Sound of Metal (Criterion Collection) - DVD

In 1959, repressed professor Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver) journeyed to a Nevada ranch to gain solitude-and perhaps the divorce she was mulling-and found herself slowly becoming attracted to her landlord's free-spirited and openly lesbian daughter (Patricia Charbonneau). Moving, eye-opening, and groundbreaking adaptation of Jane Rule's 1964 novel InchDesert of the HeartInch co-stars Audra Lindley, Gwen Welles, Dean Butler. 91 min. Widescreen; Soundtrack English Dolby Digital mono; Subtitles English (SDH); audio commentary; featurettes.

Writer/director David Cronenberg's explicit, controversial adaptation of the J.G. Ballard novel stars James Spader and Holly Hunter as lovers who literally meet by accident, in a highway collision. Their affair draws them into a sexual subculture of fetishists where man and machine, pain and pleasure, and even life and death come together. With Elias Koteas, Rosanna Arquette, Deborah Kara Unger. 100 min. Widescreen (Enhanced); Soundtrack English Dolby Digital 5.1; Subtitles English (SDH); audio commentary by Cronenberg; behind-the-scenes footage; interviews; theatrical trailers; more. Two-disc set.

Written and directed by John Sayles (Lone Star), this wrenching historical drama recounts the true story of a West Virginia coal town where the local miners' struggle to form a union rose to the pitch of all-out war in 1920. When the town of Matewan's miners go on strike, organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper, in his screen debut) arrives to help them, uniting workers white and black, Appalachia-born and immigrant, while urging patience in the face of the coal company's violent provocations. With a crackerjack ensemble cast including James Earl Jones, David Strathairn, Mary McDonnell, and Will Oldham and Oscar-nominated cinematography by Haskell Wexler (In the Heat of the Night), Matewan taps into a rich vein of Americana with painstaking attention to local texture, issuing an impassioned cry for justice that still resounds today.