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Release: July 9, 2019

$6.99

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A 4K Restoration! From Jean-Luc Godard, the influential director of Breathless, Contempt, Band of Outsiders and Pierrot Le Fou. American secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine, Attack of the Robots) is sent to the distant space city of Alphaville where he must find a missing person and kill the inventor of fascist computer Alpha 60. Anna Karina (The Nun) and Akim Tamiroff (After the Fox) co-star in this cockeyed fusion of science-fiction with pulp characters and surrealist poetry. Godard’s irreverent journey to the mysterious Alphaville remains one of the least conventional films of all time. Beautifully shot in glorious black-and-white by Raoul Coutard (Jules and Jim, First Name: Carmen). Special Features: -Audio Commentary by Film Historian Tim Lucas -Both Original French and English Versions of the Film -Anna Karina Interview -Colin MacCabe Introduction -Theatrical Trailer Top About this item Similar From the Brand Reviews Alphaville (Special Edition) aka Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution [Blu-ray]

Release: August 27, 2024

$7.99

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From Jean-Luc Godard, the influential filmmaker behind the French New Wave classics, Breathless, Contempt, Band of Outsiders and Pierrot Le Fou, comes this futuristic noir masterpiece. American secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine, Attack of the Robots) is sent to the distant space city of Alphaville where he must find a missing person and kill the inventor of fascist computer Alpha 60. Anna Karina (The Nun) and Akim Tamiroff (Touch of Evil) co-star in this cockeyed fusion of science-fiction with pulp characters and surrealist poetry. Godard’s irreverent journey to the mysterious Alphaville remains one of the least conventional films of all time. Beautifully shot in glorious black-and-white by Raoul Coutard (Jules and Jim, First Name: Carmen). Special Features: • 2023 HDR/Dolby Vision Master by StudioCanal – From 4K Scan of the Original Camera Negative • Audio Commentary by Novelist and Critic Tim Lucas • Anna Karina Interview (4:31) • Colin McCabe Introduction (5:26) • Includes Both Original French and English Audio with Optional English Subtitles • Theatrical Trailer

Release: September 20, 2011

$7.99

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Product Description A lavish romantic drama that charts the lives of three different women from different backgrounds, forever changed when they emigrate to New Zealand as war brides. Eager to escape the gloom of post-war Holland, shy but sensual farm girl Ada, dogmatic Marjorie, and Jewish fashion designer Esther become friends during the 1953 KLM flight that carried war brides to their waiting husbands, who have already settled in Christchurch. They part ways upon arrival in their new country and begin their new lives, but their paths continue to cross in the years to come. Chance meetings result in love affairs, betrayal and impenetrable bonds, leading up to a final reunion fifty years later. Review The romantic saga Bride Flight is a flawed but absorbing romantic saga from Dutch director Ben Sombogaart spanning five decades that offers a contrast to the teenage summer monotony. In postwar Holland, a planeload of strangers sign up for an actual 1953 KLM flight that entered an air race from London to New Zealand, shown in newsreel footage of the day. It was called the Bride Flight because so many women passengers were joining their fiancés who traveled ahead to pave the way, fleeing job and housing problems in the aftermath of a flood. On the 13,000-mile voyage across Persia and over Baghdad and Pakistan, three girls and one man bond, forming friendships that will last until the end of their lives. Shy Ada (Karina Smulders), free spirited fashion designer Esther (Anna Drijver) and pragmatic, earthy Marjorie (Elise Schaap), who wants only to have a family and lots of babies, all become infatuated with a warm, friendly and dashing hunk named Frank (played by Holland s new matinee idol, Waldemar Torenstra). Frank falls for Ada, but she is already pregnant by her betrothed, a strict, humorless Mennonite who is destined to make her life miserable. Esther is also engaged, to a religious Jew who labels her a daughter of Israel and demands that she prepare kosher meals, teach their future children traditional values, celebrate Sabbath, Purim and Sukkot, and dedicate her life to a higher cause. You can see the mounting terror in the eyes of the dynamic Ms. Drijver as she contemplates the thought of becoming cozy and Yiddish. Outraged, she dumps her intended immediately, sleeps with Frank and opens a clothes shop that eventually makes her famous. Instantly disillusioned, Ada is forced to ride in the rear of a truck for six hours to the pastor, then moved by her cold, passionless new husband into a dark room with a bargain mattress that used to be a bunker at the time when New Zealanders feared an invasion by the Japanese. Marjorie, whose only desire was to have a family, loses a baby in childbirth and becomes despondent. Nothing turns out to be quite what the three girls hoped. During the trajectory of this fascinating, beautifully acted and magnificently photographed film (one of the most expensive in Dutch cinema), Ada leaves her drab life and finds Frank, who has become a cherished uncle to Marjorie s son. Ada and Frank fall in love while Esther watches idly. Happiness is brief and friends are separated for years, reuniting only to attend Frank s present-day funeral, where Esther, now 70, at last runs into the child she sacrificed to Marjorie. (Old Frank is played by Rutger Hauer, who more than recovers from the trashy exploitation flick Hobo With a Shotgun, regaining some of his self-respect and seriousness of purpose as Holland s most famous export.) It s an elaborate soap opera, but only a cad would reveal how the three stories resolve. My one caveat is the truncated screenplay by Marieke van der Pol. True, it s a challenge to keep the stories straight and the characters individual but separate. Still, the film bounces around in time, introducing so many people in each scene that it s hard to tell what s going on. The actors are all double cast, so as the film cuts abruptly back and forth, linking 50 s and 60 s flashbacks to modern times, you have to pay close attention to keep everyone defined. But the Dutch really know how to make films that engage the senses and hold attention. Bride Flight is the most lavishly entertaining Dutch film since Paul Verhoeven s fabulous The Black Book. You will not walk away bored. --Rex Reed, New York Observer

