Criterion Collection Announces March Titles

If you love DVDs then you know the Criterion Collection by name. They have been committed to releasing important films in the best possible editions since 1984. They have also started re-releasing certain titles on Blu-ray. This March, they offer a slew of selections for film buffs.

The Criterion Collection announced they will release Marco Ferreri's Dillinger Is Dead on March 16th. It will feature a new, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director of photography Mario Vulpiani.

Special features include:

• New video interviews with actor Michel Piccoli and Italian film historian Adriano Aprà

• Excerpts from a 1997 roundtable discussion about director Marco Ferreri, with filmmakers Bernardo Bertolucci and Francesco Rosi and film historian Aldo Tassone, including clips of interviews with Ferreri

• Theatrical trailer

• New and improved subtitle translation

• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Michael Joshua Rowin and a selection of reprinted interviews with Ferreri

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The Criterion Collection has announced that, to celebrate the birth of legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, it will release two of his classic films on Blu-ray on his birthday March 23rd: Yojimbo and Sanjuro, starring Toshiro Mifune as a samurai-for-hire. Yojimbo was famously remade as A Fistful of Dollars launching Sergio Leone's man with no name series. Yojimbo and Sanjuro will be available separately or in a two-movie box set.

Special features are as follows:

Yojimbo

• Audio commentary by film historian and Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince

• A 45-minute documentary on the making of Yojimbo, created as part of the Toho Masterworks series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create

• Theatrical trailer and teaser

• Stills gallery of behind-the-scenes photos

• Booklet featuring an essay by critic Alexander Sesonske and notes from Kurosawa and his cast and crew

Sanjuro

• Audio commentary by film historian and Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince

• A 35-minute documentary on the making of Sanjuro, created as part of the Toho Masterworks series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create

• Theatrical trailer and teaser

• Stills gallery of behind-the-scenes photos

• Booklet featuring an essay by critic Michael Sragow and notes and statements from Kurosawa and his cast and crew

The Criterion Collection has announced that it will release Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven on Blu-ray on March 23rd. This release will feature a new, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Terrence Malick, editor Billy Weber, and camera operator John Bailey; and a new 5.1 soundtrack.

Special features include:

• Audio commentary featuring Weber, art director Jack Fisk, costume designer Patricia Norris, and casting director Dianne Crittenden

• New video interviews with cinematographers Haskell Wexler and John Bailey

• Booklet featuring essays by critic Adrian Martin and director of photography Nestor Almendros

Nicholas Ray gets his first BD release: the Criterion Collection has announced Bigger Than Life for release on Blu-ray and DVD on March 23rd. Though ignored at the time of its release, this drama starring James Mason is now recognized as one of the great American films of the 1950s. It is presented in a restored high-definition digital transfer, with mono LPCM audio on the Blu-ray edition.

Special features include:

• Audio commentary featuring critic Geoff Andrew (The Films of Nicholas Ray)

• Profile of Nicholas Ray (1977), a half-hour television interview with the director

• New video appreciation of Bigger Than Life with author Jonathan Lethem (Chronic City)

• New video interview with Susan Ray, the director's widow and editor of the book I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies

• Theatrical trailer

• An essay by film writer B. Kite

The Criterion Collection announced they will release Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa on March 30th as a four-disc set containing Ossos, In Vanda's Room, and Colossal Youth. One of the most important artists on the international film scene today, Portuguese director Pedro Costa has been steadily building an impressive body of work since the late eighties. And these are the three films that put him on the map: portraits of battered, largely immigrant lives in the slums of Fontainhas.

Special features include:

• New video conversations between Costa and filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin about Ossos and Colossal Youth

• Audio commentary for In Vanda’s Room featuring Costa and Gorin

• Selected-scene audio commentary by critic Cyril Neyrat and author-philosopher Jacques Rancière for Colossal Youth

• Video interviews with critic João Bénard da Costa and cinematographer Emmanuel Machuel about Ossos

• Video essay by artist Jeff Wall on Ossos

• All Blossoms Again, a feature-length documentary on Costa and the making of Colossal Youth

• Tarrafal and The Rabbit Hunters, two short films by Costa

• Little Boy Male, Little Girl Female, a video installation piece by Costa featuring outtakes from In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth

• Photographs by Mariana Viegas and Richard Dumas

• Theatrical trailers

• New and improved English subtitle translations of all the films

• PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by critics Cyril Neyrat, Luc Sante, Thom Anderson, and Mark Peranson, as well as a reprint by Bernard Eisenschitz