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pans_labyrinth-posterPan’s Labyrinth has been given a new 2K mastering by the Criterion Collection and released both separately and as part of the Trilogia de Guillermo del Toro on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. The trilogy also includes the previously released Chronos and The Devil’s Backbone.

While del Toro’s fantasy films are generally classified as horror films, the writer/director prefers to think of them as fairy tales. That they may be, but these three films, indeed all del Toro’s films, including Hellboy and the more recent Crimson Peak, are fairy tales for adults rather than children.

Pan’s Labyrinth, which lost the Best Foreign Film Oscar to Germany’s The Lives of Others is del Toro’s most gorgeous film as exemplified by the three Oscars it did win for Cinematography, Art Direction, and Makeup. Set in 1944 post-Civil War Spain, the film centers around an imaginative, bookish 12-year-old girl whose stepfather is a brutal Spanish Army captain. With the aid of an insect-like fairy, she escapes into her own world where she meets a faun who tells her she is a princess from a kingdom in the underground. How the two worlds come together forms the nexus of this one-of-a-kind work of cinematic beauty.

Numerous extras are included.

Robert Altman earned his fourth Oscar nomination for Best Director for 1993’s Short Cuts, which has been given a breathtaking 4K restoration by the Criterion Collection on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. Altman’s nomination, coming a year after his third for The Player, was surprisingly the only one accorded the highly lauded film by the Academy. Clocking in at 3 hours and 8 minutes, the film uses a Medfly infestation of Los Angeles to weave together several of writer Raymond Carver’s short stories.

The characters in the film are mostly flawed human beings with Andie MacDowell’s mother of a comatose 8-year-old son easily the most sympathetic. Madeleine Stowe comes close as the mother of three young children whose jerk of a husband, Tim Robbins, is a cop who cheats on her with divorcรฉe Frances McDormand whose ex-husband Peter Gallagher is a Medfly spraying helicopter pilot. Stowe’s sister Julianne Moore is a pretentious painter whose doctor husband, Matthew Modine, is the doctor treating MacDowell and Bruce Davison’s son. Jack Lemmon is Davison’s estranged father. MacDowell and Davison’s neighbor, Annie Ross, is a boozy nightclub singer whose cello playing daughter, Lori Singer, commits the ultimate act to gain her mother’s attention. Lily Tomlin is a waitress whose daughter, Lili Taylor, may have been molested by Tomlin’s second husband, Tom Waits. Taylor’s husband, makeup artist Robert Downey, Jr., and pool man Chris Penn are best friends. Penn’s wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, is a phone sex worker. Huey Lewis, Buck Henry, and Fred Ward are middle-aged frat boys who go fishing despite having discovered a dead body in the water. Ward’s wife, Anne Archer, is a kids’ birthday clown. Archer and Moore are friends. Lyle Lovett is a baker who is left holding a birthday cake for a reason he doesn’t comprehend. It ends with an earthquake that for a moment looks like it could be “the big one”.

Numerous extras are included.

Warner Archive has released a dazzling new Blu-ray of Abel Ferrara’s 1993’s Body Snatchers, the third of four films derived from Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers. Although often referred to as remakes, the 1978, 1993, and 2007 versions are technically sequels to Don Siegel’s 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, about aliens who take over the bodies of people in a small California town. Philip Kaufman’s 1978 film, also called Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is set in San Francisco and features Kevin McCarthy, the star of the original version still running from the aliens.

The 1993 version takes place on an Army base in Alabama with all new characters. Gabrielle Anwar stars as the 17-year-old daughter of an EPA inspector on the base (Terry Kinney), his wife, her stepmother (Meg Tilly), and half-brother (Reilly Murphy). Billy Wirth plays her chopper pilot boyfriend and Forest Whitaker a base psychologist. In many ways, the film is as good as the previous two films and worth seeking out. The dreadful 2007 film set in Washington, D.C., called simply The Invasion, should be avoided.

Shout! Factory has released a terrific two-disc Blu-ray of Tom Holland’s 1988 modern horror classic Child’s Play, from a 2K scan with tons of extras including interviews with the directors, numerous artisans who worked on the film, and on-camera stars Catherine Hicks, Chris Sarandon, and Alex Vincent as well as well as Brad Dourif who was the voice of Chucky, the doll possessed by a serial killer and Ed Gale, the little person who played Chucky in scenes requiring movement that couldn’t be made with the numerous dolls used to portray the character. I found the lengthy interview with Gale to be the most fascinating of all the extras.

Given a Blu-ray upgrade by Kino Lorber, Robert Lieberman’s 1983 film, Table for Five, produced by Jon Voight, was one of the actor’s best films following his Oscar win for 1978’s Coming Home. He stars as the divorced father of three trying to reconnect on a Mediterranean cruise with the children who live with their mother (Millie Perkins) and her second husband, Richard Crenna. The title stems from his reserved table on the ship’s main restaurant where the fifth chair remains empty. Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography is the real star here, though all the actors including Roxana Zal, Robby Kiger, and Son Hoang Bui as the kids, the latter of whom is adopted, provide the floating soap opera with a great deal of heart.

Universal has given the Marx Brothers’ first five films sparkling new life on Blu-ray in The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection – Restored Edition replete with feature length commentary by various film historians on each film. They include 1929’s The Cocoanuts; 1930’s Animal Crackers with footage not seen since its 1936 censure; 1931’s Monkey Business; 1932’s Horse Feathers; and 1933’s Duck Soup.

Extras include a full-length documentary, The Marx Brothers: Hollywood’s Kings of Chaos featuring new interviews with Marx family members, Leonard Maltin, Dick Cavett, and more.

This week’s new releases include Captain Fantastic and Olive Signature’s Blu-ray upgrade of The Quiet Man.

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