Kino Lorber has unveiled some of the details of their October 2022 Blu-Ray and DVD releases from their Kino Lorber, Milestone Cinematheque, Cohen Media Group, Greenwich Entertainment, Cranked Up Films, Good Deed Entertainment, Virgil Films, Menemsha Films and Raro Video imprints. Get all the details on this incredibly packed lineup below:
Street Date: 10/4/22 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: Millions of American Evangelicals are praying for the State of Israel. Among them are the Binghams, a dynasty of Kentucky pastors, and their Evangelical congregants in an impoverished coal mining town. They donate sacrificially to Israel’s foremost philanthropic organization, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, because they fervently believe the Jews are crucial to Jesus’s return. This film traces this unusual relationship, from rural Kentucky to the halls of government in Washington and to the moving of the American Embassy in Jerusalem. With unparalleled access, the film exposes a stunning backstory of the Trump and Netanyahu administrations, where financial, political and messianic motivations intersect with the apocalyptic worldview that is insistently reshaping American foreign policy toward Israel and the Middle East.
Bonus Features: Trailers
Street Date: 10/18/22
Synopsis: Ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno traveled from New Jersey to the forests of Central Africa to record the music of the Bayaka Pygmies. He fell in love with the people and their music – and a Bayaka girl. Despite his failing health and the harsh realities of life in the village, he bravely follows the Bayaka into the heart of the forest. OKA! is a true story, capturing the spirit of a remarkable people with music, humor, and love.
Bonus Features: Listen to the Forest, a making-of documentary by James Bruce & Lavinia Currier (52 min.) | Trailers
Street Date: 10/25/22
Synopsis: “Remember when we talked about being alone in the world?” Sara is a genderfluid blue-collar worker who lives as her male birth identity Robson by day while caring for her religious grandmother in Sobradinho, a small town in the northeast of Brazil. Daniel, who teaches in a police academy in southern metropolis Curitiba, has been placed on unpaid leave after a violent incident that’s all over the news. The only thing holding him together is his online romance with Sara, whom he has never met in person. When she suddenly disappears, Daniel drives 2,000 miles across Brazil to find her. He posts Sara’s picture all over town but no one recognizes her, until he receives a mysterious call from someone claiming to know her and asking to meet. What follows is a journey of the heart that will change Sara and Daniel forever. In the tradition of A Fantastic Woman and Strawberry and Chocolate, the film is both a swooning sun-baked romance and a triumphant affirmation of queer love and humanity at a time when LGBTQ+ rights are increasingly imperiled everywhere. An official selection of the Venice Film Festival and Brazil’s official submission to the 94th Academy Awards®, Private Desert boasts lush cinematography and a haunting atmospheric score. You’ll never hear “Total Eclipse of the Heart” the same again.
Bonus Features: Making-of Featurette | Trailer
Street Date: 10/18/22 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: One of the most important documents of its time, THE AIDS SHOW was filmed in 1986 in the early years of the epidemic. A collaborative piece of theatre written in the midst of a health crisis, the “Artists Involved with Death and Survival” Show deals with the virus’ impact on the community most affected by the disease – gay men. Excerpts from the play by San Francisco’s long-running Theatre Rhinoceros are accompanied by interviews with the show’s creators and performers, along with personal narration by filmmakers Peter Adair & Rob Epstein, producing a powerful hybrid of documentary and drama.
