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The 25 Best Home Video Releases of 2021

There’s comfort to be found in the predictably steady pulse of a given week’s home video releases.

The 20 Best Home Video Releases of 2021
Photo: The Criterion Collection

There’s comfort, when our world has been turned upside down by a pandemic and so much political turmoil, in the predictably steady pulse of a given week’s home video releases—not withstanding a few disruptions in the global supply chain. Amid days and weeks that seemed to swirl endlessly around each other, a plethora of titles hit the home entertainment market, running the gamut from arthouse classics to the most obscure cult films, all waiting to be picked up by the eager collector. Our list of the best home video releases of 2021 just might bring to attention a few choice titles that had previously fallen through the cracks.

This has been another banner year for big box sets—and not just when it comes to the number of films collected within. Both Severin’s The Eurocypt of Christopher Lee and Criterion’s Once Upon a Time in China: The Complete Films returned major dividends on investment with hours of bonus materials. Even the more modest sets went all out in terms of packaging by including foldout posters, CD soundtracks, art cards, and thick books full of lovely illustrations, as well as packed with captivating analysis. Arrow Video has carved out a niche for itself with just these sorts of releases, as evidenced by Vengeance Trails: Four Classic Westerns, as well as their definitive edition of Sam Peckinpah’s studio-botched film maudit Major Dundee.

This was also the year that boutique labels went Ultra High Definition, putting out the unlikeliest titles in glittering 2160p, while Criterion chose the inimitable bulwark of Citizen Kane for their first 4K release. And then there are more low-profile releases from unknown or underrepresented filmmakers that finally bowed on Blu-ray, like the films collected in Kino’s Ken Jacobs Collection, Criterion’s Signifying Works of Marlon Riggs, and Second Run’s Hungarian Masters set. Now these rarities come souped up with an array of bonus materials, and looking far better than they have since they first screened for the viewing public. Budd Wilkins



Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane (The Criterion Collection)

Criterion’s 80th anniversary 4K release boasts a luxuriant new transfer that brings Orson Welles’s quintessentially vital film into present-tense greatness once again. It’s no small feat to put together the most definitive trove of Citizen Kane bonus features; most releases have shown due reverence for the commonly accepted “greatest film of all time” and loaded their discs up with reiterations of said fact. Criterion carries over the separate Roger Ebert and Peter Bogdanovich commentary tracks from Warner’s 2011 Blu-ray and throws in a third one featuring historians James Naremore and Jonathan Rosenbaum. In the end, all four participants bring a wealth of knowledge to the table, and each deserves at least one spin. Also welcome: a 45-minute documentary on the last years of Welles’s life in which he was arguably more famous for being a stalwart talk show guest, spokesperson, and voiceover artist; an examination of Citizen Kane’s arsenal of practical effects work; a fresh look at the William Randolph Hearst problem by critic Farran Smith Nehme; and even a tongue-in-cheek look at Welles’s propensity for giving each of his characters unique schnozes. Eric Henderson



The Collected Films of Morris Engel & Ruth Orkin

The Collected Films of Morris Engel & Ruth Orkin (Kino Lorber)

Primarily known for his unadorned snapshots of New York City street life, a practice that established him as a mainstay of the Photo League cooperative and the city’s thriving pre- and post-war photography scenes, Morris Engel turned his sights to the potential of amateur filmmaking technology and scored a runaway hit with his 1953 feature debut, Little Fugitive. The film, co-directed with his wife and fellow photographer, Ruth Orkin, is collected in Kino Lorber’s three-disc set alongside the filmmakers’ later feature Lovers and Lollipops and Engel’s solo efforts Weddings and Babies and I Need a Ride to California. (The latter, for unknown reasons, was never released, but despite a meandering structure and some technical blemishes, it’s hardly the failed experiment that fate would imply.) The disc is rounded out by all of Engel’s short films (including One Chase Manhattan, which celebrates the architectural achievement of the New York City skyscraper) and commercials, as well as a wonderful commentary track from Engel himself, who wades deep into his memories of the production and of his personal connection to Coney Island. Carson Lund

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Columbia Noir #2

Columbia Noir #2 (Indicator)

