Kino Lorber Unveils February Releases Including Award-Winning Documentaries, Forgotten Classics & More

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

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FRAMING AGNES

Street Date: 2/14/23 (DVD Only)

Synopsis: The pseudonymous Agnes was a pioneering transgender woman who participated in an infamous gender health study conducted at UCLA in the 1960s. Her clever use of the study to gain access to gender-affirming healthcare led to her status as a fascinating and celebrated figure in trans history. In this innovative cinematic exercise that blends fiction and nonfiction, director Chase Joynt (No Ordinary Man) uses Agnes’s story, along with others unearthed in long-shelved case files, to widen the frame through which trans history is viewed. Through a collaborative practice of reimagination, an all-star cast of trans performers, artists, and thinkers – including Angelica Ross (Pose), Jen Richards (Mrs. Fletcher), and Zackary Drucker (Transparent) – take on vividly rendered, impeccably vintage reenactments, bringing to life groundbreaking artifacts of trans history. This collective reclamation breaks down the myth of isolation among transgender history-makers, breathing new life into a lineage of collaborators and conspirators who have been forgotten for far too long.

Bonus Features: Framing Agnes (19 minutes, 2019 short film by Chase Joynt & Kristen Schilt that was the basis for the feature) • Theatrical trailer

CONGRESS DANCES

Street Date: 2/7/23

Synopsis: Made contemporaneously with the storybook operettas of Ernst Lubitsch (The Smiling Lieutenant) and Rouben Mamoulian (Love Me Tonight), Congress Dances shares a similar blend of risqué comedy, playful camerawork, inventive sound, and of course, romantic ballads. The luminous Lilian Harvey stars as a shopkeeper who promotes her wares by ambushing world leaders with floral bouquets. When she performs this stunt just before a gathering of world leaders in Vienna, she is thrust into the political and romantic entanglements of the crowned heads of Europe.

Bonus Features: Audio commentary by film historian Eddy Von Mueller | English SDH subtitles

THE WEREWOLF OF WASHINGTON

Street Date: 2/21/23

Synopsis: Watergate-era governmental corruption inspired this cinematic howl of anger from boundary-breaking auteur Milton Moses Ginsberg (Coming Apart). The Werewolf of Washington is a biting satire that savagely attacks beltway politics while paying playful homage to the wolfman pictures of the past. Dean Stockwell (Blue Velvet) stars as a presidential aide whose rise to power is exacerbated by the bite of a wolf, transforming him into a bloodthirsty beast with the rising of every full moon. As history has shown, a monster in the White House is not strictly a 1970s phenomenon, and so, half a century later, The Werewolf of Washington is as eviscerating and relevant as ever. This edition includes a special director’s cut prepared by Ginsberg shortly before his death in 2021, as well as a 2K restoration of the 1973 theatrical release version.

Bonus Features: 2021 Director’s Cut | Original theatrical release version | Interview with Milton Moses Ginsberg, by Jake Perlin | A critical discussion with Simon Abrams and Sheila O’Malley | Theatrical trailer | TV Spot

SILENT AVANT-GARDE

Street Date: 2/21/23

Synopsis: SILENT AVANT-GARDE offers an essential collection of 21 short art film experiments in HD to 5K scans made from 35mm and 16mm picture elements. Highlights include brand new digital restorations of classic experimental films, The Enchanted City (1922), Return to Reason (1923), Ballet Mechanique (1924, 1931), The Twenty-Four Dollar Island (1925), Eisenstein Mexican Footage (1930), Escape, Synchromy No. 4 (1938), The Eclipse (1936-1949), Look Park (1973), and Tenga fe (2022). Each film features a brilliant accompaniment of original silent film music specially prepared, composed, improvised and/ or performed by a master of experimental new music. SILENT AVANT-GARDE desires to focus on the creative possibilities of image, sound, and silence used in American-made experimental films of the 20th century.

MAIGRET: SEASON 3

Street Date: 2/28/23

Synopsis: Long-awaited and unseen anywhere for decades, Georges Simenon’s Maigret (1960-1963) is the definitive adaptation of Georges Simenon’s world famous novels. This BBC television production stars Rupert Davies as Commissaire Jules Maigret, the dogged French detective. Though Simenon’s books have been adapted many times, Davies’s celebrated, BAFTA-winning portrayal won the approval of Simenon himself, who stated: “At last, I have found the perfect Maigret!” This three disc-set includes all 13 episodes of Season 3, in which Maigret reckons with “The Madman of Vervac”, “The Crooked Castle”, and various other vexing cases that only the moody Maigret can solve. Georges Simenon’s Maigret has been remastered in High Definition from original film elements and is featured here in its original fullscreen TV format.

Bonus Features: “Simenon on Simenon”: 2021 interview with Georges’ son John Simenon | Trailer | Limited Edition O-Card

NUDIST LIFE (PLUS 10 DAYS IN A NUDIST CAMP AND SHANGRI-LA)

Street Date: 2/28/23

Synopsis: Today’s viewers may be baffled by the cinematic atrocities that midcentury filmgoers had to endure in order to witness naked bodies on screen. Released in the guise of educational documentaries, nudist films usually combined newly-shot material with cannibalized nudist films, stock footage, and decades-old ethnographic films, backed with needle-drop music, and processed under substandard lab conditions. Eventually, these Frankensteined films became a genre unto themselves, paving the way for the more gruesome Mondo films that would soon follow. Dan Sonney and Maurice Zouary’s Nudist Life (1961) follows a quintet of ringers in a Florida nudist colony. 10 Days in a Nudist Camp (1957) is a reworking and expansion of This Nude World (1932). In Dick Randall’s Shangri-La, former Jerry Lewis impersonator Sammy Petrillo provides loads of cringe-inducing laffs while he lasciviously eyeballs the sun-worshippers.