Release: February 13, 2024

$7.99

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Jean-Luc Godard is synonymous with cinema. With the release of Breathless in 1960, he established himself overnight as a cinematic rebel and symbol for the era’s progressive and anti-war youth. Sixty-two years and 140 films later, Godard is among the most renowned artists of all time, taught in every film school yet still shrouded in mystery. One of the founders of the French New Wave, political agitator, revolutionary misanthrope, film theorist and critic, the list of his descriptors goes on and on. Godard Cinema offers an opportunity for film lovers to look back at his career and the subjects and themes that obsessed him, while paying tribute to the ineffable essence of the most revered French director of all time. At the time of his death in September 2022, Jean-Luc Godard had been in the midst of planning another feature, an adaptation of Belgian author Charles Plisnier’s 1937 novel Faux Passports. Though it was never produced, Godard put together the intricate and beautiful Trailer Of A Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars, which now stands as his final work, a complex collage of history, politics, and cinema constructed of paper and glue, paintings and photographs, sound and silence. He accompanied it with the following text: “Rejecting the billions of alphabetic diktats to liberate the incessant metamorphoses and metaphors of a necessary and true language by returning to the locations of past film shoots, while keeping track of modern times.” Special Features: • TRAILER OF A FILM THAT WILL NEVER EXIST: PHONY WARS (directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 2023) • LILA: Inside Godard’s cutting room with his Assistant Editor, Lila Lakshmanan (2023) • GODARD CINEMA Theatrical Trailer

Release: January 21, 2020

$7.99

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Before his convention-shattering debut, Breathless, had even premiered, Jean-Luc Godard leapt into the making of his second feature, a thriller that would tackle the most controversial subject in France: the use of torture in the Algerian War. Despite his lack of political convictions, photojournalist Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor) is roped into a paramilitary group waging a shadow war in Geneva against the Algerian independence movement. Anna Karina (in her first collaboration with Godard, whose camera is visibly besotted with her) is beguiling as the mysterious woman with whom Forestier becomes infatuated. Banned for two and a half years by French censors for its depiction of brutal tactics on the part of the French government and the Algerian fighters alike, Le petit soldat finds the young Godard already retooling cinema as a vehicle for existential inquiry, political argument, and ephemeral portraiture—in other words, as a medium for delivering “truth twenty-four times per second.” BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • High-definition digital restoration, approved by cinematographer Raoul Coutard, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack • Interview with director Jean-Luc Godard from 1965 • Interview with actor Michel Subor from 1963 • Audio interview with Godard from 1961 • New English subtitle translation • PLUS: An essay by critic Nicholas Elliott Top About this item Similar From the Brand Reviews Le petit soldat (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Release: October 6, 2020

