Kino Lorber has unveiled some of the details of their March 2023 Blu-Ray and DVD releases from their Kino Lorber, Kino Classics, MHz Choice, Milestone Cinematheque, Cohen Media Group, Greenwich Entertainment, Virgil Films and Raro Video imprints. Get all the details on this incredibly packed lineup below:
Street Date: 3/7/23 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: The French writer and 2022 Nobel Prize awardee Annie Ernaux, whose novels and memoirs have gained her a devoted following (and whose autobiographical L’Événement was adapted into the critically acclaimed film Happening), opens a treasure trove with this delicate journey into her family’s memory. Compiled from gorgeously textured home movie images from 1972 to 1981 – when her first books were published, her sons became teenagers, and her husband Philippe brought an 8mm film camera everywhere they went – this portrait of a time, place, and moment of personal and political significance takes us from holidays and family rituals in suburban bourgeois France to trips abroad in Albania and Egypt, Spain and the USSR. Supplying her own introspective voiceover, Ernaux and her co-filmmaker, her son David, guide the viewer through fragments of a decade, diffuse and vivid in equal measure. The Super 8 Years is a remarkable visual extension of Ernaux’s ongoing literary project to make sense of the mysterious past and the unknowable future.
Bonus Features: Annie Ernaux and David Ernaux-Briot on The Super 8 Years (Courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center and New York Film Festival) | Theatrical Trailer
Street Date: 3/7/23
Synopsis: From its elaborate and stylish opening scenes, Asphalt immediately establishes itself as a startling cinematic achievement of Weimar cinema. Gustav Frölich, best known as the young protagonist of Metropolis, stars as a strait-laced traffic cop who has the simple task of escorting a diamond thief to the police station. However, Holk’s routine assignment becomes complicated when he discovers the criminal in his custody: the exotic and beautiful Else (Betty Amann). Working alongside cinematographer Günther Rittau (The Blue Angel), director Joe May (The Indian Tomb) takes a simple melodrama and transforms it into a masterwork, with a brooding visual style, nuanced performances, and psychological complexity.
Bonus Features: Audio commentary by film historian Anthony Slide
Street Date: 3/14/23
Synopsis: Ernst Lubitsch has long been recognized as the director of some of Hollywood’s greatest comedies, including Trouble in Paradise (1932) and Ninotchka (1939). However, he made some of his best films while an emerging filmmaker in his native Germany. The Wildcat (Die Bergkatze) is a madcap farce about a charming lieutenant (Paul Heidemann) who is captured en route by outlaws who roam the snow-covered mountains. When the bandit leader’s untamed daughter (silent superstar Pola Negri) falls for the young officer, a delicious sex comedy is set in motion. Peter Bogdanovich described The Wildcat as “an uproarious, hard-edged antimilitary spoof,” and ranks the film among the five funniest movies he’d ever seen (along with another early Lubitsch comedy, 1919’s The Doll). This edition includes a rare 1916 domestic comedy directed by and starring Lubitsch: Where Is My Treasure?
Bonus Features: Audio commentary by film historian Anthony Slide | Where Is My Treasure?, a 1916 comedy directed by and starring Ernst Lubitsch
Street Date: 3/14/23
Synopsis: Originally released under the title One Arabian Night, Sumurun was among Lubitsch’s early triumphs and helped secure his invitation to Hollywood. This exotic spectacle stars Jenny Hasselqvist (The Saga of Gosta Berling) as Sumurun, a rebellious member of a harem who has committed the greatest of sins: she has rejected the old sheikh (Paul Wegener, The Golem) and fallen in love with a charming cloth merchant. Pola Negri co-stars as a traveling dancer who is drawn to both the harem and to the sheikh’s handsome son, and Lubitsch himself appears as a hunchbacked clown in love with the dancer. Sumurun was based on a pantomime that had been a popular success for Lubitsch’s mentor, theater director Max Reinhardt. The New York Times labeled the film “an exceptional production,” and film historian Lewis Jacobs wrote that Sumurun “not only revealed Lubitsch as an ingenious director of comedy, but introduced a risqué wit that killed the heavy-handed American sex and style displays.”
Bonus Features: Screen test footage for Lubitsch’s unrealized American production of Faust
Street Date: 3/21/23
Synopsis: Super-8 DIY flmmaking at its most audacious, Flaming Ears is a pop sci-fi lesbian extravaganza set in the year 2700 in the fictional burned-out city of Asche. In this cardboard-and-plastic dystopia, Spy (Susana Helmayr) is a comic book artist whose printing presses are burned down by Volley (Ursula Puerrer), a sexed-up pyromaniac. Wounded in her quest for revenge, Spy is sheltered by Nun (A. Hans Scheirl), an amoral alien in a red plastic suit with a predilection for reptiles…who also happens to be Volley’s lover. This story of obsession and revenge is also an anti-romantic plea for love in all its many forms. A truly fearless underground film newly restored in 4K, Flaming Ears playfully disrupts narrative conventions with its witty approach to film genre, and its punk visual splendor.
Bonus Features: Three short films: Super-8-Girl Games (1985, 3 Min.) | Gezacktes Rinnsal schleicht sich schamlos schenkelnässend an (Jagged trickle sneaks shamelessly thigh-wetting, 1985, 4 Min.) | Das schwarze Herz tropft (Bastelanleitung zu R-innen) (The Black Heart Drips, 1985, 13 Min.)
