22Dec09
When we released Jim Jarmusch’s films Down by Law and Night on Earth, the supplement Ask Jim, in which he answered questions viewers wrote in about his films, was so popular that we’ve decided to do it again. We are currently working on the special edition of Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, and we are wondering what questions you would like answered about the film. We can’t guarantee he will answer all (or any) of your questions on the release, but please post them in the comments here.
We will be accepting your questions through January 6. Please do not post any personal requests; they will not be answered. Please do post thoughtful and creative questions. Post as many questions as you’d like, and remember to include your full name, city, state, and country of residence. Thanks for participating and look out for Criterion’s edition of Mystery Train this summer!
*By posting a question to this address, you allow the Criterion Collection to use your full name, city, state, and country of residence and your question in full or edited form, in any or all media, worldwide, in perpetuity.
7Oct09
Our Jeanne Dielman–Criterion Collection Cooking Video Contest on YouTube has been a huge success, thanks to scores of filmmakers who served up more than fifty delectable entries! We’ve been amazed at the quality of the submissions, and now we need your help picking the Audience Award winner. To guide you through the nearly six hours of video, we’ve created this handy click-through catalog. We’ve also marked an admittedly eclectic array of personal favorites from the Criterion staff to get you started; feel free to post your own top picks in the comments below. More viewers rating more films will make a better contest, so please watch and rate as many films as you can to ensure that the best film wins. The deadline for ratings is October 20. Prize winners will be announced October 22.
Click here for our guide.
16Sep09
Due to delays in manufacturing our custom Blu-ray cases, we’ve been forced to move the street dates for several titles.
Monsoon Wedding (DVD and Blu-ray editions)
Original release date: 10/13/09
New release date: 10/20/09
Wings of Desire (DVD and Blu-ray editions)
Old street: 10/20/09
New street: 11/3/09
Howards End (Blu-ray edition)
Old street: 10/20/09
New street: 11/3/09
We are also moving the DVD edition of A Christmas Tale down from November to December in order to add a Blu-ray edition; both will street on the same day.
A Christmas Tale (DVD and Blu-ray editions)
Original release date: 11/10/09
New release date: 12/01/09
Keep up-to-date on the latest Criterion releases at www.criterion.com, on facebook.com/criterioncollection, or on Twitter@criterion.
19Apr09
Big and Little Edie fans have been coming in droves to take advantage of our Grey Gardens $5-off sale. To such an extent, indeed, that we’ve temporarily sold out of our two-disc box set, including both the original film and the sequel, The Beales of Grey Gardens. Never fear, though: we’ve placed a new order, which we hope will be ready for shipment by Friday. And we’ve extended the one-week sale until the new copies are in. So place your orders now, and we’ll get your discounted copies to you as soon as we’re restocked. Copies of the individual titles are still available now.
26Mar09
We have some good news: preorders are back at criterion.com! We’ve worked out some kinks in the system, and starting today you can once again order upcoming Criterion titles and your credit card won’t be charged until your order is ready to ship.
Here are some of the titles available for preorder now: the Korda Eclipse series, featuring Charles Laughton’s Oscar-winning, mutton-munching role in The Private Life of Henry VIII; a lost gem of 1970s cinema starring Robert Mitchum, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which director Peter Yates has said is even better than his more familiar classic Bullitt; an early Stephen Frears thriller, The Hit, starring Terence Stamp, John Hurt, and Tim Roth; John Huston’s long-unavailable adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood; Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé, which features mind-bending visuals and a ninety-minute original score by Yo La Tengo; and David Fincher’s dreamy, Oscar-winning The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, starring Brad Pitt. And for those who aren’t afraid to get down and dirty, we have a collection of Shohei Imamura’s underworld classics—Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura—as well as Nagisa Oshima’s notoriously explicit erotic masterpiece In the Realm of the Senses and its chilling companion piece Empire of Passion. Happy viewing!
4Feb09
If you happen to be in Columbus, Ohio, next week, you’ll have the chance to learn more about how Criterion Collection DVDs are made. On Monday, February 9, our very own Kim Hendrickson, Criterion executive producer, will appear at the Wexner Center for the Arts to discuss how we do what we do, before a screening of Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert, which comes out on DVD on Tuesday. The Q&A begins at 7:00 p.m., following a 6:00 p.m. reception in the Wexner’s bookshop, where Criterion DVDs will be on sale for 30 percent off. Additionally, there will be a special ticket price including a copy of the Simon of the Desert DVD at a reduced price. Click here for directions and other info. And here to listen to a podcast about the event.
2Feb09
We’ve been having some trouble handling preorders through our new store. A significant number of our customers have been distressed to find that their credit card was charged at the time they preordered items from our site rather than when the product shipped. To ensure that this doesn’t happen again, we will not be taking preorders through the site until our shopping cart and fulfillment systems are properly integrated. We hope it won’t be long. In the meantime, if you have already preordered an item, don’t worry—your order is still in the queue and should arrive by the street date. Thank you for your patience, and we’ll let you know as soon as our preorder system is up and running.
22Jan09
Last fall the Criterion Collection and Janus Films joined forces to acquire a first-run film for theatrical distribution—a rare move for two companies best known for handling the classics of cinema history. Revanche, both an existential thriller and a quiet, character-driven rumination on fate and grief, is the ninth feature from Austrian director Götz Spielmann and the first theatrical release of a new film from Janus in decades. With its Academy Award nomination yesterday for Best Foreign Language Film, Revanche joins a long lineage of Janus first-run releases that have received attention from the Academy (from nominees Dodes’ka-den and The Horse’s Mouth to winners Through a Glass Darkly and The Virgin Spring).
“This all came together very organically,” Peter Becker, Criterion’s president, says. “Key members of the Criterion staff saw the film at Telluride, and they were really bowled over. Götz Spielmann is the real deal. He’s a completely commanding filmmaker with a powerful visual sense and an impeccable sense of timing. He is meticulous, patient, and deeply humane, but he is also full of surprises. He can wring suspense out of the simplest gestures, and the film takes some remarkable turns along the way.”
Though the film has all the ingredients of a classic crime flick, Spielmann’s real interest lies deeper than the caper put in motion by Alex (Johannes Krisch, in a stunning screen debut) and his prostitute girlfriend. “That’s the surface,” Spielmann says. “Deeper down, I hope, the film tells us about a kind of stillness behind things. It’s difficult to express that in words, because it refers to a realization, knowledge, or experience which begins beyond conscious thought and language.”
You’ll be hearing a lot more about Revanche, which Film Comment describes as “a potent, sympathetically observed tragedy” and AFI Fest on website called “the first Buddhist thriller,” when it comes to theaters this spring. Until then, check out the film’s official website, where you can find the trailer as well as more critics’ quotes, comments from the director, and info about prizes it has won at festivals around the world.
13Jan09
This week marks the long-anticipated release of Roberto Rossellini’s beloved The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, the crowning achievement of the filmmaker’s remarkable end-of-career endeavor to capture the history of human knowledge in a series of provocatively minimalist television films (also including Blaise Pascal, Cartesius, and The Age of the Medici, released in conjunction as Eclipse Series 14). For Louis XIV, Rossellini scholar Tag Gallagher created a multimedia essay in which he elucidates the meanings behind the style of this modernist-humanist “horror film,” and Rossellini’s other history works. Watch a clip from that new video here.
