April is fast approaching and The Criterion Collection and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment have yet another amazingh selection of classic titles heading to Blu-ray next month.
On 17th April comes WANDA, written, directed and starring BARBARA LODEN, the film is a ground-breaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character rarely seen on-screen and on the 24th of April, MYSTERY TRAIN, directed by JIM JARMUSCH which is a boozy and beautiful pilgrimage to Memphis and a paean to the music it gave the world.
On 17th April comes WANDA, written, directed and starring BARBARA LODEN, the film is a ground-breaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character rarely seen on-screen and on the 24th of April, MYSTERY TRAIN, directed by JIM JARMUSCH which is a boozy and beautiful pilgrimage to Memphis and a paean to the music it gave the world.
With her first and only film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—BARBARA LODEN turned in a ground-breaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men—including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. A difficult-to-see masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, Wanda is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society’s margins. |
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 2K digital restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, The Film Foundation, and Gucci, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- I Am Wanda, an hour-long documentary by Katja Raganelli featuring an interview with director Barbara Loden filmed in 1980
- Audio recording of Loden speaking to students at the American Film Institute in 1971
- Segment from a 1971 episode of The Dick Cavett
- Show featuring Loden
- The Frontier Experience, a short educational film from 1975 about a pioneer woman’s struggle to survive, directed by and starring Loden
- Trailer
Aloof teenage Japanese tourists, a frazzled Italian widow, and a disgruntled British immigrant all converge in the city of dreams—which, in Mystery Train, from Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, Night on Earth), is Memphis. Made with its director’s customary precision and wit, Mystery Train is a triptych of stories that pay playful tribute to the home of Stax Records, Sun Studio, Graceland, Carl Perkins, and, of course, the King himself, who presides over the film like a spirit. Mystery Train is one of Jarmusch’s very best movies, a boozy and beautiful pilgrimage to an iconic American ghost town and a paean to the music it gave the world. |
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Jim Jarmusch (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the lu-ray edition)
- Q&A with Jarmusch in which he responds to questions sent in by fans
- Original documentary on Mystery Train’s locations and Memphis’s rich social and musical history
- On-set photos by Masayoshi Sukita, and behind-the-scenes photos
- New and improved English subtitle translation