Tuesday’s have always been a DVD / CD / Blu-ray collectors day to treasure. Being a fan of Criterion, their new release Tuesdays are even sweeter. Its triply sweet today, getting Götz Spielmann’s Revanche, Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes, and Steve McQueen’s Hunger.
Of the three released today, I’d throw my weight towards Revanche, as it was my favorite of the three, it being the one I want to watch again, no questions asked. You can hear me discuss Revanche on the last couple of podcasts, our episode on The 400 Blows, yesterday’s episode 24, and last week’s Disc 2. Something I mentioned in one of the podcasts, was that I immediately found myself attracted to Spielmann’s use of the camera, and lack of music found within the film. While I’m usually one who demands a commentary track, I found all of the bonus materials a perfectly enjoyable alternative, where I was able to learn all about the directors thoughts on filmmaking in general, and a look behind the making of Revanche. [Note from the Editor: today, Netflix Watch Instantly added Revanche to it's streaming lineup!]
While I did enjoy Steve McQueen’s Hunger, it is certainly a challenging film to get through. You can hear some of my thoughts on the film in a Disc 2 from last November, just after the release was officially announced. Hunger was also one of the films from the initial announcement in September, that IFC and Criterion would be joining forces.
The Lola Montes release has to be the most surprising of the three made available today. This is mostly because I went into my viewing of the film having not seen any of Max Ophuls films, and was warned early on by Travis’ experience with his previous Criterion discs. I think what really intrigued me was the trailer. It is masterfully cut together as well as showcases just how gorgeous this remastered print is on DVD and Blu-ray. You can find the trailer below, and I’d highly recommend you click on the “view in HD” button, just to get an idea of what’s in store for the Blu-ray.
Buy Revanche on DVD from Amazon
Buy Revanche on Blu-ray from Amazon
Revanche
Götz Spielmann, Criterion # 502
A gripping thriller and a tragic drama of nearly Greek proportions, Revanche is the stunning, Oscar-nominated international breakthrough of Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann. In a ragged section of Vienna, hardened ex-con Alex (the mesmerizing Johannes Krisch) works in a brothel, where he falls for Ukrainian hooker Tamara. Their desperate plans for escape unexpectedly intersect with the lives of a rural cop and his seemingly content wife. With meticulous, elegant direction, Spielmann creates a tense, existential, and surprising portrait of vengeance and redemption, and a journey into the darkest forest of human nature, in which violence and beauty exist side by side.
Add Revanche to your Netflix Queue.
Disc Features
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer, approved by director Götz Spielmann (with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
- New video interview with Spielmann
- The Making of “Revanche,” a half-hour documentary shot on the set
- Foreign Land (Fremdland), Spielmann’s award-winning student short film, with an introduction by the director
- U.S. theatrical trailer
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Armond White
Warning: the Revanche trailer does spoil a key plot moment.
Buy Lola Montes on DVD from Amazon
Buy Lola Montes on Blu-ray from Amazon
Lola Montès
Max Ophuls, Criterion # 503
Lola Montès is a visually ravishing, narratively daring dramatization of the life of the notorious courtesan and showgirl, played by Martine Carol. With his customary cinematographic flourish and, for the first time, vibrant color, Max Ophuls charts the course of Montès’s scandalous past through the invocations of the bombastic ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) of the American circus where she has ended up performing. Ophuls’s final film, Lola Montès is at once a magnificent romantic melodrama, a meditation on the lurid fascination with celebrity, and a one-of-a-kind movie spectacle.
Add Lola Montes to your Netflix Queue.
Disc Features
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
- Audio commentary featuring Max Ophuls scholar Susan White
- “Max Ophuls ou le plaisir de tourner,” a 1965 episode of the French television program Cinéastes de notre temps, featuring interviews with many of Ophuls’s collaborators
- Max by Marcel, a new documentary by Marcel Ophuls about his father and the making of Lola Montès
- Silent footage of actress Martine Carol briefly demonstrating the various glamorous hairstyles in Lola Montès
- Theatrical rerelease trailer from Rialto Pictures
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Gary Giddins
Buy Hunger on DVD from Amazon
Buy Hunger on Blu-ray from Amazon
Hunger
Steve McQueen, Criterion # 504
With Hunger, British filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen has turned one of history’s most controversial acts of political defiance into a jarring, unforgettable cinematic experience. In Northern Ireland’s Maze prison in 1981, twenty-seven-year-old Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands went on a hunger strike to protest the British government’s refusal to recognize him and his fellow IRA inmates as political prisoners. McQueen dramatizes prison existence and Sands’s final days in a way that is purely experiential, even abstract, a succession of images full of both beauty and horror. Featuring an intense performance by Michael Fassbender, Hunger is an unflinching, transcendent depiction of what a human being is willing to endure to be heard.
Add Hunger to your Netflix Queue.
Disc Features
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer, approved by director Steve McQueen (with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
- Video interviews with McQueen and actor Michael Fassbender
- A short documentary on the making of Hunger, including interviews with McQueen, Fassbender, actors Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham, and Brian Milligan, writer Enda Walsh, and producer Robin Gutch
- “The Provo’s Last Card?,” a 1981 episode of the BBC program Panorama, about the Maze prison hunger strikes and the political and civilian reactions across Northern Ireland
- Theatrical trailer
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Chris Darke
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