New Releases for September 19 2023

PAST LIVES (2023)

Nora and Hae Sung, two deeply connected childhood friends, are wrest apart after Nora’s family emigrates from South Korea. Two decades later, they are reunited in New York for one fateful week as they confront notions of destiny, love, and the choices that make a life, in this heartrending modern romance. (BLU-RAY and DVD)

THE TRIAL (1962) (Criterion)

A feverishly inspired take on Franz Kafka’s novel, Orson Welles’s The Trial casts Anthony Perkins as the bewildered office drone Josef K., whose arrest for an unspecified crime plunges him into a menacing bureaucratic labyrinth of guilt, corruption, and paranoia. Exiled from Hollywood and creatively unchained, Welles poured his ire at the studio system, the blacklist, and all forms of totalitarian oppression into this cinematic statement—a bold, personal film that he himself considered one of his greatest. Dizzying camera angles, expressionistic lighting, increasingly surreal locations—Welles unleashed the full force of his visual brilliance to convey the nightmarish disorientation of a world gone mad. (4K ULTRA HD and BLU-RAY)

EARLY SHORT FILMS OF THE FRENCH NEW WAVE (1956-1969)

In the mid-1950s, a radically new vision of French cinema emerged. The short films in this special edition box set represent the dawn of this New Wave — the earliest works of its most emblematic auteurs, which would include Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, & more. Visionary producer Pierre Braunberger guided their work and financed their early efforts. These are the first forays of a movement that would revolutionize French film and influence cinema around the world for decades to come. (BLU-RAY and DVD)