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Release: April 7, 2020

$7.99

Description

The most personal film by the underworld poet Jean-Pierre Melville, who had participated in the French Resistance himself, this tragic masterpiece, based on a novel by Joseph Kessel, recounts the struggles and sacrifices of those who fought in the Resistance. Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, and the incomparable Simone Signoret star as intrepid underground fighters who must grapple with their conception of honor in their battle against Hitler’s regime. Long underappreciated in France and unseen in the United States, the atmospheric and gripping thriller Army of Shadows is now widely recognized as the summit of Melville’s career, channeling the exquisite minimalism of his gangster films to create an unsparing tale of defiance in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • High-definition digital restoration, supervised by director of photography Pierre Lhomme, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack • Alternate 2.0 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio • Audio commentary from 2006 featuring film scholar Ginette Vincendeau • Interviews from 2007 with Lhomme and editor Françoise Bonnot • On-set footage and excerpts from archival interviews with director Jean-Pierre Melville, cast members, author Joseph Kessel, and real-life Resistance fighters • Jean-Pierre Melville et “L’armée des ombres” (2005), a short program on the director and his film • Le journal de la Résistance (1944), a rare short documentary shot on the front lines during the final days of the German occupation of France • Restoration demonstration by Lhomme • Trailers • PLUS: An essay by critic Amy Taubin, along with a piece by historian Robert O. Paxton and excerpts from Rui Nogueira’s Melville on Melville

Release: February 21, 2023

$6.99

Description

When Commissaire Pierre Niemans (Jean Reno, Léon: The Professional), France’s leading serial killer investigator, is called to examine a grisly murder, he enters a world of secrets, lies and unthinkable horrors. The dead, whose hands and eyes have been removed, are clues to a terrible tradition the killer can no longer bear. Each murder means something more; each victim, a guilty conspirator in a grand immoral experiment. Filled with blood-chilling suspense, twisted turns and breathtaking locations in the French Alps, this tense thriller has the style, action and intelligence to keep you wondering what’s really happening right up until its shocking conclusion. Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz (La haine) and featuring Vincent Cassel (Eastern Promises), Nadia Farès (The Nest), Dominique Sanda (The Conformist), Philippe Nahon (I Stand Alone) and Jean-Pierre Cassel (Army of Shadows). Special Features: -Audio Commentary by Director Mathieu Kassovitz and Stars Jean Reno & Vincent Cassel -The Investigation: Documentary -The Corpse: Featurette -The Car Chase: Featurette -Mountain Sequence: Featurette -Theatrical Trailer -French and English 5.1 Surround Audio -Optional English Subtitles Top Similar From the Brand Reviews The Crimson Rivers

Release: November 21, 2023

$7.99

Description

Claude Chabrol’s forty-ninth feature stands as the crowning achievement of his prolific career—a coolly riveting study of class dynamics, the psychology of crime, and the sordid secrets lurking beneath the veneer of everyday life. A fascinatingly enigmatic, César Award–winning Isabelle Huppert is the chaotic yin to Sandrine Bonnaire’s tightly coiled yang. They are, respectively, a small-town postal worker and a maid to a wealthy family, a pair of outsiders who form a mysterious alliance that gradually, almost imperceptibly, goes haywire. With a master’s control of sound, editing, and suspense, Chabrol constructs a tour de force of sustained tension that delivers each brilliant shock with ice-pick precision. BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 4K digital restoration, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack Selected-scene commentary featuring director Claude Chabrol New introduction by filmmaker Bong Joon Ho Making-of program Archival interviews with Chabrol, actors Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire, and cowriter Caroline Eliacheff Episode of the Criterion Channel series Observations on Film Art about the use of offscreen sound Trailer New English subtitle translation PLUS: An essay by crime-fiction and true-crime expert Sarah Weinman

