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Release: December 12, 2023

$7.99

Description

Like the Royal Theater in The Last Picture Show and the title movie house in Cinema Paradiso, the Fu-Ho is shutting down for good. The Fu-Ho’s valedictory screening is King Hu’s 1967 wuxia epic Dragon Inn, playing to a motley smattering of spectators. The standard grievances persist: patrons snack noisily and remove their shoes, treating this temple of cinema like their living room. The sense that moviegoing as a communal experience is slipping away takes on a powerful and painful resonance. Yet Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn is too multifaceted to collapse into a simple valentine to the age of pre-VOD cinephilia. A minimalist where King Hu was a maximalist, preferring long, static shots and sparse use of dialogue, Tsai rises to the narrative challenges he sets for himself and offers the slyest, most delicate of character arcs (the manager, a woman with an iron brace on her leg, embarks on a torturous odyssey to deliver food to the projectionist, played by Lee Kang-sheng). By the time the possibility arises that the theater is haunted, we’ve already identified it as a space outside of time—indeed, two stars of Hu’s original opus, Miao Tien and Shih Chun, watch their younger selves with tears in their eyes, past and present commingling harmoniously and poignantly. 4K Restoration by CINEMATEK, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium. Special Features: • Audio commentary by film critic Phoebe Chen • Introduction by film critic Nick Pinkerton • Light (2019, a short film by Tsai Ming-liang) • Re-Release Trailer

Release: May 5, 2026

$6.99

Description

A bad day gets worse for young detective Murakami when a pickpocket steals his gun on a crowded bus. Desperate to right the wrong, he goes undercover, scavenging Tokyo’s sweltering streets for the stray dog whose desperation has led him to a life of crime. With each step, cop’s and criminal’s lives become more intertwined and the investigation becomes an examination of Murakami’s own dark side. Starring Toshiro Mifune as the rookie cop and Takashi Shimura as the seasoned detective who keeps him on the right side of the law, Stray Dog goes beyond crime thriller, probing the squalid world of postwar Japan and the nature of the criminal mind. BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack Audio commentary by Stephen Prince, author of The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa Short documentary on Stray Dog, from the series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create, featuring interviews with director Akira Kurosawa, production designer Yoshiro Muraki, actor Keiko Awaji, and others Plus: An essay by film critic Terrence Rafferty and an excerpt from Kurosawa’s book Something Like an Autobiography