Kino Lorber Unveils April Releases Including Works From Lon Chaney, Charlotte Rampling & More

Kino Lorber has unveiled some of the details of their April 2023 Blu-Ray and DVD releases from their Kino Lorber, Kino Classics, Artsploitation Films, Milestone Cinematheque, Cohen Media Group, Greenwich Entertainment, First Run Features, Virgil Films and Raro Video imprints. Get all the details on this incredibly packed lineup below:

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THE TRAP

Street Date: 4/18/23

Synopsis: The Trap is a grand story of romance and betrayal that includes the first starring role of the legendary “Man of a Thousand Faces” Lon Chaney. Chaney plays Gaspard, a French-Canadian trapper whose beloved Thalie (Dagmar Godowsky) throws him over for Benson (Alan Hale), the scoundrel who tricked Gaspard out of a mine claim. Gaspard nurses his resentments over a decade, and traps a half-starved wolf as his agent of vengeance. Shot against the awe-inspiring backdrop of Yosemite National Park, The Trap is a wildly entertaining melodrama.

Bonus Features: By the Sun’s Rays (1914 Western short featuring Lon Chaney) | Lon Chaney: Behind the Mask (1996, 65 minutes)

OH, DOCTOR! AND POKER FACES: TWO COMEDIES DIRECTED BY HARRY A. POLLARD

Street Date: 4/18/23

Synopsis: Kino Lorber is proud to present two uproarious silent comedies from Universal Pictures and director Harry A. Pollard. Oh, Doctor! (1925) stars Reginald Denny (Rebecca) as Rufus, a frail hypochondriac deeply in debt. He promises to repay it with the fortune he is due to inherit in three years. To ensure his health, the loan sharks hire a nurse, Dolores Hicks (Mary Astor, The Maltese Falcon), to take care of him. But when Rufus learns that the fetching Dolores prefers courageous men, he throws himself into a series of dangerous stunts that give his creditors a coronary. Poker Faces (1926) is a madcap farce in which henpecked husband Edward Everett Horton is desperately trying to close a contract to please his boss. When his wife (Laura La Plante) is unable to attend an all-important business dinner he hires a woman to play her. But she turns out to be married to an insanely jealous boxer!

Bonus Features: Audio commentaries for Oh, Doctor! and Poker Faces by Adam Nayman, a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams. | Oh, Doctor! music by Jake Monaco | Poker Faces music by Zach Marsh

VIRTUAL REALITY

Street Date: 4/4/23

Synopsis: A film director agrees to a dark pact to help his career take off. When he summons the cast and crew to his house for a first-cut screening, they will have to survive a reality they never saw coming.

Bonus Features: Trailer

UP, DOWN, FRAGILE

Street Date: 4/11/23

Synopsis: Inspired by the backstage Hollywood musicals of the 1930s, this later period Rivette recounts the adventures of three young women (Nathalie Richard, Marianne Denicourt, Laurence Côte) in Paris, each at a turning point in her life – and with a musical number (or two)!

Bonus Features: Audio commentary track by Richard Peña, Director Emeritus, New York Film Festival & Professor of Film and Media Studies, Columbia University | Re-release Trailer

JUNIPER

Street Date: 4/4/23 (DVD Only)

Synopsis: Ruth (Oscar nominee Charlotte Rampling) is a worldly former war correspondent now bored in retirement with a drinking problem and a newly fractured leg. Sam (George Ferrier) is her unruly grandson, recently kicked out of boarding school and grieving the death of his mother. When the two are brought together under the same roof, they form an unexpected bond.

Bonus Features: Trailers

iMORDECAI

Street Date: 4/11/23 (DVD Only)

Synopsis: When Mordecai, a Holocaust survivor, portrayed by Academy Award Nominee Judd Hirsch (The Fabelmans, Ordinary People) is given a new iPhone, an unexpected series of events upends his world. A heartwarming Miami-set comedy based on a true story. Co-starring Sean Astin (The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Goonies) and Academy Award Nominee Carol Kane (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Hester Street).

Bonus Features: Trailers

SCRAP

Street Date: 4/11/23 (DVD Only)

Synopsis: Discover the vast and strangely beautiful places where things go to die and meet the people who collect, restore, and recycle the world’s scrap. SCRAP is a love letter to the things we use in our daily lives. This cinematic documentary tells the stories of people who have deep connections to objects that have reached their end of life.

