoration, approved by editor Thelma Schoonmaker, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- New conversation between director Martin Scorsese and writer Fran Lebowitz
- Audio commentary featuring Scorsese, Schoonmaker, director of photography Michael Ballhaus, actor and producer Griffin Dunne, and producer Amy Robinson
- Documentary about the making of the film featuring Dunne, Robinson, Schoonmaker, and Scorsese
- New program on the look of the film featuring costume designer Rita Ryack and production designer Jeffrey Townsend
- Deleted scenes
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Sheila O’Malley
FREAKS / THE UNKNOWN / THE MYSTIC: TOD BROWNING'S SIDESHOW SHOCKERS
(USA 1932 / 1927 /
1925) | Blu-ray | 23 October 2023
The world is a carnival of criminality, corruption, and psychosexual strangeness in the twisted pre-Code shockers of Tod Browning. Early Hollywood’s edgiest auteur, Browning drew on his experiences as a circus performer to create subversive pulp entertainments set amid the world of traveling sideshows, which, with their air of the exotic and the disreputable, provided a pungent backdrop for his sordid tales of outcasts, cons, villains, and vagabonds. Bringing together two of his defining works (The Unknown and Freaks) and a long-unavailable rarity (The Mystic), this cabinet of pre-Code curiosities reveals a master of the morbid whose ability to unsettle is matched only by his daring compassion for society’s most downtrodden.
SPECIAL EDITION BLU-RAY FEATURES:
- New 2K digital restoration of Freaks, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New 2K digital reconstruction and restoration of The Unknown by the George Eastman Museum, with a new score by composer Philip Carli
- New 2K digital restoration of The Mystic, with a new score by composer Dean Hurley
- Audio commentaries on Freaks and The Unknown and an introduction to The Mystic by film scholar David J. Skal
- New interview with author Megan Abbott about director Tod Browning and pre-Code horror
- Archival documentary on Freaks
- Episode from 2019 of critic Kristen Lopez’s podcast Ticklish Business about disability representation in Freaks
- Reading by Skal of “Spurs,” the short story by Tod Robbins on which Freaks is based
- Prologue to Freaks, which was added to the film in 1947
- Program on the alternate endings to Freaks
- Video gallery of portraits from Freaks
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by film critic Farran Smith Nehme
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