Bonus Features: The Shanti Project: Performance of The A.I.D.S. Show (1985, 22 minutes) | Leland Moss Audition and Interview (21 minutes) | Trailer
ROB EPSTEIN – JEFFREY FRIEDMAN COLLECTION:
COMMON THREADS, WHY ARE WE?, PARAGRAPH 175
Street Date: 10/25/22
Synopsis: For more than 30 years, Oscar®-winning directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have borne powerful witness to gay life, creativity, and activism — documenting lost aspects of LGBTQ+ history and chronicling unfolding events with humor, compassion, and fierce urgency. The Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman Collection includes three of their most essential works in new restorations: Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt (1989, winner of the Academy Award® for Best Documentary Feature), Where Are We? Our Trip Through America (1992) and Paragraph 175 (2000). Common Threads uses the NAMES Project Memorial Quilt to explore the cross-section of identities affected by HIV/AIDS, as well as efforts to combat the stigma, misinformation, and political obstruction that deepened the crisis. Where Are We? Our Trip Through America follows Epstein and Friedman as they chronicle an 18-day road trip through the American south. They interview a large variety of people along the way, stopping to ask them questions about their hopes and regrets. Paragraph 175 fills a crucial gap in the historical record by revealing the lasting consequences of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals.
Bonus Features: Common Threads: Audio commentary by filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman | Vito Russo’s ACT UP Demonstration (1988) | Then and Now (1981-2004, directed by Epstein and Friedman, 43 minutes) | Vito Russo – pre-interview footage | Where Are We? Deleted
Street Date: 10/11/22
Synopsis: An this controversial and notorious buddy film, director Bertrand Blier (GET OUT YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS) created what critic Pauline Kael described as “an explosively funny erotic farce – both a celebration and a satire of men’s daydreams.” Gerard Depardieu (in the role that would make him an international star) and Patrick Dewaere portray Jean-Claude and Pierrot, two amoral drifters who travel the French countryside committing petty crimes and harassing the women they encounter, including Miou-Miou, Jeanne Moreau, and, in an early role, Isabelle Huppert. Perpetually on the run from the police and the women they encounter, the two are always just one step ahead of death or imprisonment as a result of their crime spree, but, as Kevin Thomas in the LA Times observes, ”Blier is interested more in Jean-Claude and Pierrot as sexual chauvinists than as petty criminals, and as they learn to become more considerate lovers they become more likable. Above all, they embody the sure-fire appeal of all movie anti-heroes, free-spirits who live entirely for the moment and at all times follow their impulses.” Graced with a justly famous score by Stéphane Grappelli, GOING PLACES remains as shocking and outrageous today as it did upon its initial release.
Bonus Features: Audio commentary track by Professor of Film Studies at Columbia University Richard Peña | Trailer
Street Date: 10/25/22
Synopsis: Adapted from the book by Georges Simenon, Monsieur Hire is a film of gorgeously muted widescreen color and “funereal beauty” (The Washington Post) that coolly unpacks sexual obsession and romantic love with intelligence and understated intensity. A young girl is brutally murdered. The prime suspect is a cold and reclusive man who is obsessed with his beautiful neighbor. He spends his nights watching her through his window, but when she discovers that she is being spied on, she becomes the aggressor in an erotically charged relationship that leads to a deadly game of cat-and-mouse.
Bonus Features: New interview with director Patrice Leconte and star Sandrine Bonnaire |Audio commentary track by Wade Major, producer/host of the DigiGods podcast, film critic for CineGods.com and KPCC FilmWeek | Trailers
Street Date: 10/4/22 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: Antoinette, a schoolteacher, is looking forward to her long planned summer holiday with her married lover Vladimir, the father of one of her pupils. When she learns that Vladimir has to cancel because his wife organized a surprise hiking vacation, Antoinette decides to follow their tracks, accompanied by a protective donkey named Patrick.
Bonus Features: Trailer
Street Date: 10/18/22
Synopsis: Minnesota is the heartland of US hockey, creating more skaters—on the local rinks and in the NHL—than any other state. Here, the senior boys of rival towns—one an emerging dynasty, the other with a fabled past— face down uncertain futures as they skate for a last chance to etch their names into local lore. Where Texas football has Friday Night Lights, Minnesota high school hockey has Hockeyland.
Bonus Features: Trailers
Street Date: 10/25/22 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: Rolling Stones bassist Darryl Jones reflects on growing up on the South Side of Chicago, playing alongside Miles Davis, Madonna, and Sting, and replacing Bill Wyman in the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band. Featuring interviews with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, Charlie Watts and more.
