The Criterion Collection and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment have today confirmed their two new Blu-ray releases for September 2017.
IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD
A Film by Stanley Kramer
Release Date: 4 September, 2017
Stanley Kramer followed his Oscar-winning Judgment at Nuremberg with a film that could not be more different if it tried: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, a sprawling and often farcical comedy about a group of strangers fighting tooth and nail over buried treasure.
With a cast including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Spencer Tracy, Jonathan Winters, and a boatload of other playing-to-the-rafters comedy legends, Kramer’s wildly uncharacteristic film is unlike any other, an exhilarating epic of tomfoolery
Special Features:
• Restored 4K digital film transfer of the general release version of the film, with 5.1 surround Master Audio soundtrack
• New high-definition digital transfer of a 197-minute extended version of the film, reconstructed and restored by Robert A. Harris using visual and audio material from the longer original road-show version—including some scenes that have been returned to the film here for the first time—with 5.1surround Master Audio soundtrack
• New audio commentary featuring It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World aficionados Mark Evanier, Michael Schlesinger and Paul Scrabo
• New documentary on the film’s visual and sound effects, featuring rare behind-the-scenes footage of the crew at work and interviews with visual-effects specialist Craig Barron and sound designer Ben Burtt
• Talk show from 1974 hosted by director Stanley Kramer and featuring Mad World actors Sid Caesar, Buddy Hackett, and Jonathan Winters
• Press interview from 1963 featuring Kramer and members of the film’s cast
• Interviews recorded for the 2000 AFI programme 100 Years . . . 100 Laughs, featuring comedians and actors discussing the influence of the film
• Two-part 1963 episode of the CBC television program Telescope that follows the film’s press junket and premiere
• The Last 70mm Film Festival, a program from 2012 featuring cast and crew members from Mad World at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, hosted by Billy Crystal
• Selection of humorist and voice-over artist Stan Freberg’s original TV and radio advertisements for the film, with a new introduction by Freberg
• Original and rerelease trailers, and rerelease radio spots
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Lou Lumenick
CERTAIN WOMEN
A Film by Kelly Reichardt
Release Date: 26 September, 2017
The expanses of the American West take center stage in this intimately observed triptych from Kelly Reichardt.
Adapted from three short stories by Maile Meloy and unfolding in self-contained but interlocking episodes, Certain Women navigates the subtle shifts in personal desire and social expectation that unsettle the circumscribed lives of its characters: a lawyer (Laura Dern) forced to subdue a troubled client; a woman (Michelle Williams) whose plans to construct her dream home reveal fissures in her marriage; and a night-school teacher (Kristen Stewart) who forms a tenuous bond with a lonely ranch hand (Lily Gladstone), whose unguardedness and deep attachment to the land deliver an unexpected jolt of emotional immediacy.
With unassuming craft, Reichardt captures the rhythms of daily life in small-town Montana through these fine-grained portraits of women trapped within the landscape’s wide-open spaces.
Director-Approved Special Features:
• New 2K digital transfer, supervised by director Kelly Reichardt and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• New interviews with the film’s cast and crew, including Reichardt and executive producer Todd Haynes
• New interview with Maile Meloy, author of the stories on which the film is based
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by critic Ella Taylor
