Jeff Heinrich

German filmmaker Douglas Sirk – or Hans Detlef Sierck, as he was known by his birth name until he emigrated to the U.S. in 1937 – is best remembered for his late-career Hollywood melodramas: Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life. So it's particularly fascinating to see what his early career in Germany consisted of: some prototypical melodramas, naturally, but also comedies, social satires and even a musical farce. As part of its 'Masters of Cinema' series, U.K. distributor Eureka! has now gathered three of these feature films, all originally released in 1935, into a two-disc Blu-ray set along with several mid-'30s shorts, totaling close to six hours of material. The discs are both coded for Region B – that is, for British and European players. Restorations were done by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation. First up is Sirk's debut feature, April Fool!, a fast-paced farce about a nouveau-riche family of pompous parvenus pranked into believing that an important nobleman (a certain Prince Heinrich something-or-other, no relation ...) will be coming to inspect their noodle factory (yes, noodles, as in pasta); the prince does show up, but is mistaken for an imposter, then the imposter shows up, too, and confusion reigns. The second feature is The Girl from Marsh Croft, a rural melodrama in which a young farmer falls in love with a disgraced (read: illegitimately pregnant) maid he has taken into his employ, threatening his pending marriage to his bride-to-be. Lastly comes Pillars of Society, the story (adapted from the Ibsen play) of a wealthy and deceitful Norwegian shipbuilder who has his comeuppance at the hands of a returning traveller who exposes his corrupt ways. For their part, the three shorts are all comic, with the first by far the best of the lot. Set on the eve the Great Depression, "Two Greyhounds" (1934, 34 mins.; originally titled "Two Geniuses" and written by the same team as April Fool!) tells the amusing story of a pair of unemployed accountants who apply for a job, mistake each other for the boss, and wind up taking over the firm. "Three Times Before" (1935, 17 mins., in two versions, both silent, one with intertitles and the other with synchronous subtitles substituted for a lost soundtrack) is a kind of screwball comedy, a he-said/she-said account of two jealous newlyweds who strain to explain why they both want a divorce. And lastly, "The Imaginary Invalid" (1935, 36 mins.) condenses Molière's famous comédie-ballet about a hypochondriac father and his lovestruck daughters into a half hour of bewigged silliness and operatic singing. Optional English subtitles are offered on all the films, and there are new audio commentaries on all three features by Sirk expert David Melville Wingrove. For an extra, there's a new interview with film historian Sheldon Hall on Sirk’s bifurcated career in Germany and Hollywood. The accompanying booklet runs 30 pages and has a new essay on Sirk’s early works by German cinema expert Tim Bergfelder.

Running the entire length of the eight-hour factory shift it depicts, Park Lanes is documentary cinema at a snail's pace. (The longest doc I've ever seen is Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, which clocks in at close to 10 hours, but that was an entirely different experience.) Black American filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson spends a lot of time in Virginia getting to know the skilled workers who make, assemble and finish all manner of machined parts for bowling alleys (hence the title, the name of an establishment Everson frequents in his home state of Ohio). For a kind of intermission, there's the factory lunch break, and here the workers' humanity is revealed in all its racialized glory, for the bulk of the employees are Black or Asian American and they do like to let off steam. If you have the patience – or maybe a day off work yourself – this film will help you appreciate what it means to be an industrial worker in today's America. Think about that, Canadians, next time you feel the urge to boycott American goods: somebody, somewhere, will lose out, and it won't be the nasty guys at the top. British distributor Second Run brings Park Lanes to Blu-ray in a two-disc, all-region set, complete with a 40-page booklet featuring new essays by London film critics Matthew Barrington and Elena Gorfinkel and an interview with Everson by New York cinema-studies professor Michael Boyce Gillespie.

On the heels of the Nouvelle Vague, and some years before his death by suicide in 1981, French director Jean Eustache made his feature debut with The Mother and the Whore, an observational drama in black-and-white about a love triangle that plays out against the backdrop of a dispirited post-'68 Paris. François Truffaut film regulars Jean-Pierre Léaud and Bernadette Lafont take the lead, along with Françoise Lebrun in her first big screen appearance, incarnating a triple threat of pseudo-intellectual drifter, moody older girlfriend and sex-obsessed nurse strung out over the film's more than three-and-a-half hours of run time. They talk, they drink, they screw, they talk some more. It's life lived through the head, the tongue, the liver, the groin. As Léaud's character says: "I saw it done in a film. Films teach you how to live." This one will either bore you stiff (Judith Crist called it "a pretentious and boring examination of boy-meets-blobs") or strike you as the most honest portrayal of a three-way you've ever seen. For its latest iteration on home video, U.S. distributor Criterion provides the movie on a choice of two discs: a regular Blu-ray (with extras) and a 4K-UHD disc. Special features include a restored trailer, 15 minutes of an interview with Lebrun in 2022, a new half-hour conversation with longtime Jean-Luc Godard protegé Jean-Pierre Gorin and American novelist Rachel Kushner, a short program on the film’s restoration (17 mins.), and a 10-minute segment from the French TV series 'Pour le cinéma' recorded in 1973, featuring the director and his three leads talking at the Cannes Film Festival, where the movie won the Grand Jury Prize. English-language subtitles throughout are new-and-improved. The accompanying booklet has an essay by critic Lucy Sante and Eustache's original introduction to the film.

Almost a decade-and-half after Twentieth Century Fox released it worldwide on Blu-ray, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert gets a 4K upgrade from Via Vision Entertainment, a distributor "Down Under" in Australia, where the movie was originally made and set. A bittersweet dramedy written and directed by Stephan Elliott, it follows gay drag queens 'Tick' (Hugo Weaving) and Adam (Guy Pearce) and an older transgender woman named Bernadette (Terence Stamp) as they venture out by chartered tour bus (the 'Priscilla' of the title) into the barren boonies for a gig in Alice Springs. Along the way, they encounter the kindness of strangers and the bigotry of others, learn to share secrets, and glory in the self-knowledge that "normal" is not for them and never will be – all the while redefining what "family" can truly mean. On stage, they perform to a glorious soundtrack of camp pop: "I've Never Been to Me" by Charlene, "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor, "Finally" by CeCe Peniston, "Mamma Mia" by ABBA. Packaged in a slipcase with flamboyant 3D lenticular cover, six artcards and a 36-page booklet, Via Vision's Imprint Films editionhas three discs: two regular BDs and a 4K-UHD one. The latter and one of the BDs has the film, trailer and director's commentary from 2004. The second Blu-ray has all the special features, two of which are new interviews: half an hour with Elliott and 17 minutes with actor Mark Holmes, Tick's young son in the movie. The previously available extras include two hour-long documentaries ("Between a Frock and a Hard Place" from 2015 and "Ladies Please" from 1995) and four featurettes: "Birth of a Queen" (2005, 29 mins.), "Behind the Bus: Priscilla with Her Pants Down" (2004; 9 mins.), "Tidbits from the Set" (2007; 6 mins.) and "Backstage" (9 mins.). Completing the video extras are seven minutes of deleted scenes and 10 minutes of outtakes, along with a trailer, two teasers and a photo gallery.

Winter 2024-2025 on Blu-ray

02.2025

01.2025

12.2024