None of the "characters" know what the hell they are doing, and millions of dollars are not an excuse to go Down Under to make a film seem authentic. Internet everywhere, connectivity, ease of movement around our globe. Screens, screens everywhere. Please try again. Merrick is so present, even disguised, that we’re never led to anticipate his “reveal” cheaply, as we might a monster in a horror film. The pronouncement in favor of written language is uttered in Until the End of the World by the narrator character, Eugene (Sam Neill), as a kind of conclusion, after he’s witnessed the abyssal attraction that the digital image holds for his ex-girlfriend, Claire (Solveig Dommartin, who co-authored the film’s story), and the new object of her affection, Sam (William Hurt). It also analyzes reviews to verify trustworthiness. The desperate, craven urge to live overwhelms, and it’s a shock to the characters, just as much as it to the audience. But during and after World War II, the industry was churning out the escapist Heimatfilm—literally, homeland film—even after nearly all of its most talented directors had fled to the United States and France. This is obviously by design, but there are only so many times you can show the effect of cocaine through fast motion or mental deterioration through fish-eye lenses before the techniques start to feel less expressive than lazy and obvious—crutches for a filmmaker who used up his entire bag of tricks in the first 30 minutes. But as the larger, overarching elements of the plot take center stage, namely the revelation of the meaning behind “IPCRESS,” the film veers into the similarly ludicrous terrain of your average Bond caper. Yeah, I think it was worth waiting. For decades, the only version of “Until the End of the World” available in the U.S. was the out-of-print theatrical cut, which runs 158-minutes and was only released on videocassette. The French LPCM mono track is a workhorse, doing well by the recondite score, whether it be snatches of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or Antoine Duhamel’s broody score. Finally, is it the length of the journey or the lessons gained, if any, when one finally reaches the end of the road. Her random encounters lead her to meet Sam Farber (William Hurt). The film’s first half is a road trip through a globalized world auguring a post-Berlin Wall order that bears more than a passing likeness to our own: East Berlin glows with the neon of renewed capital investment; in the Soviet Union, espionage has been privatized; and San Francisco bears witness to the extreme income disparity wrought by the latter years of the Pax Americana. Until the End of the World is out on Blu-ray & DVD December 10, 2019, from Criterion Collection Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, from 1992, expands on the original in a number of ways. Cronenberg’s first feature is a decidedly bloody valentine to libidinal liberation. Movies / TV: Action / Adventure: 715515239110. In an entertaining 20-minute archival interview, Michael Caine talks about his outrageous first day on the set when Furie burnt a copy of the script in front of him, deciding to have the film rewritten as they shot. I AM SO EXCITED! Extensive archival interviews with Tsukamoto cover all the films, including one from earlier this year that spans his entire career. One of the few great filmmakers not affiliated with the Nazi Party to remain in Germany was Helmut Käutner, whose melodramas shot during WWI, such as Romance in a Minor Key and Under the Bridges, have an emotional sensitivity and fluid camerawork that recalls his compatriot Max Ophüls’s work. From search engines to all-engrossing handheld devices, the technologies that the German director conjured for his 1991 opus Until the End of the World are now common features of contemporary life. A really brilliant 5-hour version of this Vim Wenders original. The film’s relentless sound editing and Clint Mansell’s remarkable score is perfectly presented, never sacrificing the clarity of the dialogue. What slowly emerges in an idiosyncratic spin on Taxi Driver’s notion of the generation gap, with the older man trying to save misguided youth from themselves. Is it all a ruse? Older ones lack updated codecs to work it and just a black picture comes up. Suffering amnesia as the result of a car crash that killed his girlfriend, medical student Hiroshi (Tadanobu Asano) discovers that the body currently on his dissecting table belongs to her. Bong historic international breakthrough receives a superlative Blu-ray package from Criterion. At one point in the film, the slum village where Ki-taek and his family live is devastated by a massive flood during a night of severe weather. Finally, there’s a foldout booklet with an essay from Graham Fuller, who contextualizes The Hit as a British gangster film, a road movie, and a philosophical character study. With the film already available on 4K, the appeal of this Blu-ray release comes down to its extras, and on that front it certainly delivers. JavaScript is disabled. Film grain is organic with a healthy sheen and some density shifts in regards to scenes that utilize the primitive high definition sequences. The film’s final images are a memory of nature’s verdant glory. A second disc includes the film’s black-and-white version, but not unlike the similar retooling that Mad Max: Fury Road received, color is such a spectacularly rendered, carefully considered element of the original cut that this version feels superfluous. Utilizing an entire stable of visual tricks, from split-screens to slow- and fast-motion to rhythmically repeated inserts, these early moments are an exciting and purely cinematic experience. Käutner’s damning film sees a nation of people unwilling or unable to confront their history of violence—a notion further complicated when the owner of the aforementioned dog, Inge (Ingmar Zeisberg), is revealed to be a past lover of Robert’s. The 16-bit audio track is suitably clear, with clean dialogue throughout. Up-Down Under Romo (6:32) – This 1993 interview with Wenders focuses on his time in Australia both before and during the making of the movie. The Criterion Collection presents Wim Wender’s full 287-minute cut of his “ultimate road movie,” Until the End of the World, on Blu-ray in a director approved 2-disc set. It’s an eminently worthwhile track that covers a lot of ground, from the philosophy of shot selection and film editing to a near-death experience when Tim Roth (who couldn’t drive) decided to test his skills with Hurt and Terence Stamp in the backseat. I've been waiting for this for many, many years, Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2019. Elsewhere, Dr. Bruce Isaacs, author of The Art of Pure Cinema and Toward a New Film Aesthetic, lavishes coolly hyperbolic praise on the film’s style. At first glance, St. Luc seems eminently capable, yet oddly diffident to the tender mercies proffered by Nurse Forsythe (Lynn Lowry). The 158-minute version plays like a hypnotic highlight reel, especially since Wenders is, again, creating the sensation of travel, the discovery of the journey and the sensual quality of movement. Following the exploits of a truck driver, Robert (Helmut Wildt), involved in a scam to steal a couple of loads of the gravel he delivers each week, the film presents Germany as being stuck in a purgatorial state of recovery. Not to mention Wenders’s own previous films: The director’s use of the road as means of contemplating the gulf between image and experience recalls Alice in the Cities and his American breakout, Paris, Texas. With this double-disc Blu-ray, Criterion offers an expansive but well-curated selection of extras organized around a few through lines. Wim Wenders, who oversaw the film’s restoration, makes best use of the remastered 5.1 soundtrack during the music sequences, using the more robust mix to create a greater sense of envelopment. Previous page of related Sponsored Products. Cast: William Hurt, Solveig Dommartin, Sam Neill, Max von Sydow, Rüdiger Volger, Ernie Dingo, Jeanne Moreau, Chick Ortega, Elena Smirnova, Eddy Mitchell, Chishu Ryu, Allen Garfield, Lois Chiles, Kuniko Miyake Director: Wim Wenders Screenwriter: Peter Carey, Wim Wenders Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 287 min Rating: R Year: 1991 Release Date: December 17, 2019 Buy: Video, Review: John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China on Shout! The first of two commentary tracks consists of a newly recorded and lively discussion between film historians Troy Howarth and Daniel Kremer, who profess their fondness for the film and make a compelling case for the value of director Sidney J. Furie’s lesser known work, like Leather Boys. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. One of my favorite movies, finally given the American release it deserves. I had waited 20 years to finally see this film as Wenders intended. Then, in its final act, the film shifts gears again into a surreal conflation of all three viewpoints, where time and place seem to come unmoored. Remarkably, Bong even finds room for a commentary on Korean peninsula relations. Godard foreshadows the futility of their attempted escape from vapid pop culture by staging their vehicular flight in a dizzying blizzard of richly hued lights—meant to represent passing streetlights—that are the same colors of the rooms at the party. All the while, a young Spanish woman (Laura del Sol), taken hostage along the way, simply tries to stay alive. The film details the late life of Joseph Merrick (called John here), an English man born in 1862 with severe deformities, including a twisted spine and face, huge and painful knots of flesh and bone, and a phallic head so large and heavy that he couldn’t sleep laying down for fear of breaking his neck. Image quality is absolutely beautiful. Of course, this being a Tsukamoto film, Hiroshi is at the same time engaged in a sadomasochistic relationship with straight-A student Ikumi (Kiki) that involves erotic asphyxiation. Things get even weirder in the final scenes when the wholly transformed salaryman is wooed by the “metal fetishist” (Tsukamoto) into complete bodily fusion. Not surprisingly, Mes is deeply versed in all things Tsukamoto, and delivers his comments in a low-key, occasionally humorous style. Narratively, as Requiem for a Dream spirals toward its nightmarish finale, things start to get so melodramatically awful for the characters that the film starts to seem like a modern-day equivalent to Reefer Madness, never so much as in the ugly way it introduces the character of a black drug dealer, Big Tim (Keith David), solely to exploit audience disgust at seeing a white woman taken advantage of by a black man.