Jeff Heinrich

At long last, the three feature films that made the name of director István Szabó outside his native Hungary in the 1980s — and earned him an Oscar — come together restored in 4K in a lovely Blu-ray boxset, one that's region-free, too, courtesy of British boutique distributor Second Run. The three movies — Mephisto (1981), Colonel Redl (1985) and Hanussen (1988) — are German-language period dramas starring Austrian actor Klaus Maria Brandauer (Out of Africa), written by Péter Dobai (Sátántangó) and shot by cinematographer Lajos Koltai (Malèna). Winner of the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, Mephisto is based on the Klaus Mann novel about a German stage actor named Hendrik Höfgen (modeled on the real-life Gustaf Gründgens) who sheds his Bolshevik sympathies and sells his soul in a Faustian bargain with the Nazi party. Nominated for an Oscar and winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes and the BAFTA for best foreign-language film, Colonel Redl chronicles the rise and fall of Alfred Redl, a fictional chief of the secret police in pre-World War One Austro-Hungary whose ruthless efficiency hides a personal secret: he's gay. Hanussen returns to the Nazi period with the true story of Hermann (Herschel Chaim) Steinschneider, aka Erik Jan Hanussen, a self-promoting Moravian Jew whose powers of clairvoyancy help him predict the Reichstag fire of 1933, only to see him assassinated by the Brownshirts a month later. On disc, this isn't the first time Mephisto and Colonel Redl have made it to Blu-ray (in the U.S., Kino Classics did it in 2020), but the new boxset marks the first time all three films have been issued as a single English-language package. Unlike Kino's Mephisto, there's no audio commentary on the Second Run release, nor is there on either of the other films, but the new edition does replicate one extra: an affectionate 2020 look at József Romvári, the three films' production designer, in which Romvári's granddaughter, the American filmmaker Sophy Romvari, interviews Szabó over the phone and ends with some sweet footage of her as a girl on her granddad's knee. There's a big bonus to this edition, too: four of Szabó's early short films; newly remastered in high-def, there's the anti-war 'Variations on a Theme' (1961), the "all-about-the-girl" love story 'You' (1963), 'Concert' (1963), a silent comedy with sound effects about a public piano on the banks of Budapest's Danube, and 'City Map Budapest' (1977), a love letter to Hungary's capital. There's also an interview in Hungarian with the director and a 3-minute promo reel of his oeuvre (with clips of his German-language films dubbed in Hungarian), and several trailers. Accompanying each disc is a booklet, and in them you'll find new writing by Hungarian-film experts John Cunningham, Peter Hames and Catherine Portuges, and by investigative journalist Stephen Lemons. If you remember seeing Mephisto and Colonel Redl on their release in cinemas four decades ago, as I do, screening them again now will bring renewed pleasures; despite their extended length (146 minutes for Mephisto, 151 minutes for Colonel Redl), the movies fly by a fast clip, they're that good. And if, like me, you're experiencing Hanussen for the first time, well, revel in the new.

Literally a whirlwind romance if ever there was one (caught in a seastorm, the protagonist survives a deadly whirlpool), "I Know Where I'm Going!" stars Wendy Hiller as a headstrong young Londoner who travels up to the Scottish Hebrides to marry a man who's twice her age and even wealthier than she is, only to be delayed by the weather and meet her true soulmate (Roger Livesey), a Royal Navy officer on leave from the war, heading home. Shot in black-and-white on the Isle of Mull and in Denham Studios (where Livesey did all his scenes), the film was the fourth of five feature films that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made during the Second World War, and it remains one of their most passionate. For its new iteration in high-definition, the movie gets a solid upgrade from U.S. distributor Criterion in a new 4K digital restoration by the BFI National Archive and The Film Foundation, supervised by filmmaker Martin Scorsese and his editor, Powell's widow Thelma Schoonmaker, who provide a new before-and-after comparison of the film from standard def to 4K. Apart from that , and an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, extras in this two-disc edition (4K UHD / Blu-ray) remain the same as those on Criterion's 2001 DVD of the film. There's an audio commentary by film historian Ian Christie, some behind-the-scenes stills narrated by Schoonmaker, a 1994 documentary by Mark Cousins called “'I Know Where I’m Going!' Revisited," a photo essay by writer Nancy Franklin exploring the locations used in the film, and footage from home movies Powell shot on his travels in Scotland, narrated by Schoonmaker. There are English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, and the accompanying booklet has an essay by critic Imogen Sara Smith.

