Criterion Announces Their August Blu-ray Lineup

The Criterion Collection has announced 5 titles for Blu-ray release in the month of August. First The Earrings of Madame de… is set for August 6. Seconds is set for August 13. Two titles are set for August 20, The Big City and Charulata. Last but not least, To Be or Not To Be is set for August 27. Check below for a list of supplements included in each release.

The Earrings of Madame de…
Disc Features

  • New, restored high-definition digital film transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • Audio commentary featuring film scholars Susan White and Gaylyn Studlar
  • Introduction by filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson
  • Interviews with director Max Ophuls’s collaborators Alan Jessua, Marc Frédérix, and Annette Wademant
  • Visual essay by film scholar Tag Gallagher
  • Archival interview with novelist Louise de Vilmorin on Ophuls’s adaptation of her story
  • PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Molly Haskell, an excerpt from costume designer Georges Annenkov’s 1962 book Max Ophuls, and the 1951 source novel by Vilmorin, Madame de

Seconds
Disc Features

  • New 4K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • Audio commentary featuring director John Frankenheimer
  • Actor Alec Baldwin on Frankenheimer and Seconds
  • New program on the making of Seconds, featuring interviews with Evans Frankenheimer, the director’s widow, and actor Salome Jens
  • Interview with Frankenheimer from 1971
  • New visual essay by film scholars R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance
  • PLUS: An essay by critic David Sterritt

The Big City
Disc Features

  • New 2K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • New interview with actor Madhabi Mukherjee
  • Satyajit Ray and the Modern Woman, a new interview program featuring Ray historian Suranjan Ganguly
  • The Coward (1965), a feature film directed by Ray that also addresses modern female identity and stars Mukherjee and Soumitra Chatterjee
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by scholar Chandak Sengoopta and an interview with Ray from the 1980s by his biographer Andrew Robinson

Charulata
Disc Features

  • New 2K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • New interview program with actors Madhabi Mukherjee and Soumitra Chatterjee
  • Adapting Tagore, a new interview program featuring Indian film scholar Moinak Biswas and Bengali literature historian Supriya Chaudhuri
  • Archival audio interview with director Satyajit Ray by film historian Gideon Bachmann
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Philip Kemp and a 1980s interview with Ray by his biographer Andrew Robinson

To Be or Not To Be
Disc Features

  • New, restored 2K digital film transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • New audio commentary featuring film historian David Kalat
  • Lubitsch le patron, a 2010 French documentary on director Ernst Lubitsch’s career
  • Two episodes of The Screen Guild Theater, a radio anthology series: Variety (1940), starring Jack Benny, Claudette Colbert, and Lubitsch, and To Be or Not to Be (1942), an adaptation of the film, starring William Powell, Diana Lewis, and Sig Ruman
  • Trailer
  • PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien

Charulata

Seconds

TheBigCity

TheEarringofMadamede

ToBeorNotToBe