Kino Lorber has unveiled some of the details of their July 2021 Blu-Ray and DVD releases from their Kino Lorber, Kino Classics, Zeitgeist Films, Cranked Up Films, Greenwich Entertainment and Menemsha Films imprints. Get all the details on this incredibly packed lineup below:
Street Date: 7/13/21 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: This riveting, Cannes-selected #MeToo drama from debut filmmaker Charlène Favier follows the relationship between a teenage ski prodigy and her predatory instructor, played by frequent Dardenne brothers collaborator Jérémie Renier (The Kid with a Bike, In Bruges). In a breakthrough role, Noée Abita plays 15-year-old Lyz, a high school student in the French Alps who has been accepted to an elite ski club known for producing some of the country’s top professional athletes. Taking a chance on his new recruit, ex-champion turned coach Fred decides to mold Lyz into his shining star despite her lack of experience. Under his influence, she will have to endure more than the physical and emotional pressure of the training. Will Lyz’s determination help her escape Fred’s exploitative grip?
Bonus Features: Q&A with director Charlène Favier | Trailer
Street Date: 7/13/21 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: Working in defiance of a lifelong ban on filmmaking, dissident director Mohammad Rasoulof delivers a piercing drama about a subject he knows well: the costs of living under a repressive, brutal government. Winner of the Golden Bear, the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival, There Is No Evil is a film in four chapters, each telling a different story related to the death penalty in contemporary Iran. The first story concerns a family man who, as we come to see, pays a grave moral price for his comfortable middle-class life. The second and third chapters focus on conscripted soldiers – in Iran, it is often these men who are forced to perform executions – and both segments explore the tension and turmoil that can come with such harsh coercion. The final section involves a family secret, which brings the film to its powerful conclusion. Suspenseful, mysterious, and shot through with a sense of urgency, Rasoulof’s work bears the mark of an artist who sets his own terms – and who knows just how to captivate an audience.
Bonus Features: Trailer
Synopsis: In Season 3 of the Finnish Nordic Noir hit Bordertown, chief investigator Kari Sorjonen of the Serious Crimes Unit has grave concerns about the future of his family, while pursuing a murderer who seems to have been studying his previous cases.
Bonus Features: Trailers
Synopsis: In his final film as director, Gordon Parks (The Learning Tree, Shaft) turned the camera upon himself and created a deeply personal and remarkably poetic self-portrait. Moments Without Proper Names blends Parks’s striking photographs (spanning four decades) with newly-shot footage of the artist, his own musical compositions, and personal reminiscences performed by a trio of esteemed actors: Avery Brooks, Roscoe Lee Browne, and Joe Seneca. Restored from the original camera negatives, presented in cooperation with the Gordon Parks Foundation and the Library of Congress, Moments Without Proper Names offers a penetrating gaze into the life and mind of one of the 20th Century’s most celebrated artists.
Bonus Features: Flavio (1964, 11 Min.) directed by Gordon Parks | Listen to a Stranger: An Interview with Gordon Parks (1973, 19 Min.) | Audio commentary by producer Shep Morgan and executive producer Jeanne Wolf
Synopsis: One of Hollywood’s earliest — and most peculiar — musicals, The Great Gabbo stars Erich von Stroheim as an egotistical ventriloquist who casts a Svengali-like spell upon an ingenue (Betty Compson), against a backdrop of singularly strange numbers (including “Icky” and the spider-and-fly-themed “Caught in a Web”). Director James Cruze (The Covered Wagon) allowed von Stroheim to endow the character with his signature flourishes, resulting in a wicked cocktail of garish stage shows and Austro-Hungarian villainy that is a diabolical delight.
Bonus Features: Audio commentary by Richard Barrios, author of A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film
Synopsis: By the late 1940s, exploitation producers such as George Weiss (Test Tube Babies, Glen or Glenda?) drifted away from the pseudo-educational framework of the genre and began producing risqué crime melodramas. No films better represent the “mainstreaming” of exploitation than Girl Gang and Pin-Down Girl, and no actor was more suited to such low-grade potboilers than deadpan baritone Timothy Farrell. In Girl Gang, Farrell is a small-time mob boss who feeds dope to high school girls hungry for kicks. A return to the gymnasium setting of Weiss and Farrell’s The Devil’s Sleep, Pin-Down Girl stars Peaches Page as a woman caught in the vice-riddled world of female wrestling. Girl Gang was mastered in 2K from the original 35mm negative; Pin-Down Girl was mastered in 2K from a 35mm re-release version (The Blonde Pick-Up).