Bonus Features: Trailers
Street Date: 10/11/22
Synopsis: Lost in the remotest part of Eastern Europe, Sam is a foreigner searching for his biological father. Then a minor road accident leads to a chance meeting with a pig-farmer’s daughter, who captures him and makes him a slave on the farm.
Bonus Features: Trailers
Street Date: 10/18/22
Synopsis: In a small Mediterranean village, Carmen has looked after her brother, the local priest, her entire life. After he dies Carmen begins to see the world, and herself, in a new light.
Bonus Features: Trailers
RETURN TO AUSCHWITZ: THE SURVIVAL OF VLADIMIR MUNK
Street Date: 10/4/22 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: What makes one person a survivor? Return to Auschwitz: The Survival of Vladimir Munk is the moving story of Czech Holocaust survivor and retired SUNY Plattsburgh professor Vladimir Munk. The film follows Vladimir, now 95, as he returns to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, the camp where he was held prisoner during World War II. This will be his last chance to honor thirty of his close relatives, including his parents, who perished there. Accompanied by his dear friend, the trip from his home in the United States will be filled with painful memories and unforeseen hardships but it is a journey he knows he must take. The challenges continue upon his return when Covid-19, the isolation of lockdown and serious heart problems threaten the health and well being of this true survivor.
Bonus Features: Trailers
Street Date: 10/11/22 (DVD Only)
Synopsis: At the end of the 1950s, Rachel (Virginie Efira, Elle, Call My Agent!), a young office clerk living in a provincial town, meets Philippe (Niels Schneider), a well-educated man from a wealthy family. They share an intense but short-lived romance, from which a daughter is born. Over the next 50 years, their lives will be shaped by the unconditional love between a mother and her daughter, overshadowed by the impossible love of a woman for a man that rejects her, and of a daughter for an absent and abusive father.
Bonus Features: Trailers
Street Date: 10/25/22
Synopsis: Nick the Sting is another slam-bang action movie from pulp movie master Fernando di Leo (The Italian Connection ; Shoot First, Die Later). Luc Merenda stars as small time conman Nick Hezard who gets caught up in the bigger scams of crime boss Robert Clark (Lee J. Cobb) in Geneva, Switzerland. Nick gets involved in jewel-related insurance scams, but soon realizes that Clark is about to execute a double cross. So Nick gets a team together and concocts an elaborate scam of his own involving false arrests, fake murders, and prop police stations. This high stakes game of double and triple cross will either put Nick on easy street or straight into the grave.
Bonus Features: A video history of ’60s & ’70s split-screen cinema by Mike Malloy
Street Date: 10/25/22
Synopsis: Le Soldatesse (The Camp Followers) is a heartbreakingly moving wartime drama starring the luminous Anna Karina (Pierrot le Fou, Alphaville) and directed by the great Valerio Zurlini (The Desert of the Tartars, Family Portrait). Lieutenant Martino (Tomas Milian) can no longer stand the death and disease surrounding him in Athens, and puts in a request to be relocated. So along with Sergeant Castagnoli (Mario Adorf) he is tasked with delivering twelve prostitutes to various military outposts across the Axis territory. It is an unpleasant task, made even more so by the fascistic Major Alessi (Aca Gavric), who they pick up along the way. Karina plays Elenitza, a soft spoken prostitute who develops a sympathetic relationship with Martino. Alessi becomes increasinglyunhinged during the journey, becoming a violent and maniacal supporter of the Blackshirts, whose brutal tactics tear the group apart.
Bonus Features: Introduction by Marco Müller, professor at the Shanghai Film Academy and former director of the Venice and Rome film festivals | Audio commentary by Danielle Hipkins, Professor of Italian Studies and Film at the University of Exeter
Dillon is most comfortable sitting around in a theatre all day watching both big budget and independent movies.