Street Date: 3/28/23
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 four disc-set includes all 13 episodes of Season 4, in which Maigret reckons with “The Fontenay Murders”, “The Crime at Lock 14”, 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: “Play of the Month: Maigret at Bay” (1969, 92 minutes) | “The State of Maigret”: Restoration Notes | Trailer
Street Date: 3/21/23 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: Paris, 1899: A young, ambitious detective is thrust into a murder investigation against the dark backdrop of La Belle Epoque.
THE HUNTERS: COMPLETE SEASON 1 & 2
Street Date: 3/28/23 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: Rolf Lassgard stars as a retired Stockholm cop drawn into a mystery in Sweden’s far north.
Street Date: 3/7/23
Synopsis: Israel’s official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards®, and an official selection at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. Sami lives in Jerusalem with his wife and child, and an invitation to his brother’s wedding forces him to return to the Arab village where he grew up. After the wedding, with no warning or explanation, the village is put under military lockdown by Israeli soldiers and cut off from the outside world. Chaos rises overnight amongst those stuck within the walls. Director Eran Kolirin (The Band’s Visit) brings Sayed Kashua’s bestselling novel to life, exposing the absurdist world of Palestinian reality while highlighting human stories of being trapped in an unexpected situation.
Bonus Features: Theatrical trailer
Street Date: 3/14/23
Synopsis: When a brilliant scientist (Sandrine Bonnaire) discovers that her father did not die accidentally but was murdered by a family friend, she swears vengeance. However, she soon finds herself deeply embroiled in a mystery of lust and intrigue. And when she discovers the truth about her father, it threatens to shake her very foundations in this fascinating thriller.
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
Street Date: 3/7/23 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: When 21-year-old hippie-millionaire Michael Brody Jr. decided to give away his fortune to anyone in need, he ignited a psychedelic spiral of events. An instant celebrity, Brody was mobbed by the public, scrutinized by the press, and overwhelmed by the crush of personal letters responding to his extraordinary offer. Fifty years later, an enormous cache of these letters are discovered—unopened.
Bonus Features: Trailers
Street Date: 3/14/23 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: The explosive true story of America’s most corrupt police unit, the Gun Trace Task Force, which terrorized the city of Baltimore for half a decade. Based on the acclaimed book of the same name, this documentary takes viewers around every twist and turn of a real-life cat-and-mouse game where cops are also robbers and those meant to protect our safety turn out to be the ones jeopardizing it.
Bonus Features: Trailers
BURLESQUE: HEART OF THE GLITTER TRIBE
Street Date: 3/14/23 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: Burlesque: Heart of the Glitter Tribe is a feature documentary about the passion and personalities at the heart of today’s new wave of burlesque. On stage and in candid conversation, twelve of today’s hottest performers reveal the naked truth about an exotic world where artifice is a route to authenticity and pretending to be someone else is the ultimate journey to become yourself.
Bonus Features: Trailers
Street Date: 3/14/23
Synopsis: The Man Without A World is a bold independent American film, the conceptual masterpiece of an important artist, a meditation on history, and a very funny and beautiful melodrama. Credited to the legendary (and imaginary) 1920s Soviet director, Yevgeny Antinov, the film was actually made by Eleanor Antin in 1991. This silent drama set in a Jewish shtetl, was Antin’s “love letter” to her mother, who had been an actress in the Yiddish theater. When a gypsy caravan and its lovely dancer (played by Antin herself) arrive in the village, the life of the shtetl dwellers — including Zionists, religious zealots, socialists, and lovers — is upended. But as the Jewish villagers pursue their dreams for the future, the Angel of Death is ever near… This Blu-ray release also includes two other historical conjuring acts from Eleanor Antin. From the Archives of Modern Art (1987) is a series of short, sometimes ribald, comic films from the “lost years” of ballerina Eleanor Antinova. For The Last Night of Rasputin (1989), Antinova and her husband Yevgeny Antinov (both personas of Antin) joined forces to film the final orgy and dreadful end of the notorious monk, Rasputin, on the eve of the Russian Revolution.
Bonus Features: Audio Interview with Eleanor Antin • Trailers • The Last Night of Rasputin (1989, Eleanor Antin) • From the Archives of Modern Art (1987, Eleanor Antin) • Interview with actress Christine Berry (directed by Ross Lipman) • Original organ score by Lee Erwin
Street Date: 3/14/23
Synopsis: The Belle Starr Story is a rip-roaring Spaghetti Western starring Elsa Martinelli (Hatari!) and directed by the legendary Lina Wertmüller (Seven Beauties, Swept Away). It is the only Spaghetti Western to be directed by a woman – she replaced Piero Cristofani (using the pseudonym “Nathan Wich”) a few days into the shoot. Abused and dominated by men in her youth, Belle Starr (Martinelli) now out-rides, out-smokes, out-shoots, and out-gambles them as she makes her way around the Old West, usually wearing male garb.
Bonus Features: Audio commentary by film historian Samm Deighan
Dillon is most comfortable sitting around in a theatre all day watching both big budget and independent movies.