Displaying items by tag: Criterion August, The Earrings of Madame De, To Be or Not to Be, Seconds, Day of the Falcon, Akira Kurosawa, Scott Pilgrim vs the World

All right, it’s Thursday here at The Bits and you know what that means!  Well… actually it doesn’t really mean anything except that it’s Thursday, but we do have some great release news and some more Blu-ray Disc reviews for you.

First the reviews:  From our own Tim Salmons we’ve got a new review of Anchor Bay’s Day of the Falcon, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud.  We’ve also ported over another pair of his older reviews from the original Bits website – Clerks and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

On top of that, we’ve updated more of our classic Criterion Blu-ray reviews as well – from myself, Todd Doogan and Barrie Maxwell.  They include Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Kagemusha, Sanjuro and Yojimbo (as well as Ran from Studio Canal and Lionsgate) and also Charade and Amarcord.

And that leads me nicely to today’s release news: Our friends at the Criterion Collection have just announced their August Blu-ray and DVD release slate, set to include an updating of Max Ophuls’ The Earrings of Madame De... (Cat #445 – BD and DVD – due 8/6), John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (Cat #667 – BD and DVD – due 8/13), Satyajit Ray’s The Big City (Cat #668 – BD and DVD – due 8/20) and Charulata (Cat #669 – Blu-ray and DVD – also due 8/20) and Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (Cat #670 – BD and DVD – due 8/27).  They also have Eclipse Series 39: Early Fassbinder coming to DVD only on 8/27, featuring Love Is Colder Than Death, Katzelmacher, Gods of the Plague, The American Soldier and Beware of a Holy Whore.  Here’s a look at three of the covers (we’ll update the Amazon links when they become available)…

And that’s all for the moment.  Stay tuned!

- Bill Hunt