The Criterion Collection announced their May releases this week, two of those being Michael Haneke’s Funny Games and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, with Funny Games arriving May 14th and Blue Velvet on May 28th.
Michael Haneke’s most notorious provocation, Funny Games spares no detail in its depiction of the agony of a bourgeois family held captive at their vacation home by a pair of white-gloved young men. In a series of escalating “games,” the sadistic duo subject their victims to unspeakable physical and psychological torture over the course of a night.
Funny Games special features include:
New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director Michael Haneke, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
New interviews with Haneke and actor Arno Frisch
New interview with film historian Alexander Horwath
Press conference from the 1997 Cannes Film Festival featuring Haneke and actors Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Mühe
Trailer
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by critic Bilge Ebiri
Home from college, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) makes an unsettling discovery: a severed human ear, lying in a field. In the mystery that follows, by turns terrifying and darkly funny, David Lynch's Blue Velvet burrows deep beneath the picturesque surfaces of small-town life. Driven to investigate, Jeffrey finds himself drawing closer to his fellow amateur sleuth, Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), as well as their prime suspect, lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini)—and facing the fury of Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), a psychopath who will stop at nothing to keep Dorothy in his grasp.
Blue Velvet special features include:
New 4K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray, both supervised by director David Lynch
Alternate original stereo soundtrack
“Blue Velvet” Revisited, a feature-length meditation on the making of the film by Peter Braatz, filmed on-set during the production
The Lost Footage, fifty-one minutes of deleted scenes and alternate takes assembled by Lynch
Mysteries of Love, a seventy-minute documentary from 2002 on the making of the film
Trailer
More!
Visit The Criterion Collection's website to pre-order Funny Games and/or Blue Velvet today.