Bonus Features: Audio commentary for Girl Gang by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas | Audio commentary for Pin-Down Girl by Eric Schaefer, author of Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films 1919-1959 | Theatrical trailers
Synopsis: Whirlpool of Fate (1925) is Jean Renoir’s debut feature, a lyrical tale of the tragic life of an orphan girl. An independent feature shot on family friend Paul Cézanne’s property, La Nicotiere, it is a dreamy episodic melodrama that follows the poor girl as she endures the loss of her father, the abuse of her alcoholic uncle, and a perilous fall down a well that erases her memory and triggers surreal dreams. Presented in a beautiful new 4K restoration, Whirlpool of Fate gives an early glimpse of Renoir’s immense talent.
Bonus Features: Audio commentary by film critic Nick Pinkerton | Music composed and performed by Antonio Coppola
Synopsis: Nana (1926) is Jean Renoir’s (The Rules of the Game) second feature, and one of his most ambitious productions, presented here in a new 4K restoration. It is an elaborately mounted adaptation of Émile Zola’s novel that tracks the doomed romances of its title character—an actress who would go on to be the most notorious courtesan of her era. When her father dies, a young girl is sent to live with her uncle. Mistreated, she runs away to lead a vagabond’s life in the forest. When she is found, she becomes Nana, a fashionable actress of loose morals, becoming first the mistress of a count, and then of the Emperor’s chamberlain. Nana’s love affairs are set against gorgeously mounted sets designed by Claude Autant-Lara.
Bonus Features: Audio commentary by film critic Nick Pinkerton | Before-and-After Restoration Comparison | Music composed and performed by Antonio Coppola
Synopsis: During World War II, Kristina Söderbaum came to represent, for the German people, an ideal woman: the embodiment of strength and beauty, as well as a paragon of fidelity and sacrifice. Immensee stars Söderbaum as Elisabeth, a woman in love with Reinhardt, a brilliant composer (Carl Raddatz), but who instead marries someone more reliable (Paul Klinger). Years later, Reinhardt returns, and Elisabeth has a chance to be true to her one greatest love. In The Great Sacrifice, Söderbaum is Äls, a goddess of a woman who captures the heart of a married man Albrecht (Raddatz). When Äls falls victim to a serious illness, Albrect’s loyal wife (Irene von Meyendorff) sacrifices her own happiness for the sake of her husband. Filmed in the rich, warm hues of the Agfacolor process (exquisitely restored by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung), both films are heavy with mood, highlighted by feverish dream sequences that give sublime visual expression to the character’s overwrought emotions.
Bonus Features: Immensee audio commentary by film historian Olaf Möller | The Great Sacrifice audio commentary by film historians Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson
Synopsis: Ken Jacobs is one of the most wildly creative and influential film artists and teachers in the history of the medium, and Kino Classics is proud to present this two-disc selection from his vast body of work (additional titles will be available digitally via Kino Now). Jacobs, born in Brooklyn, NY in 1933, studied Abstract Expressionism with Hans Hofmann before turning to filmmaking – where he became a prolific member of the underground scene, along with contemporaries Jonas Mekas, Jack Smith, and Stan Brakhage. His early films use NYC as a poetic landscape (Orchard Street) and as a setting for Smith’s carnivalesque performances (Little Stabs at Happiness and Blonde Cobra – both preserved by Anthology Film Archives). Jacobs then started experimenting with found footage, expanding a five-minute fragment of Billy Bitzer’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son to feature length (restored in 2K by Museum of Modern Art), and went on to embrace digital tools – using stroboscopic effects to turn silent shorts and Victorian stereoscopic photographs into mind-expanding 3D investigations (Capitalism: Child Labor). He continues to push the boundaries of the art form – as you can see with his hypnotically abstract Movie That Invites Pausing (2021). In addition to his landmark films, which have been honored by the American Film Institute, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, Jacobs (along with his wife Flo) founded the free film school Millennium Film Workshop, and he also helped create SUNY Binghamton’s experimental Department of Cinema in 1969, where he became a Distinguished Professor and influenced generations of artists and scholars.
