The Criterion Collection has announced that it will add six new titles to its Blu-ray catalog in July: Andrei Tarkovsky's
Stalker, Albert Brooks'
Lost in America, Robert Bresson's
L'argent, and Roberto Rossellini's
War Trilogy.
Stalker
Synopsis: Andrei Tarkovsky's final Soviet feature is a metaphysical journey through an enigmatic postapocalyptic landscape, and a rarefied cinematic experience like no other. A hired guide—the Stalker—leads a writer and a scientist into the heart of the Zone, the restricted site of a long-ago disaster, where the three men eventually zero in on the Room, a place rumored to fulfill one's most deeply held desires. Adapting a science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Tarkovsky created an immersive world with a wealth of material detail and a sense of organic atmosphere. A religious allegory, a reflection of contemporaneous political anxieties, a meditation on film itself—Stalker envelops the viewer by opening up a multitude of possible meanings.
Special Features:
- NEW 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New interview with Geoff Dyer, author of Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room
- Interview from 2002 with cinematographer Alexander Knyazhinsky
- Interview from 2002 with set designer Rashit Safiullin
- Interview from 2002 with composer Eduard Artemyev
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by critic Mark Le Fanu
STREET DATE: JULY 18.
Lost in America
Synopsis: In this hysterical satire of Reagan-era values, written and directed by Albert Brooks, a successful Los Angeles advertising executive (Brooks) and his wife (Julie Hagerty) decide to quit their jobs, buy a Winnebago, and follow their Easy Rider fantasies of freedom and the open road. When a stop in Las Vegas nearly derails their plans, they're forced to come to terms with their own limitations and those of the American dream. Brooks's barbed wit and confident direction drive Lost in America, a high point in the string of restless comedies about insecure characters searching for satisfaction in the modern world that established his unique comic voice and transformed the art of observational humor.
Special Features:
- NEW 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New conversation with director Albert Brooks and filmmaker Robert Weide
- New interviews with actor Julie Hagerty, executive producer Herb Nanas, and comic writer and director James L. Brooks
- Trailer
- PLUS: An essay by critic Scott Tobias
STREET DATE: JULY 25.
L'Argent
Synopsis: In his ruthlessly clear-eyed final film, French master Robert Bresson pushed his unique blend of spiritual rumination and formal rigor to a new level of astringency. Transposing a Tolstoy novella to contemporary Paris, L'argent follows a counterfeit bill as it originates as a prop in a schoolboy prank, then circulates like a virus among the corrupt and the virtuous alike before landing with a young truck driver and leading him to incarceration and violence. With brutal economy, Bresson constructs his unforgiving vision of original sin out of starkly perceived details, rooting his characters in a dehumanizing material world that withholds any hope of transcendence.
Special Features:
- NEW, restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Press conference from the 1983 Cannes Film Festival
- "L'argent," A to Z, a new video essay by film scholar James Quandt
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by critic Adrian Martin and a newly expanded 1983 interview with director Robert Bresson by critic Michel Ciment
STREET DATE: JULY 11.
Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy
Synopsis: Roberto Rossellini is one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. And it was with his trilogy of films made during and after World War II—Rome Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero—that he left his first transformative mark on cinema. With their stripped-down aesthetic, largely nonprofessional casts, and unorthodox approaches to storytelling, these intensely emotional works were international sensations and came to define the neorealist movement. Shot in battle-ravaged Italy and Germany, these three films are some of our most lasting, humane documents of devastated postwar Europe, containing universal images of both tragedy and hope.
Rome Open City (1945)
Synopsis: This was Roberto Rossellini's revelation, a harrowing drama about the Nazi occupation of Rome and the brave few who struggled against it. Though told with more melodramatic flair than the other films that would form this trilogy and starring some well-known actors—Aldo Fabrizi as a priest helping the partisan cause and Anna Magnani in her breakthrough role as the fiancée of a resistance member—Rome Open City (Roma città aperta) is a shockingly authentic experience, conceived and directed amid the ruin of World War II, with immediacy in every frame. Marking a watershed moment in Italian cinema, this galvanic work garnered awards around the globe and left the beginnings of a new film movement in its wake.
Special Features:
- NEW high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Introduction by Roberto Rossellini
- Audio commentary from 2009 by film scholar Peter Bondanella
- Once Upon a Time . . . "Rome Open City," a 2006 documentary on the making of this historic film, featuring rare archival material and footage of Anna Magnani, Federico Fellini, Ingrid Bergman, and many others
- Interviews from 2009 with Rossellini scholar Adriano Aprà
- Rossellini and the City, a 2009 video essay by film scholar Mark Shiel on Rossellini's use of the urban landscape in The War Trilogy
- Interview with film critic and Rossellini friend Father Virgilio Fantuzzi, who discusses the filmmaker and the role of religion in Rome Open City
Paisan (1946)
Synopsis: Roberto Rossellini's follow-up to his breakout Rome Open City was the ambitious, enormously moving Paisan (Paisà), which consists of six episodes set during the liberation of Italy at the end of World War II, and taking place across the country, from Sicily to the northern Po Valley. With its documentary-like visuals and its intermingled cast of actors and nonprofessionals, Italians and their American liberators, this look at the struggles of different cultures to communicate and of people to live their everyday lives in extreme circumstances is equal parts charming sentiment and vivid reality. A long-missing treasure of Italian cinema, Paisan is available here in its full original release version.
Special Features:
- NEW high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Introduction by Roberto Rossellini
- Interview from 2009 with Rossellini scholar Adriano Aprà
- Excerpts from rarely seen videotaped discussions Rossellini had in 1970 about his craft with faculty and students at Rice University
- Into the Future, a 2009 video essay about The War Trilogy by film scholar Tag Gallagher
Germany Year Zero (1948)
Synopsis: The concluding chapter of Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy is the most devastating, a portrait of an obliterated Berlin, seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy. Living in a bombed-out apartment building with his sick father and two older siblings, young Edmund is mostly left to wander unsupervised, getting ensnared in the black-market schemes of a group of teenagers and coming under the nefarious influence of a Nazi-sympathizing ex-teacher. Germany Year Zero (Deutschland im Jahre Null) is a daring, gut-wrenching look at the consequences of fascism, for society and the individual.
Special Features:
- NEW high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Introductions by Roberto Rossellini
- Italian credits and prologue from Germany Year Zero
- Roberto Rossellini, a 2001 documentary by Carlo Lizzani, assistant director on Germany Year Zero, tracing Rossellini's career through archival footage and interviews with family members
- Letters from the Front: Carlo Lizzani on "Germany Year Zero," a podium discussion with Lizzani from the 1987 Tutto Rossellini conference
- Interview from 2009 with Rossellini scholar Adriano Aprà
- Interviews from 2009 with filmmakers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
STREET DATE: JULY 11.