Blue Velvet (Criterion Collection) - 4K Blu-Ray [4K Ultra HD Blu-ray]

Blue Velvet (Blu-ray 25th Anniversary E

Mathieu Kassovitz (THE CRIMSON RIVERS) took the film world by storm with LA HAINE (HATE), a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieues on Paris' outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (IRREVERSIBLEs Vincent Cassel), Hubert (THE CONSTANT GARDENERS Hubert Koundi), and Saod (THREE KINGS Saod Taghmaoui) - white, black, and Arab - give human faces to France's immigrant and otherwise marginalized populations, their resentment at their situation simmering until it reaches a boiling point. A work of tough beauty, LA HAINE is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of it's country's ongoing identity crisis.

Unfolding in a series of mythic vignettes, this late work by Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai, Ran) brings eight of the beloved director's own nighttime visions, informed by tales from Japanese folklore, to cinematic life. In a visually sumptuous journey through the master's unconscious, tales of childlike wonder give way to apocalyptic visions a young boy stumbles on a fox wedding in a forest; a soldier confronts the ghosts of the war dead; a power-plant meltdown smothers a seaside landscape in radioactive fumes. Interspersed with reflections on the redemptive power of art, including a richly textured tribute to Vincent van Gogh (played by Martin Scorsese), Akira Kurosawa's Dreams is both a showcase for it's maker's imagination at it's most unbridled and a deeply personal lament for a world at the mercy of human ignorance.