In her introduction to the Criterion Channel’s Columbia Noir collection, critic Imogen Sara Smith asserts that it’s an avoidance of “cookie cutter” plots and a tendency to reflect “the whole scope and diversity of what film noir could be” that sets Columbia Pictures’s noirs apart from those of other studios. And the adventurousness of the studio’s output is amply clear throughout the six films collected on Columbia Noir #2, in everything from Ginger Rogers’s against-type turn as a sassy, hard-nosed convict in Tight Spot to Perry Botkin’s wildly unconventional, solo guitar score for Murder by Contract. The high-def transfers are fantastic across the board, especially those for the two best films in the set, Murder by Contract and The Mob, both of which are premiering on Blu-ray for the first time. Powerhouse Films typically goes all out for their Indicator series box sets, but the distributor has really gone above and beyond here. The highlight of Columbia Noir #2 is surely the newly recorded audio commentaries, each of which offers critical insights into everything from the typical qualities of a Columbia noir to the formal strategies and thematic elements of the individual films. Derek Smith



The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone (Shout! Factory)

Pulled from The Dead Zone’s original negative, this 4K scan boasts a full, natural range of color and, all too frequently, delivers the insistently wintry imagery with bone-chilling detail. And for a single-disc release, Shout! has pulled out the stops. There are no fewer than three separate commentary tracks—four if you count the isolated music score track with select commentary from film music historian Daniel Schweiger, who illustrates how Michael Kamen’s score influenced the evolution of David Cronenberg’s frequent collaborator Howard Shore. The quartet of featurettes produced about a decade and a half ago by filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau are ported over from Paramount’s 2006 DVD release, which is a great relief. Christopher Walken isn’t among those who were interviewed for them (which, put together, total nearly 45 minutes), but David Cronenberg was. The Dead Zone was his first adaptation of someone else’s work, and his insights on the adjustment are intriguing. Thankfully, Shout! also saw fit to produce a pair of new featurettes to slot alongside the Bouzereau content, touching base with some of the crew members who didn’t get their own commentary track, and ceding the floor to actor Brooke Adams, who gets an updated solo featurette to herself. Henderson



The Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee

The Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee (Severin)

British horror icon Christopher Lee spent some time in the 1960s acting in a number of gothic Euro-shockers, five of which have been gathered together by Severin in this lavishly packaged box set. Set amid haunted castles and tenebrous crypts, these films are mostly monochrome mood pieces, with the exception of Harald Reinl’s grisly The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism. Spread across the discs are an array of extras that include commentary tracks, interviews with cast and crew, trailers and stills galleries, and even a location featurette. But the supplements don’t stop there. You get 24 half-hour episodes of the Lee-hosted Polish anthology TV series Theatre Macabre from 1971-72, with episodes directed by the likes of Andrzej Wajda and Andrzej Żuławski, adapting stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde. A separate disc titled Relics from the Crypt offers over four hours of interviews with Lee over several decades. There’s a CD of Angelo F. Lavagnino’s score for The Castle of the Living Dead, and, last but certainly not least, an 88-page illustrated book by Lee biographer Jonathan Rigby. Wilkins



The Hungarian Masters Collection

The Hungarian Masters Collection (Second Run)

Second Run’s region-free Hungarian Masters box set marks the Blu-ray debut of three films that helped define Hungary’s cinema in the aftermath of the 1956 revolution. Zoltán Fábri’s Merry-Go-Round is given a fitting tribute from filmmaker István Szabó, who describes the film’s massive influence in Hungary, particularly on younger filmmakers. This disc also comes with several screen tests and a fascinating 20-minute featurette examining the restoration process, detailing all the research that goes into this gargantuan task. István Gaál’s Current comes with the director’s 1963 short film Tisza: Autumn Sketches, as well as an illuminating interview with curator Gareth Evans, who delves into how the personal and existential collide in Current. Miklós Jancsó himself shows up in a nearly hour-long interview from 1987 on the Agnus Dei disc, where he talks about the various advantages and challenges of working within a state-funded film industry. Each disc is also accompanied by beautiful bound booklets, which include lengthy, extensively researched essays by writers and curators John Cunningham, Peter Hames, and Tony Rayns, who help unpack the dense historical contexts of these three diverse yet aesthetically and thematically challenging films. Derek Smith

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In the Shadow of Hollywood

In the Shadow of Hollywood: Highlights from Poverty Row (Flicker Alley)

Flicker Alley’s In the Shadow of Hollywood: Highlights from Poverty Row serves up a wonderful sampling of four Poverty Row films, including a morality tale, a newspaper melodrama, a proto-noir, and a tale of twisted revenge. All four films have been newly restored from archival 35mm material and look wonderful in high definition. Flicker Alley has also included newly recorded audio commentaries for each film. In her commentary on Chester Erskine’s Call It Murder, author and film scholar Leah Alridge provides an in-depth aesthetic analysis, focusing much of her attention on the film’s clever, efficient camerawork, framing, and compositions. The other three tracks are equally compelling but lean more toward historical analysis, serving up historical backgrounds of many of the actors and directors involved and shedding light into the financial and operational realities of Poverty Row productions. The set also comes with a handsome booklet, with full page stills and a lengthy piece by historian and restorer Jan-Christopher Horak that gives a nice overview of the history of these studios and how each of the four films in the set came into being. Derek Smith



Irréversible

Irréversible (Indicator)

One of the unexpected storylines in movies of late is Gaspar Noé somehow getting his groove back and (finally) getting off of Stanley Kubrick’s schedule. Similarly, one of the unexpected storylines in boutique Blu-ray was U.K.-based Powerhouse Films finally dipping its toes into the realm of non-English language cinema. And what a confluence it was. Their Indicator release of Irréversible has split cinephiles right down the middle like a bandsaw ever since it blindsided audiences at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. Even now it remains, if not Noé’s best movie (that’s Climax, full stop), certainly his signature provocation. Indicator’s release is stacked even by the distributor’s own standards, right up to the inclusion of the 2020 “straight” cut, which even if it makes little sense from a formal perspective at least brings up the opportunity to examine the film’s “time destroys all” theme from both sides, as critic Alexandra Heller-Nicolas does in her crucial featurette about Noe’s provocation in the context of rape-revenge cinema. Not that it could’ve done otherwise, but this “limited edition” (of 10,000 copies) also gets bonus points for leaning into the film’s still polarizing reception, even as the fresh 2K restoration rubs its most debased images right into your eye sockets. Henderson



Johnny Guitar

Johnny Guitar (Masters of Cinema)

Eureka double-underlined the auteurist bent of their Masters of Cinema imprint when they pulled out all the stops for their release of Johnny Guitar. A heady, heated ’50s western that was dismissed in print by both director Nicholas Ray and star Joan Crawford—who, despite having starred in, well, Trog, ranked the movie among her very worst—the film is without question among the 10 most fervidly stanned titles among director-worshippers of all eras, from readers of Cahiers du Cinéma during its heyday to the vulgar auteurists generously sharing their wisdom on Film Twitter. Eureka’s limited edition release plants both feet in the earth to announce the film’s masterpiece bona fides, right down to the hardbound slipcase’s traffic-light yellows and reds. Aside from the roster of critics and historians brought aboard for the ride—Tony Rayns, Geoff Andrew, Martin Scorsese, western specialist Howard Hughes—the package presents Ray’s riotously Technicolor achievements gorgeously (smartly utilizing the restoration featured in Olive Films’s release five years earlier), kicking the film’s ferociously raw feminist energy up to cask strength. Henderson



Ken Jacobs Collection Vol. 1

Ken Jacobs Collection Vol. 1 (Kino Lorber)

The first disc in Kino’s Ken Jacobs Collection Vol. 1 features Jacobs’s uncharacteristically straightforward urban documentary Orchard Street, as well as several of the early unhinged lo-fi freak-outs that he made with fellow avant-gardist Jack Smith, including Blonde Cobra, which provides detailed on-screen instructions for accompanying the film with a live radio. Disc two is dominated by Jacobs’s later structuralist experiments, including his most renowned work, Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, which explodes a larkish 1905 one-reeler into flickering shards of mysterious abstraction. The set is rounded out by some of his 21st-century computer-made work, including the unsettling steroscopic psychedelia of Capitalism: Child Labor and Capitalism: Slavery, as well as Movie That Invites Pausing, a mesmeric abstract motion painting that he completed last year. J. Hoberman suggests in his booklet essay that Jacobs may have been “the first movie-maker to seriously use the projector as his instrument.” And one of the joys of Kino’s collection is that it invites us to “play” our Blu-ray player in much the same way, ensuring that the work of this pioneering experimental film artist becomes not some passive viewing exercise but remains a fully engaged participatory activity. Keith Watson

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Major Dundee

Major Dundee (Arrow Video)

The bulk of this set’s terrific extras have been culled from various earlier home video releases of Sam Peckinpah’s near-masterpiece, and they’re rounded out with a brand new visual essay from critic David Cairns that, among other niceties, examines the contrasting acting styles of leads Charlton Heston and Richard Harris. There are three commentary tracks, and while they inevitably cover some of the same material, each has its own approach and sufficiently unique tangents to recommend a listen. Also of note are three documentary pieces related to Mike Siegel’s ongoing “Passion & Poetry” project: a feature-length examination of Major Dundee with talking-head contributions from several of the cast and crew, a shorter piece that features various actors reminiscing about their collaborations with Peckinpah, and an intriguing profile of Siegel himself. As usual with Arrow Video, the set’s packaging is exemplary: Each version of the film comes in its own cardboard keep case (with different cover art), and both are nestled inside a slipcase with a double-sided foldout poster and a 60-page booklet containing new essays on Peckinpah and Major Dundee from critics Farran Smith Nehme, Roderick Heath, and Jeremy Carr, and some archival goodies. Wilkins



Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films

Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films (The Criterion Collection)

Even by the standards of Criterion’s recent, ludicrously stuffed mega-box sets, the label goes above and beyond with the extras on offer in Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films. The two most considerable features here are two feature-length movies: Baadasssss!, the 2003 dramatized biography by Van Peebles’s son, Mario, about his father’s struggles to make his most enduring film, and Joe Angio’s documentary How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It), which covers the director’s life and work. The set also comes with three of Van Peebles’s early short films: Sunlight, Three Pickup Men for Herrick, and Les cinq cent balles. Among the other extras are a 1997 commentary track by Van Peebles for Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, interviews with the director (ranging from French television appearances in the 1960s all the way up to new talks conducted not long before his death for this release), and archival episodes of the public broadcasting show Black Journal devoted to each of the films in the set. There are also extras related to Mario Van Peebles’s included film, and new discussions about Van Peebles’s legacy with critics like Nelson George and scholars such as Amy Abugo Ongiri. An accompanying booklet features essays on each film from various critics. Jake Cole



Nasty Habits Nunsploitation

Nasty Habits: The Nunsploitation Collection (Severin)

In 1971, Ken Russell’s The Devils opened the floodgates for a wave of similarly scandalous titles that came to be recognized as a distinct subgenre (especially popular in Italy) called nunsploitation films. Mostly period pieces, these films were typically organized around a number of themes—pleasure and pain, virtue and vice, hypocrisy and blasphemy—strung together with lashings of more or less graphic sex and violence. Severin has collected four of these films together in Nasty Habits: The Nunsploitation Collection. A morality play concerning the depravity of the jet set, Cristiana, Devil Nun is unusual for its contemporary setting. Story of a Cloistered Nun pits the sisterhood of the convent against the patriarchal condescension of the Catholic Church. Easily the most extreme entry in terms of content, Images in a Covent claims to be based on the same source as Jacques Rivette’s The Nun, but you’d never guess it. The True Story of the Nun of Monza, while perhaps questionable in its titular claim, does, however, feature an orgy presided over by a priest in a devil costume. Severin rounds thing out with cast and crew interviews, a visual essay on the subgenre, and Images in a Convent comes with a commentary track, as well as deleted scenes, also with commentary. Wilkins



Once Upon a Time in China

Once Upon a Time in China: The Complete Films (The Criterion Collection)

Though each of the films in the Once Upon a Time in China series can be enjoyed according to its own merits, taken together they trace out a very specific arc both in terms of historical era and character development. Turn-of-20th-century period pieces, replete with absurdly over-the-top kung fu (not to mention wire fu) set pieces, and characterized by a broad streak of antic comedy, these films are both crowd-pleasers and sly reinterpretations of episodes in Chinese history. The films, all but one directed by Tsui Hark, look uniformly excellent as presented by Criterion, with bold colors popping off all over the place like fireworks. On the extras front, we get 1997’s quasi-epilogue Once Upon a Time in China and America, an uproarious oater with Jet Li back in the saddle as Wong Fei-hung that also functions as an exposé of systemic racism and exploitation amid the supposedly gold-paved streets of the Wild West. Also of note is a new interview with critic Tony Rayns, who places the Once Upon a Time in China series in its cinematic and sociopolitical contexts, and new interviews with Hark, Film Workshop co-founder Nansun Shi, and editor Marco Mak, who discuss their place in the Hong Kong film industry, their working relationships, and the inspirations behind the series. Wilkins

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Sátántangó

Sátántangó (Arbelos)

Only previously available in Region 1 on a notoriously cruddy and now out-of-print DVD from Facets, Béla Tarr’s seven-hour episodic masterpiece Sátántangó receives an absolutely revelatory restoration from Arbelos. Detail is excellent throughout, highlighting the various shades of rot on dilapidated house walls and throwing close-ups into such sharpness that you can practically count the individual pores on people’s faces, while the soundtrack is clear and balanced, emphasizing ambient sound as much as dialogue. In a lengthy interview, composer Mihály Vig discusses his career and how his interests in classical, progressive rock, and ambient music sparked his transition into film scoring. Naturally, his long-running collaboration with Tarr is covered at length, and in some ways the musician-actor’s biography doubles as a tour of Tarr’s career from an emerging artist running a film club and personal studio to internationally acclaimed auteur. A video essay by critic Kevin B. Lee titled “Orders of Time in Motion” breaks down the film’s structure, camera movement, and use of long takes, while an archival post-screening Q&A with Tarr at the Walker Art Center finds the filmmaker offering insights into the social context and aesthetic makeup of Sátántangó. Cole



Santa Sangre

Santa Sangre (Severin)

Severin’s release is available in both two-disc Blu-ray and four-disc Digipack editions, both abundant in enough special features and extras for casual fans and those who simply can’t slake their thirst for more of Santa Sangre’s weird delights. Both versions include absolutely every feature that was present on the label’s admirable 2011 Blu-ray release, including David Gregory’s feature-length documentary Forget Everything You Have Ever Seen on the making of the film, an audio commentary with director Alejandro Jodorowsky and journalist Alan Jones, a documentary on Goyo Cárdenas, the real-life spree-killer who served as inspiration for the project, and so much more. The new material is mostly composed of interviews (refreshingly, all in-person, as they were completed just prior to the Covid pandemic), the most insightful of which features Jodorowsky and producer Claudio Argento, who believes that Santa Sangre is the single greatest work that he had a hand in getting made. Shell out for the beautifully packaged four-disc set and you’ll also get a set of reproduction German lobby cards and a CD of the original soundtrack. Rocco T. Thompson



Sicilia!

Sicilia! (Grasshopper Film)

Sicilia!’s rich black-and-white cinematography looks wonderful on Grasshopper Film’s transfer, which is sourced from a 20th anniversary digital restoration. Straub-Huillet films tend to feature soundtracks with exaggerated separation between elements, and the audio track here renders each of these sounds clearly and without murky overlap. Grasshopper’s disc pairs Sicilia! with director (and superfan) Pedro Costa’s making-of documentary Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? An entry into the long-running French series Cinéma, de notre temps, the documentary reflects that program’s history of reflecting their subjects’ aesthetic techniques by framing Straub-Huillet’s editing bay in static shots in which they loudly pontificate about their thought process and roam the narrow space of the frame. In testament to just how seriously the filmmakers take every shot and cut, Costa’s documentary runs fully 40 minutes longer than Straub-Huillet’s film. As hilarious in its snapshot of an old married couple bickering lovingly as it is fascinating as a treatise on editing, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? isn’t so much a supplement as a masterpiece in its own right. Cole



The Signifyin’ Works of Marlon Riggs

The Signifyin’ Works of Marlon Riggs (The Criterion Collection)

