Spirit Entertainment has announced three November UK releases from the Criterion Collection on 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Harmony Korine’s debut feature Gummo, the granddaddy of all monster movies Godzilla, and the original Howard Hawks directed Scarface.
GUMMO (1997) | 4K UHD & Blu-ray | 4 November 2024 | £29.99
Harmony Korine’s debut feature is an audacious, lyrical evocation of America’s rural underbelly, and an elegy in the southern-gothic tradition of William Faulkner and William Eggleston. Shot in Korine’s native Nashville – standing in for the tornado-ravaged Xenia, Ohio – the rough-hewn film follows two young friends, Tummler and Solomon, as they ride around town, huffing glue and hunting stray cats, their every local encounter charged with vaudevillian anarchy as well as deep pathos.
At once transgressive and empathetic, disturbing and undeniably beautiful, Gummo is a one-of-a-kind portrait of angelic and devilish souls caught in a cultural void, circumscribed by poverty and the depleted, alienated spiritual life of late-twentieth-century America.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Harmony Korine, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- [4K ONLY] One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- New interview with Korine
- Conversation from 1997 between Korine and filmmaker Werner Herzog
- Split Screen: Projections episode from 2000 featuring Korine in conversation with host John Pierson
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by film critic Carlos Aguilar and an appreciation by filmmaker Hype Williams
GODZILLA (1954) | 4K UHD & Blu-ray | 11 November 2024 | £29.99
Godzilla (a.k.a. Gojira) is the roaring granddaddy of all monster movies. It’s also a remarkably humane and melancholy drama, made in Japan at a time when the country was reeling from nuclear attack and H-bomb testing in the Pacific. Its rampaging radioactive beast, the poignant embodiment of an entire population’s fears, became a beloved international icon of destruction, spawning more than thirty sequels.
A thrilling, tactile spectacle that continues to be a cult phenomenon, the original 1954 Japanese version is presented here, along with Godzilla, King of the Monsters, the 1956 “Americanized” version.
4K UHD + BLU-RAY FEATURES:
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- [4K ONLY] One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- High-definition digital restoration of Godzilla, King of the Monsters, Terry Morse’s 1956 reworking of the original, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Audio commentary for both movies by film historian David Kalat
- Interviews with actors Akira Takarada and Haruo Nakajima and special effects technicians Yoshio Irie and Eizo Kaimai
- Interview with legendary Godzilla score composer Akira Ifukube
- Featurette detailing Godzilla’s photographic effects, introduced by special effects director Koichi Kawakita and special effects photographer Motoyoshi Tomioka
- Interview with Japanese-film critic Tadao Sato
- The Unluckiest Dragon, an illustrated audio essay featuring historian Greg Pflugfelder describing the tragic fate of the fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryu Maru, a real-life event that inspired Godzilla
- Trailers
- PLUS: An essay by critic J. Hoberman
SCARFACE (1932) | 4K UHD & Blu-ray | 18 November 2024 | £29.99
Blazing across the screen in a spray of bullets, the gangster-film sensation Scarface helped set the standard for the genre for decades to come. Swaggering, scary, and unexpectedly charming, Paul Muni gives an iconic portrayal of criminal sociopathy as Tony Camonte, the ruthless, machine-gun-toting mobster who rises through the ranks of a bootlegging empire atop an ever-increasing body count, but whose possessive relationship with his wild-child sister (Ann Dvorak) threatens to be his undoing.
With rat-a-tat command of editing and dialogue, and his trademark panache, director Howard Hawks creates an unstoppable sense of dynamism while pushing on-screen violence to new heights of brutality.
4K UHD + BLU-RAY FEATURES:
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Alternate ending, from the censored version of the film
- New conversation between author Megan Abbott and actor Bill Hader
- New interview with film scholar Lea Jacobs on director Howard Hawks’s innovative use of sound and editing
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Imogen Sara Smith
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