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He'll Love You to Death! Baxter, a sociopathic bull terrier, stars in this chilling French horror film that blends thrills and black comedy into a truly original tale. The inner thoughts of the brooding Baxter reveal that he is quite unhappy with his situation-living with an elderly woman (French screen legend Lise Delamare, the star of the Jean Renoir classic, La Marseillaise) who is afraid of him. In search of his ideal master, he successfully plots how to do away with her-and attempts a similar plan when he becomes dissatisfied with his next owner. It's not long before the ingenious Baxter finds the perfect guardian-a lonely, introverted boy whose macabre interest in Hitler's personal life helps turn the all-too-willing canine into a thoroughbred killing machine. Top critic Vincent Canby (The New York Times) called Baxter "One of the Best Films of the Year."

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Marguerite Duras had already established herself as one of the major figures of postwar French literature when she launched an equally fascinating and unclassifiable career in cinema, translating her elliptical, experimental style to the screen through an unprecedented fusion of hypnotic, highly stylized imagery and radically disjunctive sound. Boldly reimagining the possibilities of dialogue, music, silence, and architectural space, the tantalizing, sphinxlike evocations of soul-deep female malaise India Song and Baxter, Vera Baxter embody Duras’s singular multisensory approach, with each opening up new spaces for the expression of women’s interior worlds. TWO-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 2K digital restorations, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks Marguerite as She Was, a 2003 portrait of director Marguerite Duras Interview from 1977 with Duras Excerpt from a 1977 documentary on actor Delphine Seyrig New English subtitle translation PLUS: An essay by film scholar Ivone Margulies INDIA SONG Marguerite Duras’s most celebrated work is a mesmerizing, almost incantatory experience with few stylistic precedents in the history of cinema. Within the insular walls of a lavish, decaying embassy in 1930s India, the French ambassador’s wife (Delphine Seyrig) staves off ennui through affairs with multiple men—with the overpowering torpor broken only by a startling eruption of madness. Setting her evocatively decadent visuals to a desynchronized chorus of disembodied voices that comment on and counterpoint the action, with India Song Duras creates a haunted-house movie unlike any other. BAXTER, VERA BAXTER Marguerite Duras reunited with India Song collaborators Delphine Seyrig and composer Carlos d’Alessio for Baxter, Vera Baxter, a hypnotically unsettling journey into one woman’s existential emptiness. Ensconced in a sprawling rental villa, the world-weary Vera Baxter (Claudine Gabay) receives visits from two women, including a mysterious stranger (Seyrig) to whom she recounts a shocking story about her marriage, the way she lives, and the reasons for her malaise. Setting her languid images to d’Alessio’s incongruously breezy, endlessly looping score, Duras fashions a quietly shattering portrait of marriage as a kind of prison. Top About this item Similar From the Brand Reviews Two Films by Marguerite Duras (The Criterion Collection) [India Song/Baxter, Vera Baxter] [Blu-ray]