Violent, uneven, seductive, hollow, disjointed, realistic – since its premiere last September at the Gdynia Polish Film Festival, The Partisan has left critics scrambling for words to describe what could otherwise, under tighter direction and more polished scripting, have been an engrossing spy thriller. Set in Nazi-occupied Poland and (later) France, it stars Morgane Polanski, daughter of Roman Polanski and Emmanuelle Seigner, as real-life UK Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, "Churchill's favourite spy." To her credit, Polanski gives a masterful performance: gritty, uncompromising, tough, highly believable. But though she is in almost every scene, the 32-year-old actress is let down by the narrative, which veers from question mark to question mark as her mission behind enemy lines unfolds in a confusing array of obscure historical plot points and incongruous narrative sequences populated by characters who come and go without explanation, communicate in a bewildering variety of mostly non-native English accents, and (aside from star turns by pros like Malcolm McDowell, as Skarbek's British handler, and some cast members better known to Polish audiences) rarely elicit much sympathy or understanding in the viewer. And all the while, as in a first-person shooter game, the body count grows. Entertaining, to a point, the whole of The Partisan is, in the end, decidedly less than the sum of its parts. Things don't get any better with the DVD now out from U.K. distributor High Fliers Films: it's code-locked to Region B (Britain and Europe, essentially), has no subtitles and also nothing in the way of extras.

Crowd-funding in the 1970s? Yes, it did happen ... in India. Half a million dairy farmers there put up two rupees each to finance Shyam Benegal's 1976 independent film Manthan, a 135-minute feature that developed out of India's 'White Revolution,' a massive government program to produce milk for the masses. Dramatizing issues of gender, class and caste inequalities in the western coastal state of Gujarat, the movie was a milestone in India's Parallel Cinema movement, telling the tale of how the setting up of a milk cooperative transforms a rural village's economy and way of life. Cleaned up in 4K by India's Film Heritage Foundation (FHF), a new print of Manthan premiered last year at Cannes and now comes to Blu-ray via the British distributor Second Run, whose founder and owner is Mumbai-born Mehelli Modi, son of Indian film legend Sohrab Modi. Besides new English subtitles for the Hindi dialogue, the all-region BD has two extras: 'Manthan Reborn,' a look at the history and restoration of the film, including an interview with the late director, and 'Manthan at Cannes 2024,' in which FHF founder Shivendra Singh Dungarpur and actor Naseeruddin Shah are interviewed by broadcaster Anupama Chopra. A 24-page booklet rounds out the package.

Danish filmmaker Bille August (Smilla's Sense of Snow, Night Train to Lisbon) broke through internationally in 1987 with his father-and-son picture Pelle the Conqueror, a rural drama set in the mid-19th century that starred Max von Sydow and Pelle Hvenegaard and that won the Academy Award and Golden Globe for best foreign-language film as well as the Palme d'or at Cannes. Before that, August co-wrote and directed a pair of coming-of-age dramas, Zappa (1983) and Twist and Shout (1984), that explored a very different variety of childhood — the awkward teenage years — in a more modern setting, 1960s Copenhagen. In Zappa, two boys invite a third to join their little gang, and things turn dark when their enthusiasms turn to bullying, burglary and violence. In Twist and Shout, one of the boys (again played by Adam Tønsbrerg), plays drums in a Beatles cover band and forms an awkward bond with a shy friend (Lars Simonsen) struggling to cope with a stern father and mentally ill mother. If you're a fan of August's compatriot, the filmmaker Nils Malmros (Tree of Knowledge), who too explores the cruel realities of early adolescence, you'll enjoy these two pictures. In a solid upgrade from the 2004 double-DVD set released by Home Vision Entertainment, they now come paired on Blu-ray by Altered Innocence, a small LGBTQ-themed U.S. distributor. Extras include a new half-hour interview with August, an 11-minute appreciation of the director's work, and half a dozen trailers. English (and Spanish) subtitles are optional.

Autumn 2025 on Blu-ray

12.2025

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