El Criterion 10/25 Blu-ray (Rental)

Spanish surrealist master Luis Buñuel’s fiendish tale of love gone wrong is among the most perverse and unsettling films he made during his two decades of exile in Mexico. Folding his own neuroses into an adaptation of Mercedes Pinto’s autobiographical novel, Buñuel crafts an expressionistically stylized nightmare in which a young woman (Delia Garcés) discovers that the outward sophistication of her new husband (Arturo de Córdova) masks disturbing depths of jealousy and paranoia. A characteristically raw indictment of religious and social hypocrisy, Él stands as the director’s greatest excursion into melodrama, a vivid portrayal of society’s inability to restrain the irrational urges of the human id. BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 4K digital restoration, supervised by photographer Gabriel Figueroa Flores, director of photography Gabriel Figueroa’s son, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack New video essay on director Luis Buñuel by scholar Jordi Xifra Appreciation by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro Interview with Buñuel from 1981 by writer Jean-Claude Carrière, a longtime collaborator of the director's Panel discussion from 2009, moderated by filmmaker José Luis Garci Trailer New English subtitle translation PLUS: An essay by critic Fernanda Solórzano and an interview with Buñuel by critics José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent