Akasen Chitai / Yokihi (Street of Shame / Empress Yank Kwei Fei) [Masters Of Cinema] [UK import, Region 2 PAL DVD]

Akasen Chitai / Yokihi (Street of Shame / Empress Yank Kwei Fei) [Masters Of Cinema] [UK import, Region 2 PAL DVD] Review

Akasen Chitai / Yokihi (Street of Shame / Empress Yank Kwei Fei) [Masters Of Cinema] [UK import, Region 2 PAL DVD] Feature

• Digital Stereo
• No Regional Coding
• Auto Start
• Auto Repeat
• 4 Hours

2 x disc special edition containing new transfers of both films. New and improved English subtitles. Full length Akasen Chitai audio commentary and a video discussion about Yokihi by acclaimed Japanese film expert/critic, festival programmer, and filmmaker Tony Rayns. Original theatrical trailers. 64-page booklet featuring writing by Keiko I. McDonald (author of Mizoguchi), Mark Le Fanu (author of Mizoguchi and Japan), Masako Nakagawa (author of The Yang Kuei-fei Legend in Japanese Literature), ninth-century poetry (A Song of Unending Sorrow) by Po Chü-i, and rare production stills. YOKIHI (EMPRESS YANK KWEI FEI): In eighth century China, the Emperor is grieving over the death of his wife. The Yang family wants to provide the Emperor with a consort so that they may consolidate their influence over the court. General An Lushan finds a distant relative working in their kitchen whom they groom to present to the Emperor. The Emperor falls in love with her and she becomes the Princess Yang Kwei-fei. The Yangs are then appointed important ministers, though An Lushan is not given the court position he covets. The ministers misuse their power so much that there is a popular revolt against all the Yangs, fueled by An Lushan. AKASEN CHITAI (STREET OF SHAME): Five prostitutes work at Dreamland, in Tokyo's Yoshiwara district. As the Diet considers a ban on prostitution, the women's daily dramas play out. Each has dreams and motivations. Hanae is married, her husband unemployed; they have a young child. Yumeko, a widow, uses her earnings to raise and support her son, who's now old enough to work and care for her. The aging Yorie has a man who wants to marry her. Yasumi saves money diligently to pay her debt and get out; she also has a suitor who wants to marry her, but she has other plans for him. Mickey seems the most devil-may-care, until her father comes from Kobe to bring her news of her family and ask her to come home.

Buster Keaton Complete Short Films 1917-1923 (Masters of Cinema edition) [UK import, Region 2 PAL format]

Buster Keaton Complete Short Films 1917-1923 (Masters of Cinema edition) [UK import, Region 2 PAL format] Review

NEWLY RESTORED! Containing thirty-two films with a running time of 740 minutes, this collection documents Buster Keaton's short films between 1917-1923. Capturing Keaton's first steps in front of a camera this box set charts his early association with ex-Keystone Kop Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle through to starring in, headlining, and directing his own box office smash hits. Using Chaplin s old Hollywood studios in 1920, Keaton's sophisticated technical inventiveness coupled with his haunted-yet-handsome Stone Face persona, created a succession of the most timeless, classic comedy shorts ever realised. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present the following films in a four-disc box set, with audio commentary by Joseph McBride on six of the films, and a 180-page book: The Butcher Boy (1917) The Rough House (1917) His Wedding Night (1917) Oh, Doctor! (1917) Coney Island (1917) Out West (1918) The Bell Boy (1918) Moonshine (1918) Good Night Nurse (1918) The Cook (1918) Backstage (1919) The Hayseed (1919) The Garage (1919) The High Sign * (finished 1920, released 1921) One Week* (1920) Convict 13* (1920) The Scarecrow (1920) Neighbors (1920) The Haunted House (1921) Hard Luck (1921) The Goat (1921) The Playhouse* (1921) The Boat* (1921) The Paleface (1922) Cops* (1922) My Wife s Relations (1922) The Blacksmith (1922) The Frozen North (1922) Daydreams (1922) The Electric House (1922) The Balloonatic (1923) The Love Nest (1923) *features audio commentary

La vie de Jesus [Masters of Cinema edition, Region 2 PAL format]]

La vie de Jesus [Masters of Cinema edition, Region 2 PAL format]] Review

La vie de Jesus [Masters of Cinema edition, Region 2 PAL format]] Feature

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One of the great debut films of recent times, Bruno Dumont's LA VIE DE JÉSUS [THE LIFE OF JESUS] presents life's brutality and exhilaration played out by turns within the quarters of a tiny Flemish country town. Here, positioned in relative isolation from the rest of so-called cultural Europe, the connections between individuals will take on a physical power inflected by boredom, by desperation, and by urges as raw as the earth. Freddy and Marie (played by David Douche and Marjorie Cottreel in astonishing performances) are two teenagers with their futures uncertain and their present undefined. They ride motorbikes, they have sex - communication like any other sort. But in their hometown of Bailleul in Flanders, where news from the world-at-large disappears just as quickly as it drifts in, death proves to be inescapable, and decidedly permanent. As the film's powerful climax unfolds, the viewer will come away with his or her own interpretation of how the life of Christ has figured into the story of Freddy and Marie a contemplation on the magnitude of mercy. With its frank, honest depictions of the body in the course of the sexual act, LA VIE DE JÉSUS announced the emergence of a powerful philosophical intelligence and a master of dramatic control onto the scene of world cinema. Winner of the prestigious BFI Sutherland Trophy, Camera d'Or at Cannes, the Prix Jean Vigo, European Discovery of the Year at the European Film Awards, amongst many others, The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Bruno Dumont's feature debut for the first time on home video in the UK in a director-approved edition. ---Special Features--- *New anamorphic 2.35:1 transfer in the original aspect ratio *New and improved optional English subtitles *Original French trailer *Full-colour 40-page booklet including a lengthy interview with Dumont on the making of the film, and Dumont's work-notes created during production, in new English translations.

Pitfall (Masters of Cinema edition, UK import, Region 2 PAL format)

Pitfall (Masters of Cinema edition, UK import, Region 2 PAL format) Review

Pitfall (Masters of Cinema edition, UK import, Region 2 PAL format) Feature

• 4 Hours. Adult.

A wandering miner, looking for work with his young son, is pursued by a mysterious, silent assassin in a white suit and hat. As mistrust and killings spread through the barely populated, rundown mining community, ghosts of the dead appear, unheard by the living, yet imploring them for answers. Who is the man in white and why does he sow confusion? Hiroshi Teshigahara's debut feature, PITFALL [OTOSHIANA], was the first of his collaborations with novelist/playwright Kobo Abe and composer Toru Takemitsu. Beautifully filmed in an abandoned, postwar coal-mining town in Western Japan, it is part social-realist critique, part unsettling ghost fable. Examining themes of alienation, workers' rights, and identity, Teshigahara and Abe's exotically strange film evokes the cinema of Antonioni, Resnais, the writing of Kafka, Beckett, Carroll, and the French existentialists. Teshigahara coined the term "documentary fantasy" for this study of the powerless, impoverished worker in postwar Japan. Demonstrating a meticulous aesthetic (his father was an ikebana master and founder of the Sogetsu Foundation),Teshigahara's efforts with Pitfall earned him the NHK Best New Director award and the luxury of being released abroad. ** ** ** Special Features: ? Restored transfer and audio ? Exclusive full-length audio commentary by Tony Rayns ? New English subtitle translation ? 16-page booklet with an essay by David Toop ? Original trailer ? Gallery containing rare production stills and artwork

City Girl [Masters of Cinema] [Blu-ray] [1930]

