Home Media

By Alex Sitaras

November has a number of exciting home media releases, the month being perhaps the best since the COVID theater closures began. As expected, we have a number of Criterion Collection films to share, but also a boxed set from Mill Creek Entertainment and the highly anticipated Sátántangó restoration from Arbelos Films.

Starting with the Bela Tarr classic, Sátántangó is finally being released in 4K for home audiences on November 10th. For those uninitiated to Sátántangó, the film is one of the best known slow cinema films, clocking in at just over seven hours. The László Krasznahorkai novel the film is based on is a postmodern work of literature where each chapter does not contain line breaks and the story told is ephemeral. The story takes place in a village following the fall of communism in a post-apocalyptic setting. The village is visited by a prophet-like figure Irimias (Mihály Víg) who immediately enchants the villagers and gains an immense influence over them. Tarr tells the story non-chronologically so that the structure of the film mimics that of the tango. Unusual to literary adaptations, Sátántangó includes every single scene in the novel. The film will have a limited collector’s edition available exclusively through Arbelos’ site and a standard 2-disc edition. A list of special features could not be found at the time this column was written.

Arthouse lovers can also rejoice with a massive Federico Fellini box set being released by The Criterion Collection. Similar to the Bergman box set they released two years ago, Essential Fellini comes at the centennial of the great auteur’s birth and features a large assortment of the director’s work. Essential Fellini contains 14 films and beaucoups of bonus features including behind-the-scenes documentaries, commentaries, interviews, and “hundreds of pages” of writing on the director’s work spread across two books. The box set will be released November 24th, no doubt an amazing gift for many film buffs this Christmas.

Also released that same day by The Criterion Collection is the Blu-ray release for Martin Scorsese‘s newest crime drama The Irishman. Following Roma and Marriage Story, Netflix has licensed The Criterion Collection the rights to produce a home media release for The Irishman. The move by the streaming giant is one that has continued to earn Netflix goodwill from auteurs and audiences alike. The Irishman portrays the life of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) starting at the 1950s, leading up to his final days in a nursing home. Sheeran lived at the intersection of organized crime and workers’ unions, achieving great success as a hit man and union leader. For Scorsese, the film reunites him with De Niro, Pacino, Pesce and others as a late-career meditation on life, Scorsese’s career built upon gangster dramas very much akin to The Irishman. Even so, The Irishman carries with it a craftiness and deliberation that could only be achieved by the director late in his career. The Criterion Collection Blu-ray of the film includes a number of bonus features surrounding the making of the film, those interested in the technical aspects no doubt will be drawn to The Evolution of Digital De-aging, a look at the visual effects necessary to capture younger versions of the films’ characters without the use of additional actors.

Also a crime drama, Jim Jarmusch‘s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai will be receiving a Blu-ray release courtesy of The Criterion Collection on November 17th. Jarmusch’s sixth film in the Collection and like many Jarmusch films before it, Ghost Dog is Jarmusch’s spin on well established genre conventions, his targets here being the mafia feature and samurai film. The titular “Ghost Dog” is played by Forest Whitaker and the film takes place in the present day (Ghost Dog was released in 1999), mostly filmed in Jersey City. As such, the cloaked figure of Ghost Dog with his samurai sword against the backdrop of modern America is a sight to behold, though such comic weirdness is a staple of Jarmusch’s filmography. Ghost Dog bears some resemblance in story to Jean-Pierre Melville‘s Le Samouraï, so those who enjoyed the noir/French New Wave classic may find something to admire in Ghost Dog.

The second film collection part of this month’s Most Anticipated column is the Rita Hayworth – Ultimate Collection, an assortment of films predominantly from the 40s & the 50s. Depending on if you purchase DVD or Blu-ray, there are 16 or 12 of her films in the set, respectively. Due to licensing, some of Hayworth’s most notable titles including Gilda, You Were Never Lovelier, and Cover Girl are not part of this set; however, this set can supplement your film collection nicely should you already own those films. Despite some omissions and the varying number of films as part of the set, at $25/$20 for the Blu-ray/DVD, the bundle of films is still a great bargain for those who want to include more Rita Hayworth films in their home media collection.