The Criterion Collection really pulled out the stops for The Signifyin’ Works of Marlon Riggs. The two biggest headliners are the inclusion of an eighth title, Marlon Riggs’s 1981 thesis project Long Train Running: The Story of the Oakland Blues and Karen Everett’s hour-long documentary portrait of Riggs’s life and times, I Shall Not Be Removed: The Life of Marlon Riggs, in which he explicitly says that he always knew he was destined to be great in the medium. Beyond that, there’s a one-two introductory punch from critic K. Austin Collins, whose booklet essay goes above and beyond serving up its subject as an incontestable talent in cinema, and a 25-minute Zoom roundtable on Riggs from Criterion curatorial director Ashley Clark, speaking with filmmakers Vivian Kleiman and Shikeith (whose #Blackmendream feels like the spiritual descendent of Riggs’s work). And Riggs himself is given some extra time with his taped introductions to Tongues Untied and Color Adjustment. As if that weren’t enough, there’s a full slate of newly produced featurettes covering Riggs’s editing style, his influence on culture, and personal memories from former collaborators. Henderson

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Son of the White Mare

Son of the White Mare (Arbelos)

Arbelos’s disc presents Son of the White Mare in a 4K restoration from the film’s original 35mm camera negative. The noticeable film grain and visual quirks of the animation process make Son of the White Mare feel profoundly alive in a way that modern animation has lost almost entirely. And Arbelos has assembled a treasure trove of Marcell Jankovics’s earlier works to accompany the feature film. These include the feature-length Johnny Corncob, the 1974 Oscar-nominated short Sisyphus, 1977’s The Struggle, and a 1968 Air India ad in which you can very much detect the raw material of the director’s later masterpiece. The disc also includes an enlightening 30-minute interview with Jankovics, archival newsreel footage from the making of Johnny Corncob, and a U.S. theatrical trailer. Accompanying the disc is a booklet with excellent new essays by professors Eleanor Cowen and Charles Solomon that give some much-appreciated context on Pannonia Film Studio and Jankovics’s place in the history of Hungarian animation and the medium more broadly. The limited edition run of 1,000 units comes with a beautiful slipcase and 11×17 cut-out poster. Thompson



Southland Tales

Southland Tales (Arrow Video)

Arrow includes both the theatrical cut and the never-before-released Cannes cut of Southland Tales in terrific-looking new 2K restorations. The disc with the theatrical cut contains all the extras, while the second disc contains only the Cannes cut. On his commentary track from 2008, writer-director Richard Kelly goes at great length into the film’s elaborate backstory, as well as the elements that had to be excised from the film after its disastrous Cannes premiere. The archival featurette “USIDent TV: Surveilling the Southland” is an excellent blend of behind-the-scenes footage and interviews, with some great footage of several FX scenes being shot. “It’s a Madcap World: The Making of an Unfinished Film” is a new piece with lots of talking-head commentary from Kelly and other crewmembers. Kelly goes into the initial conception of Southland Tales, how it kept growing and adding layers (much like what had happened during the development of his prior film, Donnie Darko), and what aspects of the film he considers to be still unfinished. Wilkins



The Straight Story

The Straight Story (Imprint)

Although the disc offers a great-looking transfer, the extra features, including a commentary track with critic Peter Tonguette, more than justify the price. In his commentary, Tonguette addresses the mixed to negative critical response to David Lynch’s previous two films, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway, and how the unexpectedly sweet The Straight Story helped turn the critical tide back in his favor. He also uses Janet Maslin’s 1999 review as a frequent reference to analyze both how the film celebrates simple virtues and how Lynch’s style remains uncompromised even with material he didn’t write. A new video essay by filmmaker, writer, and programmer Ian Mantgani makes a convincing case that The Straight Story isn’t an outlier in Lynch’s filmography. Drawing comparisons to many of Lynch’s films, Mantgani traces a line between their motifs and themes all the way to The Straight Story, and suggests that Lynch’s vision of Americana is far more nuanced and panoramic than many people give him credit for. The disc also comes with several other extras that touch on the film’s location scouting and Angelo Badalamenti’s score, as well as a behind-the-scenes featurette that speaks to Lynch’s striving for authentic Midwestern actors. Smith



Three Films by Luis Buñuel

Three Films by Luis Buñuel (The Criterion Collection)