Bonus Features: Booklet essay by film critic J. Hoberman | Conversation between Ken Jacobs and film scholar Tom Gunning (Disc 1)
Synopsis: Winner of awards at Tribeca and Vancouver, My Wonderful Wanda is a delightful satire of the haves and the have-nots set against the backdrop of a gorgeous lakeside villa in Switzerland. At the story’s center is Wanda (Agnieszka Grochowska) a Polish caretaker who has left her own small children in Poland to look after Josef (André Jung) the stroke-ridden patriarch of the wealthy Wegmeister-Gloor dynasty. Wanda is adept in navigating the tricky family dynamics between the two grown (if still childish) offspring and the elegant if controlling matriarch Elsa (an amazing Marthe Keller), along with the sporadic intervention of animals stuffed or alive. But an unexpected turn of events turns everything upside down. While My Wonderful Wanda exposes present-day realities of class injustice, thanks to writer-director Bettina Oberli’s empathetic lens, it is never less than a very human comedy.
Bonus Features: Trailers
15 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT BIGFOOT
Synopsis: Glasses. Joggers. Vapes. As a millennial blogger, Brian has everything – except a meaningful career. Forced to carve out his day job in the ever growing clickbait space, he wants nothing more than to cover real news, but instead is sent out on another waste of his time: Bigfoot. Tasked with covering a Bigfoot expedition with cryptozoology’s biggest rockstar, Brian witnesses something unexplainable and paranormal in the woods. What started out as a wild goose chase for Bigfoot becomes the story of a lifetime.
Bonus Features: Trailers
Street Date: 7/6/21 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: From Academy Award®-winning director Caroline Link (Nowhere in Africa) comes an adaptation of acclaimed British author Judith Kerr’s classic novel based on her childhood memories. The story of a Jewish family’s escape from 1933 Berlin to Europe tackles prejudice, exile, displacement and adaptation, as told from the perspective of the author’s alter ego, nine year-old Anna Kemper (Riva Krymalowski in her feature film debut). Anna is too busy with schoolwork and friends to notice Hitler’s face glaring from posters plastered all over 1933 Berlin. But when her father (Oliver Masucci)—based on the prominent theater critic Alfred Kerr—suddenly vanishes, the family is secretly hurried out of Germany. Anna begins to understand life will never be the same as she and her family navigate unfamiliar lands and cope with the challenges of being refugees.
Bonus Features: Trailers
Synopsis: SUPER FRENCHIE provides a thrilling and intimate look at the life of professional skier and BASE jumper Matthias Giraud, who stops at nothing to pursue his passion for adventure. The film follows Matthias as he dares to execute ever more dangerous stunts while simultaneously falling in love and starting a family. The story takes a turn when Matthias suffers a catastrophic crash just days before the birth of his first child. After miraculously surviving, Matthias struggles to get back to the sport he loves while grappling with the effects it has on his young family. Ultimately he must decide if his passion for BASE jumping is worth the risk and how far he is willing to go to pursue it. Super Frenchie uniquely combines the thrills of some of the world’s most extreme sports with Matthias’ personal journey to tell a story filled with both heart and excitement.
Bonus Features: The Paraglide Rope Swing | Trailers
Synopsis: Starring Tony Award®-winning and Emmy®-nominated John Benjamin Hickey (The Good Wife) and featuring the impressive debut of Niv Nissim, SUBLET focuses on Michael (Hickey), a travel columnist for The New York Times, who goes to Tel Aviv to write an article after suffering a tragedy. He is still grieving and the loss has caused problems between him and his husband. He just wants to do his research and go home. But when he sublets an apartment from Tomer (Nissim), a young film student, he finds himself drawn into the life of the city.
Bonus Features: Trailers
KENNY SCHARF: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
Street Date: 7/27/21 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: KENNY SCHARF: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE was made over 11 years and features interviews and rare archival footage with Kenny Scharf, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Ed Ruscha, Dennis Hopper, Yoko Ono, Kaws, Marilyn Minter, and Jeffrey Deitch. The documentary shows Scharf’s New York City arrival in the early 1980s where he quickly befriended Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. This trio, amongst the fervent creative bustle of a depressed downtown scene, would soon take the art world by storm. While Basquiat and Haring both died tragically young, Scharf lived through cataclysmic shifts in New York City and the art world. Despite setbacks along the way, Scharf continues to follow his particular high-tone, technicolor artistic vision while growing public and critical appreciation for his earlier work has cemented his place as a pop art icon.
Bonus Features: Trailers
Synopsis: LEONA tells the story of a young Jewish woman from Mexico City who finds herself torn between her family and her forbidden love. Ripe with all the drama and interpersonal conflicts of a Jane Austen novel, Ariela (Naian González Norvind) navigates the labyrinth of familial pressure, religious precedent, and her own burgeoning independence as she struggles with her heart to find the right path.
Bonus Features: Trailers
Dillon is most comfortable sitting around in a theatre all day watching both big budget and independent movies.