Release: January 5, 2021

$7.99

Description

More than four decades after he took a razorblade to an eyeball and shocked the world with Un chien andalou, arch-iconoclast Luis Buñuel capped his astonishing career with three final provocations—The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty, and That Obscure Object of Desire—in which his renegade, free-associating surrealism reached its audacious, self-detonating endgame. Working with such key collaborators as screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and his own frequent on-screen alter ego Fernando Rey, Buñuel laced his scathing attacks on religion, class pretension, and moral hypocrisy with savage violence to create a trio of subversive, brutally funny masterpieces that explore the absurd randomness of existence. Among the director’s most radical works as well as some of his greatest international triumphs, these films cemented his legacy as cinema’s most incendiary revolutionary. BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • New high-definition digital restorations of all three films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks • The Castaway of Providence Street, a 1971 homage to Luis Buñuel made by his longtime friends and fellow filmmakers Arturo Ripstein and Rafael Castanedo • Speaking of Buñuel, a documentary from 2000 on Buñuel’s life and work • Once Upon a Time: “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” a 2011 television program about the making of the film • Interviews from 2000 with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière on The Phantom of Liberty and That Obscure Object of Desire • Archival interviews on all three films featuring Carrière; actors Stéphane Audran, Muni, Michel Piccoli, and Fernando Rey; and other key collaborators • Documentary from 1985 about producer Serge Silberman, who worked with Buñuel on five of his final seven films • Analysis of The Phantom of Liberty from 2017 by film scholar Peter William Evans • Lady Doubles, a 2017 documentary featuring actors Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina, who share the role of Conchita in That Obscure Object of Desire • Portrait of an Impatient Filmmaker, Luis Buñuel, a 2012 short documentary featuring director of photography Edmond Richard and assistant director Pierre Lary • Excerpts from Jacques de Baroncelli’s 1929 silent film La femme et le pantin, an adaptation of Pierre Louÿs’s 1898 novel of the same name, on which That Obscure Object of Desire is also based • Alternate English-dubbed soundtrack for That Obscure Object of Desire • Trailers • New English subtitle translations • PLUS: Essays by critic Adrian Martin and novelist and critic Gary Indiana, along with interviews with Buñuel by critics José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to a dinner that is continually delayed, their attempts to eat thwarted by vaudevillian events both actual and imagined, including terrorist attacks, military maneuvers, and ghostly apparitions. Stringing together a discontinuous, digressive series of absurdist set pieces, Buñuel and his screenwriting partner Jean-Claude Carrière send a cast of European-film greats—including Fernando Rey, Stéphane Audran, Delphine Seyrig, and Jean-Pierre Cassel—through a maze of desire deferred, frustrated, and interrupted. The Oscar-winning pinnacle of Buñuel’s late-career ascent as a feted maestro of the international art house, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is also one of his most gleefully radical assaults on the values of the ruling class. THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY Luis Buñuel’s vision of the inherent absurdity of human social rituals reaches its taboo-annihilating extreme in what may be his most morally subversive and formally audacious work. Zigzagging across time and space, from the Napoleonic era to the present day, The Phantom of Liberty unfolds as a picaresque, its main character traveling between tableaux in a series of Dadaist non sequiturs. Unbound by the laws of narrative logic, Buñuel lets his surrealist’s id run riot in an exuberant revolt against bourgeois rationality that seems telegraphed directly from his unconscious to the screen. THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE Luis Buñuel’s final film brings full circle the director’s lifelong preoccupation with the darker side of desire. Buñuel regular Fernando Rey plays Mathieu, an urbane widower, tortured by his lust for the elusive Conchita. With subversive flair, Buñuel uses two different actors in the latter role—Carole Bouquet, a sophisticated French beauty, and Ángela Molina, a Spanish coquette. Drawn from the surrealist favorite Pierre Louÿs’s classic erotic novel La femme et le pantin (The Woman and the Puppet, 1898), That Obscure Object of Desire is a dizzying game of sexual politics punctuated by a terror that harks back to Buñuel’s avant-garde beginnings.

Release: August 9, 2016

$6.99

Description

A sophisticated Parisian wife drifts into an affair while navigating the fragile balance of marriage, desire, and modern relationships.

Release: April 25, 2017

$7.99

Description

Anthology film of four swindle stories set in Tokyo, Amsterdam, Italy, and Paris.