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Wednesday, 15 March 2017 19:10

Criterion’s June slate has The Lodger & Straw Dogs, plus Space Between Us, stream Ken Russell’s Devils & more

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We’ve got a bunch of good stuff for you today here at The Bits so let’s get right to it...

First up, Tim has just posted his review of Tibor Takacs’ The Gate from Lionsgate, part of their new Vestron Video Collector’s Series. The disc is now available in stores.

Meanwhile, Michael Coate has chimed in with a new History, Legacy & Showmanship column, celebrating today’s 40th anniversary of the hit ABC sitcom Three’s Company. It features an interview with author and series authority Chris Mann. Do give it a look. [Read on here…]

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Also today, Russell Hammond has updated the Release Dates & Artwork section with all the latest Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K Ultra HD cover artwork and Amazon.com pre-order links. As always, whenever you shop from Amazon through our links, you’re helping to support our work here at The Bits and we really appreciate it.

In announcement news today, Criterion has just revealed their June slate of Blu-ray and DVD titles, which is set to include an updating of Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (Cat #309 – Blu-ray and DVD) on 6/7, Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night (Cat #880 – Blu-ray and DVD) on 6/13, Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille Trilogy (includes Marius, Fanny, and César – Cat #881-884 – Blu-ray and DVD) on 6/20, and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (includes Downhill – Cat #885 – Blu-ray and DVD) and an updating of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (Cat #182 – Blu-ray and DVD) on 6/27. We’ve update our Criterion Spines Project page and you can read more about each of these titles here. All are now available for pre-order on Amazon – just click on the cover artwork below.

Also today, Universal has set The Space Between Us for Blu-ray and DVD release on 5/16, with the Digital HD release due on 5/2. Extras on the Blu-ray will include audio commentary with director Peter Chelsom, the Love featurette, deleted scenes, and an alternate ending.

And HBO has set The Young Pope for Blu-ray and DVD release on 6/6, with the Digital HD release due on 4/10. You’ll get all 10 episodes, plus three featurettes including The Making of The Young Pope.

In other news, this is pretty fantastic: Ken Russell’s controversial 1972 horror film The Devils is finally available for streaming, in its rare unrated version, right now on Shudder.com. Click here to check that out. [Editor’s Note – Reports are that it is apparently NOT the unrated edition after all. Just FYI.]

Speaking of rare films, director Orson Welles’ unfinished 1970 film, The Other Side of the Wind, is finally going to be completed after 40 years of trying. It’s being produced by Filip Jan Rymsza and Frank Marshall, who was a line producer on the production. Director Peter Bogdanovich co-starred in the film and is consulting. More than 1,083 reels of film were flown to Los Angeles on Monday for scanning by Technicolor. The resulting film, when finally complete, will be streamed exclusively by Netflix. Pretty amazing. You can read more on this here.

Finally, while we’re on the subject of restoration, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory recently realized that all the thousands of old films they had of U.S. nuclear weapons tests – many still classified and thus never-before-seen by the public – were disintegrating and badly needed to be preserved. So they’re now being restored and a whole bunch of them were just declassified and released on YouTube today. Here’s a featurette on the restoration. From there, you can access all of the footage. Some of this stuff is pretty amazing...

All right, we’ll leave you with a look at the Blu-ray cover artwork for all of the new Criterion June titles (click the covers to pre-order them on Amazon.com)...

The Lodger (Criterion Blu-ray Disc) They Live By Night (Criterion Blu-ray Disc) Straw Dogs (Criterion Blu-ray Disc)

Ugetsu (Criterion Blu-ray Disc) The Marseille Trilogy (Criterion Blu-ray Disc) The Young Pope (Blu-ray Disc)

Stay tuned...

- Bill Hunt