City Girl [Masters of Cinema] [Blu-ray] [1930] Review

City Girl [Masters of Cinema] [Blu-ray] [1930] Feature

• UK Import
• Blu-ray
• Region-Free

ter the visual fireworks of Sunrise and the now-lost splendour of 4 Devils, F.W. Murnau turned his attention to this vivid, painterly study of an impulsive and fragile marriage among the wheatfields of Minnesota. During a brief stay in Chicago, innocent farmer s son Lem falls for and weds Kate, a hard-bitten but lonely waitress. Upon bringing her home at the start of harvest time, the honeymoon soon turns into a claustrophobic struggle as they contend with the bitter scorn of his father and the invasive, leering jealousy of the farm s labouring community. Tenderly romantic and tough-minded in equal measure, City Girl is one of cinemas great pastorals, featuring some of the most delicate performances Murnau ever directed and influencing filmmakers such as Terrence Malick and Jean Vigo. ****NEW SPECIAL EDITION including: --Restored high-definition transfer of the silent version by 20th Century Fox --A new score, composed and arranged in 2008 by Christopher Caliendo --Exclusive full-length audio commentary by film scholar David Kalat --40-page illustrated booklet with new writing and reprints

A Time to Love and a Time To Die [Masters of Cinema edition, UK import, Region 2 PAL format]

A Time to Love and a Time To Die [Masters of Cinema edition, UK import, Region 2 PAL format] Review

"Their pounding hearts drowned out the sound of chaos thundering around them." Douglas Sirk turns back to his native Germany at the time of WWII. A CinemaScope production staged on a grand scale, Sirk's picture pulsates with an intimacy that has known longing for too long, and seethes with the repression of emotions poised to explode like bombs. John Gavin plays Ernst Gräber, a soldier on the Russian-German Front in 1944 venturing home to his shattered home to search for fragments of his family's shattered lives. Amid the shards, he falls in love with Elisabeth (Liselotte Pulver), the charming daughter of his parents' doctor, activating a magnetism that compels them to love, even as it hurtles them into epochal death. Adapted from the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, Sirk's film takes its literary source and sculpts it anew out of colour, decor, and performance, arguably besting the novel on all aesthetic levels. ****SPECIAL TWO-DISC Edition including: --Gorgeous new anamorphic transfer of the film in its original 2:35:1 aspect ratio --English SDH subtitles for the hearing impaired --OF TEARS AND SPEED, a 12-minute, visually annotated recitation of Jean-Luc Godard's seminal essay on Sirk's film; interview with Wesley Strick, author of OUT THERE IN THE DARK, a roman-à-clef based upon Sirk's life in Hollywood and his relationship with the estranged son who took a starring role in Hitler Youth propaganda. --IMITATION OF LIFE [MIRAGE OF LIFE]: A PORTRAIT OF DOUGLAS SIRK a 49-minute film portrait from 1984 of Sirk and his wife Hilda in conversation, and reflecting, from their apartment in Germany, back upon their lives in Hollywood; 36-page booklet containing the complete text of Jean-Luc Godard's essay on the film, writings from critic Tag Gallagher on the film and Sirk's career in general, and an assemblage of notes that includes excerpts from Sirk's reflections upon the film, remarks upon visual motifs inside the movie, the CinemaScope process and more.

The Face of Another (Masters of Cinema Series) [Region 2]

The Face of Another (Masters of Cinema Series) [Region 2] Review

The Face of Another (Masters of Cinema Series) [Region 2] Feature

• 4 hours

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Fantastic Planet - Master's of Cinema Series (UK Import) [Region 2]

Fantastic Planet - Master's of Cinema Series (UK Import) [Region 2] Review

René Laloux's mesmerising psychedelic sci-fi animated feature won the Grand Prix at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival and is a landmark of European animation. Based on Stefan Wul's novel Oms en série [Oms by the dozen], Laloux's breathtaking vision was released in France as La Planète sauvage [The Savage Planet]; in the USA as Fantastic Planet; and immediately drew comparisons to Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Planet of the Apes (both the 1968 film and Boule's 1963 novel). Today, the film can be seen to prefigure much of the work of Hayao Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away) due to its palpable political and social concerns, cultivated imagination, and memorable animation techniques.