Bonus Features: Short films: Back to Nature (1955), The Expose of the Nudist Racket (1938), Nature Girls (1952), Nudes, Nudists, and Nudism Around the World, Nudist Memories (1961).

ARSÈNE LUPIN COLLECTION

Street Date: 2/28/23

Synopsis: 

THE ADVENTURES OF ARSÈNE LUPIN (1957) Color 103 Minutes 1.37:1

Lupin engages in a series of daring criminal schemes. His activities arouse the interest of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who offers Lupin a challenge: to steal a jewel of great value from a secret hiding place. Should Lupin accept the wager? Starring Robert Lamoureux, Liselotte Pulver and O.E. Hasse; directed by Jacques Becker (Casque d’or, Touchez pas au grisbi).

SIGNED, ARSÈNE LUPIN (1959) B&W 99 Minutes 1.66:1

At the end of the Great War, Lupin resumes his mischievous lifestyle with zeal. The theft of three paintings committed by an adversary leads him to the mysterious treasure of the Golden Fleece. Starring Robert Lamoureux, Alida Valli and Jacques Dufilho; directed by Yves Robert (War of the Buttons, The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe).

ARSÈNE LUPIN VS. ARSÈNE LUPIN (1962) B&W 111 Minutes 2.35:1

Lupin is dead! And soon after he has been laid to rest, his two sons, François and Gérard, decide to go into their father’s profession in order to rescue some gems for a gorgeous princess. Starring Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean-Pierre Cassel and Françoise Dorléac; directed by Édouard Molinaro (Back to the Wall, La Cage aux Folles).

Bonus Features: Limited Edition O-Card

LOVE ON THE GROUND

Street Date: 2/14/23

Synopsis: Jane Birkin and Geraldine Chaplin star as theatre troupe members who are invited by a mysterious playwright/director to perform in a strange mansion. As the rehearsal progresses, secrets are revealed and the line between fiction and reality blurs.

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

CALENDAR GIRLS

Street Date: 2/21/23 (DVD Only)

Synopsis: A life-affirming documentary about Florida’s most dedicated dance team for women over 60. Recognizable by their wild and wacky costumes, The Calendar Girls perform at over 100 events each year. Through revealing conversations and choreographed dance sequences, the film captures the delicate balance these women strike between family, home, and dance.

Bonus Features: Trailers

THE MAN IN THE BASEMENT

Street Date: 2/28/23 (DVD Only)

Synopsis: After a Jewish couple (Jérémie Renier and The Artist’s Bérénice Bejo) sells their basement to a former history teacher (The Intouchables’ François Cluzet), they discover his secret life as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist. As the couple struggles to rescind the sale, the buyer befriends their naive teenage daughter.

Bonus Features: Trailers

HIGH EXPECTATIONS

Street Date: 2/28/23 (DVD Only)

Synopsis: Jack finds himself adrift after his father, legendary Coach Davis, cuts him from his renowned soccer club. Estranged from his dad, at odds with his brother and desperate for purpose, he turns to his ex-girlfriend Sofia. Inspired by her tough love and unwavering pursuit to become a recording artist, he takes one last shot at his lifelong dream, by trying out for a rival soccer club.

Bonus Features: Trailer

A LIFE’S WORK

Street Date: 2/21/23 (DVD Only)

Synopsis: What’s it like to dedicate your life to work that won’t be completed in your lifetime? Fifteen years ago, filmmaker David Licata focused on four projects and the people behind them in an effort to answer this universal question.

The subjects include Jill Tarter, Director of the SETI Institute, who has been involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence since the 1970s; David and Jared Milarch, father and son tree farmers and co-founders of the Champion Tree Project, who clone old-growth trees to combat climate change; gospel music archivist Robert Darden, who founded the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, an organization that is trying preserve at-risk recordings from the black gospel music tradition; and Paolo Soleri, controversial architect behind Arcosanti, a town designed to test his theories about housing an overpopulated planet. We discover what inspired them to begin, what obstacles they face, what drives and sustains them, and how they measure success of an endeavor they will not live to see completed.

Bonus Features: Seven Bonus Shorts | Eight Gospel Music Tracks

LET’S HOPE IT’S A GIRL

Street Date: 2/14/23

Synopsis: From legendary director Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street) comes the award-winning Let’s Hope It’s a Girl (1986), a coruscating battle-of-the-sexes comedy that won seven David di Donatello Awards including Best Film. Elena (Liv Ullman), after divorcing her ineffectual husband Leonardo (Philippe Noiret), takes over the family farm in Tuscany. Along with her sister Claudia (Catherine Deneuve) and a supportive group of other female relatives and employees, she gets the farm up and running again. When Leonardo returns, hoping to mansplain the right way to run a business, he is soon outclassed by Elena’s matriarchy. Let’s Hope It’s a Girl demonstrated the possibility of a form of female bonding between women who live, by choice, in a world without men.