$7.99

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Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeois world behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: the tenth feature in six years by genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard is a stylish mash-up of anticonsumerist satire, au courant politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, “the last romantic couple.” With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, Pierrot le fou is one of the high points of the French New Wave, and was Godard’s last frolic before he moved ever further into radical cinema. BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack Interview with actor Anna Karina from 2007 A “Pierrot” Primer, a video essay from 2007 written and narrated by filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin Godard, l’amour, la poésie, a fifty-minute French documentary from 2007, directed by Luc Lagier, about director Jean-Luc Godard and his work and marriage with Karina Excerpts of interviews from 1965 with Godard, Karina, and actor Jean-Paul Belmondo Trailer PLUS: An essay by critic Richard Brody, along with a 1969 review by Andrew Sarris and a 1965 interview with Godard Top About this item Similar From the Brand Reviews Pierrot le fou (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Release: April 11, 2023

$7.99

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Inspired by the backstage Hollywood musicals of the 1930s, this later period Rivette recounts the adventures of three young women (Nathalie Richard, Marianne Denicourt, Laurence Côte) in Paris, each at a turning point in her life – and with a musical number (or two)! Special Features: • Audio commentary track by Richard Peña, Director Emeritus, New York Film Festival & Professor of Film and Media Studies, Columbia University • Re-release Trailer

Release: April 20, 2010

$7.99

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Product Description Vivre sa vie was a turning point for Jean-Luc Godard and remains one of his most dynamic films, combining brilliant visual design with a tragic character study. The lovely Anna Karina, Godard’s greatest muse, plays Nana, a young Parisian who aspires to be an actress but instead ends up a prostitute, her downward spiral depicted in a series of discrete tableaux of daydreams and dances. Featuring some of Karina and Godard’s most iconic moments—from her movie theater vigil with The Passion of Joan of Arc to her seductive pool-hall strut—Vivre sa vie is a landmark of the French New Wave that still surprises at every turn. BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack Audio commentary featuring film scholar Adrian Martin Video interview with film scholar Jean Narboni, conducted by historian Noël Simsolo Television interview from 1962 with actress Anna Karina Excerpts from a 1961 French television exposé on prostitution Illustrated essay on La prostitution, the book that served as inspiration for the film Stills gallery Director Jean-Luc Godard’s original theatrical trailer New and improved English subtitle translation PLUS: Godard’s original scenario, a new essay by critic Michael Atkinson, interviews with Godard, and a reprint by critic Jean Collet on the film’s soundtrack Amazon.com Jean-Luc Godard and the French New Wave were at the height of their power and creativity when Godard released Vivre Sa Vie (Living Her Life) in 1962. And watching it again, years later, instantly transports one to the era where an offhand remark, a lazy circle of cigarette smoke, a sidelong glance, a disaffected "I don't care about you" could all communicate deep, conflicted longing, alienation, postwar malaise, and infinite possibility. In fact, watching Vivre Sa Vie, starring Godard's lovely muse, Anna Karina, is at once both enervating--and exhilarating. The film is subtitled Film en Douze Tableaux, and the story shows Karina as Nana in 12 different short films, snapshots of her lonely, seemingly aimless life--in scenes that stay with the viewer for days afterward. In the very first tableau, Nana and a former lover, Paul (André S. Labarthe), are having a sad, disjointed conversation in a café--are they breaking up? Getting back together? The pain and power of the scene lies in its ambiguousness. And Godard and his brilliant cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, shoot this initial scene, of the most intimate conversation between two lovers, entirely from behind them. The sad, longing remarks, barbs, halfhearted entreaties--they are all communicated while the viewer looks just at the back of Karina's sleek black bob and Labarthe's scruffy hair. Only near the end of that scene, as the viewer is practically craning forward to connect to the characters, do we get a glimpse of half of a cheek, one eyebrow. And from this moment, Godard and the cast have the viewer enthralled. In a later tableau, we watch long, uninterrupted scenes of The Passion of Joan of Arc--in itself a treat--and the supposedly disaffected heroine Nana weeping rivers of tears, silently, in the theater. There are many layers to this lovely young woman, and each of the 12 snapshots of her life reveals more. Nana's life becomes a tragedy, as she descends into prostitution--yet along the way, her luminescence is revealed in small ways. In one scene, she recalls a writing exercise from when she was a child. "Birds are creatures with an outside, and an inside," she recites. "When you remove the outside, you see the inside. When you remove the inside, you see the soul." The shattering beauty of Vivre Sa Vie is that Godard and Karina allow us to see the outside, then the inside, and then finally, the soul. The Criterion Collection edition offers true cinema riches, especially in an interview with Karina from 1962, several modern commentaries putting Godard and the film in its historical context, reportage from early-'60s France on the dire situation of prostitutes at the time, a booklet of film criticism, and much more. --A.T. Hurley