Eureka Entertainment have announced via their twitter feeds (@eurekavideo and @mastersofcinema) their forthcoming releases in The Masters of Cinema series and Eureka Classics collection for the first quarter of 2015.
The latest slate of films from Eureka!'s The Masters of Cinema Series & Eureka! Classics collection bring together some of the most heralded masterpieces of the 20th century. Releases in the Masters of Cinema Series include Two for the Road, one of the great films by Stanley Donen (Singin' in the Rain, Charade), starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney; Fritz Lang’s masterpiece, Metropolis [Reconstructed & Restored] in brand new SteelBook packaging and including a second Blu-ray with more special features; Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary meditation on the Holocaust, Shoah and 4 Films After Shoah, a series of films made by Claude Lanzmann as follow-ups to Shoah (including The Last of The Unjust); Elia Kazan at his best with Wild River, a masterful recreation of a difficult, complex period in American history; Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, a harrowing and compellingly constructed chamber drama of police brutality and mental anguish starring Sean Connery; Raymond Bernard’s depiction of the travails of one French regiment during World War I, Wooden Crosses; Man of the West, Anthony Mann’s extraordinary western starring Gary Cooper; and finally Federico Fellini's adaptation of Petronious' myth of Satyricon. The Eureka Classics Collection sees the arrival of Bill Gunn’s revolutionary independent film Ganja &Hess and The Other, the psychological horror film helmed by the legendary director Robert Mulligan. And in cinemas The Last of the Unjust, will be joined by Life of Riley, the final film by the French master Alain Resnais.
Released on 19 January 2015, Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn 'make something wonderful out of being alive' in Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road. Featuring a score by Henry Mancini, the film will be released for the first time on Blu-ray in a Dual Format (Blu-ray and DVD edition).
Also available from 19 January 2015, Fritz Lang’s, Metropolis [Reconstructed & Restored], the mother of all sci-fi films and a major influence on Ridley Scott (Blade Runner), George Lucas (Star Wars), and pop culture in general (referenced by Madonna, Beyonce and countless others) will be re-released in a 2-disc Blu-ray set in brand new SteelBook packaging, now featuring Giorgio Moroder presents: Metropolis and a 45-min documentary exploring the film’s rediscovery.
Shoah is a work of genius from Claude Lanzmann, an heroic endeavour to humanise the inhuman, to tell the untellable, and to explore in unprecedented detail the horrors of the past. It is one of the most powerful and important, and greatest, films of all time. Premiering on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK, alongside the four films Lanzmann made as follow-ups to Shoah, each of which explore in further depth specific aspects and events of the Nazis' extermination programme. These four films (including The Last of the Unjust, released theatrically on 9 January) will also be released as a standalone DVD set, entitled 4 Films After Shoah. Both Lanzmann box sets will be released on 26 January 2015 to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The final Monday of the month will also see the release in a Dual Format (Blu-ray and DVD) edition of Ganja &Hess. Flirting with the conventions of blaxploitation and the horror cinema, Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess is a highly stylized and utterly original treatise on sex, religion, and African American identity. The edition will represent the original release, restored by The Museum of Modern Art with support from The Film Foundation, and mastered in HD from a 35mm negative.
Expected later in the first quarter of the year, Sean Connery stars as a burned out British Police Detective Sergeant in Sidney Lumet's The Offence, who finally snaps while interrogating a suspected child molester, played by Ian Bannen . Also starring Trevor Howard (Gandhi, The Third Man) and Vivien Merchant (Frenzy, Alfie), The Offence will be released on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK as part of the Masters of Cinema Series.
Like the classic horror films The Exorcist, The Omen, and The Shining, Robert Mulligan's psychological horror film The Other eschews gore in favour of richly detailed psychological horror in its depiction of deeply disturbed children and has gained a huge reputation for its haunting atmosphere and moody cinematography, which critic Roger Ebert has described as "perverse and menacing”. The Other will be released for the first time in the UK on Blu-ray in a Dual Format (Blu-ray and DVD) edition as a Eureka Classic.
Elia Kazan’s Wild River was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. Starring Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick (Anatomy of a Murder, The Omen). Wild River will be released on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK as part of the Masters of Cinema Series.
Raymond Bernard used a masterful arsenal of film techniques, from haunting matte paintings to jarring documentary-like camerawork in battle sequences, to create Wooden Crosses, a pacifist work of enormous empathy and chilling despair. Wooden Crosses will be released for the first time in the UK on Blu-ray in a Dual Format (Blu-ray and DVD) edition as part of the Masters of Cinema Series.
The controversial and extremely loose adaptation of Petronius’s classical Roman satire, Satyricon, written and directed by Federico Fellini, follows the exploits of two pansexual young men as they move through a landscape of free-form pagan excess. A new 4K digital restoration of Satyricon will be released for the first time in the UK on Blu-ray as part of the Masters of Cinema Series.
And finally, regarded by Jean-Luc Godard as Mann’s greatest film, Anthony Mann's final foray into the western genre is a disturbing examination of man's baser instincts, rising in intensity to the level of Shakespearean tragedy. Starring the legendary actor Gary Cooper Man of the West is the story of Link (Cooper) who tried to forget his killer past until an old evil man and a ruthless gang made him remember. Man of the West will be released for the first time anywhere in the world on Blu-ray as part of The Masters of Cinema Series.
In the last film directed by the prolific French director before his death in March, Alain Resnais turns for the third time to the work of Alan Ayckbourn for inspiration in a sparkling comedy about middle-class infidelity, Life of Riley (Aimer, boire et chanter) will be released in UK & Eire cinemas on 6 March 2015.
Managing Director of Eureka Entertainment, Ron Benson stated “New restorations and home viewing and Blu-ray premières abound - we continue our quest to release the very finest in world cinema, using the very best available materials, all with a meticulous attention to detail."
Further details for all releases will be announced in due course.
