A Hard Day's Night is a 1964 musical comedy film starring the English rock band the Beatles—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr—during the height of Beatlemania. Directed by Richard Lester, it was written by Alun Owen and originally released by United Artists. The film portrays 36 hours in the lives of the group as they prepare for a television performance.
The Criterion Collection, Inc. is an American home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films". Criterion serves film and media scholars, cinephiles and public and academic libraries. Criterion has helped to standardize certain aspects of home-video releases such as film restoration, the letterboxing format for widescreen films and the inclusion of bonus features such as scholarly essays and commentary tracks. Criterion has produced and distributed more than 1,000 special editions of its films in VHS, Betamax, LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray formats and box sets. These films and their special features are also available via The Criterion Channel, an online streaming service that the company operates.
An audio commentary is an additional audio track, usually digital, consisting of a lecture or comments by one or more speakers, that plays in real time with a video. Commentaries can be serious or entertaining in nature, and can add information which otherwise would not be disclosed to audience members.
Arizona Dream is a 1993 indie surrealist comedy drama film co-written and directed by Emir Kusturica and starring Johnny Depp, Jerry Lewis, Faye Dunaway, Lili Taylor and Vincent Gallo.
Police Story 2 is a 1988 Hong Kong action film starring and directed by Jackie Chan, who also wrote the screenplay with Edward Tang. It is a sequel to the hit 1985 film Police Story, continuing the storyline of Chan's character "Kevin" Chan Ka-kui, and is the second installment of Police Story series. It also marks the last appearance in the series for Lam Kwok-Hung as Chief Inspector Raymond Li, Chor Yuen as Chu Tao and Charlie Cho as John Ko.
Gas Food Lodging is a 1992 American drama film written and directed by Allison Anders, based on the novel Don't Look and It Won't Hurt by Richard Peck. Starring Brooke Adams, Ione Skye, and Fairuza Balk, the film follows a waitress trying to find romance while raising two daughters in a trailer park in a small desert town in New Mexico.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a 1974 West German drama film written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, starring Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem. The film won the International Federation of Film Critics award for best in-competition movie and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. It is considered to be one of Fassbinder's most powerful works and is hailed by many as a masterpiece.
Arrow Films is a British independent film distributor and restorer specialising in world cinema, arthouse, horror and classic films. As Arrow Video, it sells Ultra HD Blu-rays, Blu-rays and DVDs online; it also operates its own subscription video on-demand service, Arrow Player. Since 2017 Arrow have had a dedicated podcast hosted by film-makers Sam Ashurst and Dan Martin. Arrow Video is considered a boutique Blu-ray label.
Masters of Cinema is a line of DVD and Blu-ray releases published through Eureka Entertainment. Because of the uniformly branded and spine-numbered packaging and the standard inclusion of booklets and analysis by recurring film historians, the line is often perceived as the UK equivalent of The Criterion Collection.
Overlord is a 1975 black-and-white British war film written and directed by Stuart Cooper. Set during the Second World War, around the D-Day invasion, the film is about a young British soldier's experiences and his meditations on being part of the war machinery, including his premonitions of death. The film won the Silver Bear - Special Jury Prize at the 25th Berlin International Film Festival. “Overlord is not about military heroics; on the contrary, it is about the bleakness of sacrifice”, Cooper said.
World on a Wire is a 1973 German science fiction television serial, starring Klaus Löwitsch and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Shot in 16 mm, it was made for German television and originally aired in 1973 in ARD as a two-part miniseries. It was based on the 1964 novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye. An adaptation of the Fassbinder version was presented as the play World of Wires, directed by Jay Scheib, in 2012.
Adrian Martin is an Australian film and arts critic. He now lives in Malgrat de Mar in Spain. He is Adjunct Associate Professor in Film Culture and Theory at Monash University. His work has appeared in many magazines, journals and newspapers around the world, and has been translated into over twenty languages and has regular columns in the Dutch De Filmkrant and in Caiman: Cuadernos de cine.
Blu-ray is a digital optical disc data storage format designed to supersede the DVD format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released worldwide on June 20, 2006, capable of storing several hours of high-definition video. The main application of Blu-ray is as a medium for video material such as feature films and for the physical distribution of video games for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The name refers to the blue laser used to read the disc, which allows information to be stored at a greater density than is possible with the longer-wavelength red laser used for DVDs.
Margit Carstensen was a German theatre and film actress, best known outside Germany for roles in the works of film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. She appeared in films of directors Christoph Schlingensief and Leander Haußmann and on television in Tatort.
Koyaanisqatsi, also known as Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, is a 1982 American experimental non-narrative film directed and produced by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke.
Irmgard Hermann was a German actress. She worked in film, television, and the stage, appearing in over 160 film and television productions. She was discovered, without formal training, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder who cast her in many of his films. She was awarded the Deutscher Filmpreis for playing Irmgard Epp in Fassbinder's The Merchant of Four Seasons, and again for appearing as Else Gebel, a woman in prison with Sophie Scholl, in Percy Adlon's Fünf letzte Tage.
Ultra HD Blu-ray is a digital optical disc data storage format that is an enhanced variant of Blu-ray. Ultra HD Blu-ray discs are incompatible with existing standard Blu-ray players. Ultra HD Blu-ray supports 4K UHD video at frame rates up to 60 progressive frames per second, encoded using High-Efficiency Video Coding. The discs support both high dynamic range by increasing the color depth to 10-bit per color and a greater color gamut than supported by conventional Blu-ray video by using the Rec. 2020 color space. Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs also support a 12-bit per color container via Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision content on 4K UHD Blu-Ray can also be mastered for 10,000 nits peak brightness, whereas standard HDR10 can only achieve a maximum of 4,000 nits of brightness. Moreover, Dolby Vision makes use of dynamic metadata, which adjusts the brightness and tone mapping per scene. In contrast, standard HDR10 only makes use of static metadata, which sets the same brightness and tone mapping for the entirety of the content.