Criterion’s Three Films by Luis Buñuel gathers together three of Buñuel’s late-period masterworks, proving that time hasn’t dimmed their ability to provoke and confound. The first disc offers some excellent overview materials, namely “Speaking of Buñuel,” a terrific feature-length documentary about the filmmaker’s life and work, and “The Castaway of Providence Street,” a charming homage to Buñuel from Mexican directors Arturo Ripstein and Rafael Castanedo, which includes a recipe for his famous Buñueloni cocktail. The second disc is a little lighter on extras but does feature a thorough analysis of The Phantom of Liberty in a 2017 video essay by film scholar Peter William Evans. A lengthy introduction to That Obscure Object of Desire from screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, carried over from Criterion’s 2001 DVD, is a highlight of disc three. Also ported from the earlier release are excerpts from Jacques de Baroncelli’s 1929 silent film La Femme et le Pantin, a version of the same source material. “Lady Doubles” provides interviews with Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet, who discuss the casting process and their different working relationships with Buñuel, who was polite and somewhat distant with Bouquet, yet reputedly got on famously with countrywoman Molina. Wilkins

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Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations

The World of Wong Kar Wai (The Criterion Collection)

Over the course of seven features and one roughly hour-long short made between 1988 and 2004—all collected in this box set from the Criterion Collection bearing his name—Wong Kar-wai developed, refined, and evolved an idiosyncratic personal style in which every achingly sumptuous frame is permeated by a yearning, romantic fatalism. For the mercurial Hong Kong auteur, love is intimately tied up with loss—the end of a relationship written into its beginning, and distance providing a bittersweet counterweight to togetherness. Wong frequently sets up seemingly perfect pairings only to wrench them apart and reconfigure them. Watching his work, you often expect that big moment of romantic rapprochement, in which two people declare their love for each other and share a deep kiss. But while such moments of cathartic passion dot Wong’s oeuvre, they never serve as the culmination of a story, only its dreamlike pinnacle, one never to be reached again but which casts an indelible shadow over the characters’ lives. Criterion’s set is lacking in extras, but that’s made up by the incredible attention that was brought to the transfers of the films, as well as to the set’s super-deluxe packaging, which includes a french-fold booklet with insert prints. Watson



Vengeance Trails

Vengeance Trails: Four Classic Westerns (Arrow Video)

Given Arrow’s track record, Vengeance Trails is unsurprisingly stuffed to the gills with extras that add immensely to the enjoyment of the four collected films. Historian Fabio Melelli is present on each disc in a series of video interviews, providing worthwhile analysis of the films, and a handful of critics and authors show up to provide insightful commentary tracks. Actor Robert Woods joins Joyner on the My Name Is Pecos track, and though he’s the only cast or crew member to appear in this capacity, various other important figures crop up throughout in new and archival interviews. It’s almost impossible not to note the advanced ages of the interviewees, which makes Vengeance Trails feel even more essential in light of our increasing distance from this era of Italian filmmaking. Rounding things out are photo galleries, Italian trailers, and even an alternate end title sequence for Bandidos. The set also comes with a fold-out, double-sided poster featuring newly commissioned artwork by Gilles Vranckx, and reversible sleeves for each disc featuring original artwork. And all the discs are housed in a handsome slipcover box, also featuring art by Vranckx. Thompson



Years of Lead: Five Classic Italian Crime Thrillers

Years of Lead: Five Classic Italian Crime Thrillers (Arrow Video)

Arrow Video’s excellent three-disc box set Years of Lead: Five Classic Italian Crime Films gives viewers a cross-sectional sampling of the poliziotteschi genre, which reflected a tumultuous period in Italian political and social life. Eschewing a strict chronological presentation, Arrow places thematically related pairs of films on the first two discs, with the last one containing the earliest film available here as a sort of spiritual prequel. Although there are no commentary tracks to be found in the set, there are a number of extensive (40- to 50-minute) interviews with cast and crew that provide ample behind-the-scenes anecdotes and career reminiscences. Of particular interest are a pair of featurettes with writer-director Vittorio Salerno and actress Martine Brochard discussing their collaborations on Savage Three and No, the Case Is Happily Resolved. The requisite historical and generic context comes from a visual essay from film critic Will Webb as well as interviews with Italian film historians Fabio Melelli and Roberto Curti. The illustrated 60-page booklet included in the slipcase contains incisive and informative essays on the films from critics Troy Howarth, Michael Mackenzie, Rachael Nisbet, Kat Ellinger, and James Oliver. Wilkins

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