Latest news with #TheCriterionCollection
Geek Vibes Nation
4 days ago
- Business
- Geek Vibes Nation
Criterion Collection Announces Massive 10-Film Wes Anderson Collector's Set On 4K UHD Blu-Ray This September
The Criterion Collection has officially announced that The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years will be available on 4K UHD Blu-Ray on September 30, 2025. The set will include 4K masters all 10 of his features along with ten illustrated books, presented in a deluxe clothbound edition. The titles in this collection include Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, and The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. Get all of the details on this impressive set below!
News18
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- News18
Kareena Kapoor Is ‘Legend' Sharmila Tagore's Forever Fangirl. We Love You, Bebo
Last Updated: Kareena reshared a post on Instagram Stories celebrating the world premiere of Aranyer Din Ratri. As veteran star Sharmila Tagore gears up to represent India at Cannes 2025, her daughter-in-law Kareena Kapoor Khan has become her biggest cheerleader. Tagore will be attending the world premiere of a restored version of Satyajit Ray's Aranyer Din Ratri at Cannes. In the 1970 film, she played the lead role. Proud of her mother-in-law, Kareena reshared a post on Instagram Stories celebrating the world premiere of the iconic film. The post featured a heartfelt quote from Sharmila Tagore, reacting to the iconic film's restoration on a global platform. It reads, 'It's wonderful that Manik Da's Aranyer Din Ratri has been restored and will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this year. I have wonderful memories of the time spent with my co-actors, and Manikda's precision, especially in how he shot the memory game sequence, was incredible. I can't wait to watch the restored film. Aranyer Din Ratri is such a contemporary film, and I'm sure it will resonate with new audiences worldwide today." Expressing her admiration with a simple but powerful word, Kareena wrote 'Legend", with a red heart emoticon in the post. FYI, Aranyer Din Ratri is a Bengali adventure drama, adapted from Sunil Gangopadhyay's novel of the same name. It is directed by the iconic Satyajit Ray. Besides Sharmila, the film boasts a stellar ensemble cast including Kaberi Bose, Simi Garewal, Soumitra Chatterjee, Shubhendu Chatterjee, Rabi Ghosh, Samit Bhanja, and Pahari Sanyal, along with Premashish Sen, Samar Nag, Khairatilal Lahori, Master Dibyendu Chatterjee and Aparna Sen. As per the Film Heritage Foundation, the world premiere of Aranyer Din Ratri will be presented by an illustrious group including Wes Anderson, Sharmila Tagore, Simi Garewal, Margaret Bodde (Executive Director of The Film Foundation). The group also includes the members of producer Purnima Dutta's family, and Peter Becker and Fumiko Takagi from The Criterion Collection / Janus Films. Kareena Kapoor was last seen in Singham Again. The cast of the film included Ajay Devgn, Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone, Tiger Shroff and Arjun Kapoor. Next, she will be seen in Meghna Gulzar's Daayra. In the gripping crime drama, she shares screen space with Prithviraj Sukumaran. First Published:
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Business Standard
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Standard
Frames per second: Fun and games, from Satyajit Ray and Wes Anderson
In Asteroid City (2023), directed by Wes Anderson, five teenagers play a memory game. According to its rules, the first player names a well-known person, living or dead. The second repeats that name and adds another. The third repeats both and adds a third, and so on. The game continues in a circle until someone forgets a name—they are then declared out. The last player remaining is the winner. The game begins with famous names, but the teenagers soon realise it will last too long—they all have extraordinary memories. In fact, they are child prodigies gathered in the fictional desert town of Asteroid City, along with their families, to be honoured as Junior Stargazer awardees for their inventions. Bored, they decide to invert the game, recalling the names in reverse order. Shortly after the film's release, cinephiles noticed that the memory game is identical to the one played by characters in Satyajit Ray's 1970 film Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest). In Ray's film, the players are not teenagers, but young Bengali men and women from Calcutta vacationing in Palamu, a forested region now in Jharkhand. In fact, one of the characters, Aparna (Sharmila Tagore), names Cleopatra—just as Dinah (Grace Edwards) does in Asteroid City —suggesting a deliberate homage. Ray's influence on Anderson is well-documented. The premise of Anderson's 2007 film The Darjeeling Limited, in which a train journey transforms its protagonists, is often seen as inspired by Ray's 1966 film Nayak. It is therefore no surprise that Anderson—alongside Sharmila Tagore and Simi Garewal, both of whom acted in Aranyer Din Ratri —will present a restored version of the film at the Cannes Film Festival later this year. In a note, Anderson described the film as 'a nearly-forgotten… gem… From the master, another masterpiece'. The restoration is a collaboration between The Film Foundation (of which Anderson is a board member), the Film Heritage Foundation, and The Criterion Collection/Janus Films. It is a fitting tribute from an admirer to a master. Games frequently appear in Ray's films. In Charulata (1964), the titular protagonist (Madhabi Mukherjee) plays cards with her sister-in-law Manda (Gitali Roy); in Shakha Proshakha (1990), family members engage in tongue twisters during a picnic; and in Shatranj ke Khilari (1977), the protagonists Mirza Sajjad Ali (Sanjeev Kumar) and Mir Roshan Ali (Saeed Jaffrey) are addicted to chess in 19th-century Lucknow. Cultural critic Sibaji Bandyopadhyay described the memory game in Aranyer Din Ratri as an occasion of 'unwitting self-betrayal'. The names mentioned during the game reveal each player's inner world. Sanjay (Subhendu Chatterjee), a labour officer, names Karl Marx and Mao Zedong—icons of the leftist movements shaking Bengal in the late 1960s. Aparna's Cleopatra and Hari's (Samit Bhanja) Helen of Troy mirror each other in their mythic resonances. Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee) names Shakespeare and Tek Chand Thakur (the pseudonym of 19th-century Bengali writer Peary Chand Mitra), betraying his earlier literary ambitions. There's another layer to the game, deepening the narrative tension. Realising that Ashim is too chauvinistic to lose gracefully to a woman, Aparna pretends to forget the names. Later, as they walk in the forest, she flawlessly recites the entire list, revealing that his victory was a gift. This sparks a self-reflective moment in Ashim, prompting a subtle transformation by the film's end. Film scholar Darius Cooper interprets the four men—Ashim, Sanjay, Hari, and Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh)—through Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque, from Rabelais and His World (1965), suggesting that they wish to renounce Calcutta and replace it with the forest's ambience. This desire is symbolised in an early scene where they burn a copy of The Statesman, ritually severing ties with the city and modernity. However, critic Suranjan Ganguly argues that the forest in Ray's film is no pastoral escape. 'Shorn of its flora and fauna (the animals now perform in the circus), its inhabitants, the tribal Santals, are no better off, corrupted by money, drink, and urban sprawl,' he writes. For Ganguly, the forest represents illusion, not transformation. Illusion is also central to Asteroid City, whose layered meta-narratives are a hallmark of Anderson's work. The child prodigies' tale is not real—it is a play written by the fictional playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and directed by Schubert Green (Adrien Brody) for the stage. The play's production is embedded in a 1950s-style TV documentary, narrated by an unnamed host (Bryan Cranston). Scenes from the lives of Earp, Green, and others—such as Earp's romance with actor Jones Hall (Jason Schwartzman), or a visit from Green's estranged wife Polly (Hong Chau)—intercut the play's narrative, reinforcing its fictionality. The play is in vibrant Technicolor, while the documentary is in black and white. Asteroid City itself is clearly a set more than a real town, imagined near a nuclear test site where mushroom clouds bloom ominously. At intervals, a police car chases a gang of outlaws, exchanging gunfire—though none of the residents seem to notice. On their first night, the characters witness a rare astronomical event. A UFO descends and steals a 5,000-year-old meteorite that gives the city its name. The US president then imposes a quarantine, evoking the lockdowns of the Covid-19 era. In a scene from the framing documentary, playwright Conrad Earp describes his characters' state: 'I'd like to make a scene where all my characters are each gently, privately seduced into the deepest, dreamiest slumber of their lives, as a result of their shared experience of a bewildering and bedazzling celestial mystery.' His alternative title for the play is The Cosmic Wilderness. Within a week of quarantine, he imagines, 'Our cast of characters' already tenuous grasp of reality has further slipped… and a group begins to occupy a space of the most peculiar emotional dimensions.' Asteroid City is as much a pastoral retreat as the forests of Aranyer Din Ratri. The characters' ritualistic withdrawal into these spaces sets the stage for transformation. By embedding the memory game within such rituals, both Ray and Anderson stretch the limits of cinematic storytelling. The essential difference between a ritual (like a carnival or festival) and a game is that rituals have predictable outcomes, while games do not. Yet in cinema, even games are narrative tools, fully controlled by the storyteller. They excite the audience, but their outcomes are predetermined. Still, the games serve another function: they invite the audience into the narrative. The rituals in both films may exclude viewers from the characters' transformations—but the memory game continues beyond the films. Like the alien who inventories the meteor and returns it, we too are changed by the 'bewildering and bedazzling' cinematic experience. Whether we let it transform us is a game of our own choosing.
Yahoo
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Rosamund Pike says we're entering an age of 'prudery' with sex taking 'a backseat'
Actress Rosamund Pike has questioned whether the world is entering an 'age of prudery' with less sex due to the impact of 'wellness' culture, in comments made during her Criterion Closet interview this weekend. In the interview, the Gone Girl and Saltburn star, 46, sifts through the iconic film closet owned by The Criterion Collection and selects her top picks. Pike's first pick is I Am Curious, the 1967 Swedish erotic drama written and directed by Vilgot Sjöman that follows the story of a searching and rebellious young woman's bold exploration of her sexual identity. 'My first pick is I Am Curious because I am curious,' Pike says. 'And I'm also interested in the depiction of sex and sexuality on screen. I think it's very interesting, the debate, where it's taking us these days.' She goes on to ask: 'Are we entering an age of prudery? I'm interested in the way that wellness is taking over our lives and yet sex seems to be taking a backseat.' Pike's comments follow multiple reports that younger generations are having less sex, with the Los Angeles Times dubbing Gen Z's lack of sexual urgency a 'failure to launch'. It's coupled with Gen Zs resistance to alcohol, which has lead many to fear the death of the drunken shag, with less than half of 18-24 year olds reporting having had sex whilst drunk. The Wheel of Time actress is right to be worried about the depiction of sex on screen, too, considering there's so much less of it. A study by The Economist found that the level of sexual content in films had fallen by as much as 40 per cent since 2000, and research by The Hollywood Reporter showed a dramatic decline in sex scenes in major theatrical films this century. Plus, the younger generations don't even appear to want sex scenes. According to a UCLA report from 2023, almost half of Gen Z want to see less sex on screen, with viewers between the ages of 10 and 24 seeking more shows and films about platonic connections. This is a direct contrast with the popularity of Gen Z-beloved TV shows like Euphoria, which features frequent, graphic sex scenes between fictional high school students. Pike has starred in some risqué films herself, with the hit 2023 thriller/comedy Saltburn proving plenty divisive due to its sexual content. This includes one scene in which lead character Oliver, played by Barry Keoghan, licks semen from a bathtub drain and another where he has sex with the soil above another character's grave.
