Posted Mon Sep 16, 2024 at 10:59 AM PDT by Matthew Hartman
Not that it's ever cheap to be a physical media collector during the holidays, but Criterion isn't doing us any favors. Big hits from Sammo Hung, the Coen Brothers, Fellini, and Wim Wenders all join the collection.
Criterion offers up an eclectic new slate to their carefully curated collection of films. Now, a couple of these aren't too surprising, 8½ and Paris Texas are already on Blu-ray so we're getting welcome (if expected) upgrades. The biggest news is No Country for Old Men - the Coen Brothers' Oscar-winning thriller from the Cormac McCarthy classic novel is very good news. It was a big hitter on Blu-ray in its day, but a 4K Dolby Vision upgrade supervised by Roger Deakins is very exciting! Completing the eclectic list is Samo Hung's slick action classic Eastern Corridors - sadly only on Blu-ray but still should be a good disc.
Here's what we're getting for the final month of 2024
No Country for Old Men - The Criterion Collection 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
2007 • 122 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 2.39:1 aspect ratio
A deadly game of chance and destiny plays out against the stark backdrop of early-1980s West Texas in Joel and Ethan Coen’s powerful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel. When he happens upon more than two million dollars from a drug deal turned desert massacre, a retired welder and Vietnam veteran (Josh Brolin) sets into motion a wave of senseless, inexorable violence as he’s stalked across the plains by a soul-weary sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) and a psychopathic hit man (Javier Bardem). Winner of four Academy Awards—including Best Picture, and Best Supporting Actor for the indelibly disturbing Bardem—this darkly deadpan borderlands noir keeps both the tension and the existential unease mounting through each cruelly ironic twist of fate.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
8½ - The Criterion Collection 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
1963 • 138 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Italian with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life. One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8½ turns one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema. An early working title for 8½ was The Beautiful Confusion, and Fellini’s masterpiece is exactly that: a shimmering dream, a circus, and a magic act. Also featured is Fellini’s rarely-seen first film for television, Fellini: A Director’s Notebook (1969). Produced by Peter Goldfarb, this “imagined documentary” of Fellini on Fellini is a kaleidoscope of unfinished projects, all of which provide a fascinating and candid window into the director’s unique creative process.
4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
Paris, Texas - The Criterion Collection 4k Ultra HD Blu-ray
1984 • 145 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.66:1 aspect ratio
New German Cinema pioneer Wim Wenders brings his keen eye for landscape to the American Southwest in Paris, Texas, a profoundly moving character study written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard. Paris, Texas follows the mysterious, nearly mute drifter Travis (a magnificent Harry Dean Stanton, whose face is a landscape all its own) as he tries to reconnect with his young son, living with his brother (Dean Stockwell) in Los Angeles, and his missing wife (Nastassja Kinski). From this simple setup, Wenders and Shepard produce a powerful statement on codes of masculinity and the myth of the American family, as well as an exquisite visual exploration of a vast, crumbling world of canyons and neon.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION
Eastern Condors - The Criterion Collection Blu-ray
1987 • 98 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Cantonese with English subtitles • 2.39:1 aspect ratio
Legendary actor-director Sammo Hung delivers a bazooka blast of pure adrenaline in this exemplar of Hong Kong action cinema at its most entertaining. Drawing inspiration from Hollywood war films like The Dirty Dozen, Eastern Condors follows a ragtag band of Asian American prisoners dropped into Vietnam on a secret suicide mission to prevent a cache of weapons from falling into the hands of the Viet Cong, who are more than ready for a fight. Propelled by a dynamic ensemble cast that includes the ever-charismatic Yuen Biao as a black-market trader and a superhuman Yuen Wah as a giggling martial-arts monster, this rip-roaring spectacle offers a nonstop barrage of turbocharged set pieces that defy death, logic, and gravity itself.
BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
These aren't up for pre-order on Amazon or Walmart yet, but if your order your discs direct from Criterion you can order them now!
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