The stories convey a deeper environmental and human message about our relationship to things, the sadness we feel at their eventual loss, and the joy that we find in giving them a new purpose. By showing discarded goods in a new way, the film raises awareness about the fate of the things we use and explores how artists and other creative thinkers can be part of finding usefulness in the things we discard.

WHAAM! BLAM! ROY LICHTENSTEIN AND THE ART OF APPROPRIATION

Street Date: 4/25/23 (DVD Only)

Synopsis: Was Roy Lichtenstein a great artist, a thief, or both? This is the question addressed by the feature documentary WHAAM! BLAM! Roy Lichtenstein and the Art of Appropriation. Along with Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein created the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. His comic-based paintings reside in the greatest art galleries and can fetch more than $150 million. But some view this renowned artist as a plagiarist. WHAAM! BLAM! focuses upon the last living comic artists whose work was “appropriated” by Lichtenstein, and they are not happy.

Bonus Features: Trailers

ARAB ISRAELI DIALOGUE/IMAGINE PIECE

Street Date: 4/25/23 (DVD Only)

Synopsis: Arab Israeli Dialogue (1974) is the passionate final documentary from Lionel Rogosin (On the Bowery, Come Back Africa), in which Palestinian poet Rashed Hussein and Israeli writer Amos Kenan seek dialogue toward a possible solution to the never-ending conflict. Never before have both sides discussed a mutual problem so frankly, and so willingly. Rogosin provides an open forum for two formidable intellects to discuss the fates of their nations, and the ever-receding possibility of peace. Imagine Peace (2022) is Michael A. Rogosin’s moving and thought-provoking film about his father’s Arab Israeli Dialogue. He screened the original film on the wall of the Palestine-Israel Journal offices in East Jerusalem, the only joint Israeli-Palestinian publication, and heard the editors, some of whom knew both Kenan and Hussein, make observations about the 1974 documentary and about where we are today. Arab Israeli Dialogue was restored by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna from the original 16mm reversal film and magnetic soundtrack, preserved and made available by Anthology Film Archives. This film was restored under a project for the recuperation and promotion of the complete works of Lionel Rogosin, developed by Cineteca di Bologna and Rogosin Heritage.

Bonus Features: Interview between director Lionel Rogosin and Israeli journalist Amos Kenan

WOODCUTTERS OF THE DEEP SOUTH/WORKING TOGETHER

Street Date: 4/25/23 (DVD Only)

Synopsis: Down in the lush backwoods of Mississippi and Alabama, history is being made. Poor Black and White working people are trying to overcome the forces of racism among themselves to organize into cooperative associations to dispel the bonds of their economic captors—the paper and pulpwood companies. In his unique Woodcutters of the Deep South (1973), Lionel Rogosin (On the Bowery) allows the people in the film to tell and live their own story. We see them in their homes, with their families, in the forests, which provide them the things that make them woodcutters— trees and freedom. Interviews with the men directly involved in the formation of the group—The Gulf-Coast Pulpwood Association—reveals the intricacies of this venture, an inspiring depiction of unity among workers of all races. Michael A. Rogosin’s Working Together (2022) examines the consequences and questions that were implied in Woodcutters. Inherent in the original film is not only the question of Black and White folks working together, but what happened to the Civil Rights movement in the ’70s. By revisiting the film with Bob Zellner, who was in the original film, and other major Civil Rights workers, Lionel’s son Michael helps to understand what happened and is happening in America today. Woodcutters of the Deep South was restored by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna from the original 16mm reversal film and optical soundtrack, preserved and made available by Anthology Film Archives. The restoration is part of a project launched by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and Rogosin Heritage to restore and promote all the films made by Lionel Rogosin.

THE NEW GODFATHERS

Street Date: 4/25/23

Synopsis: With the American Mafia families pooling their resources to bring huge quantities of cheap heroin into the country, it’s up to Italian customs official Ivano Radevic (Gianni Garko) to allow the authorities to intercept the drugs en route to the USA. Radevic enters into an unlikely partnership with Naples mob boss Don Francesco Autiero (Mario Merola), whose specialty is cigarette smuggling. Together they enter into an unpredictably violent war on drugs.

Bonus Features: US-Release cut of THE NEW GODFATHERS with English audio | Mike Malloy on THE NEW GODFATHERS

ROWDY

Street Date: 4/4/23

Synopsis: Kyle Busch is the most polarizing driver of the contemporary NASCAR Series. With unmatched talent and a singular determination to win at everything, Busch confronts his physical limits when he sustains what could be a career ending wreck in 2015, only to find a path to the first of what will undoubtedly be many Cup Series Championships.