New on Blu-ray: THE DAY OF THE LOCUST (1975) Starring Donald Sutherland, Karen Black & William Atherton

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Product Description: Academy Award-winner John Schlesinger (Marathon Man) reunites with Midnight Cowboy screenwriter Waldo Salt (Coming Home), a victim of the 1950s McCarthy-era blacklist, to adapt Nathanael West’s acid satire of Hollywood decadence and broken dreams.

Painter Tod Hackett (William Atherton, Looking For Mr. Goodbar), working in the art department of a movie studio during the 1930s ‘golden age’ of Hollywood, falls in unrequited love with aspiring starlet Faye Greener (Karen Black, Five Easy Pieces). He competes for her affections against other men: a pair of cowboys (Bo Hopkins, American Graffiti and Pepe Serna, Scarface), and a forlorn accountant (Donald Sutherland, Invasion of the Body Snatchers). As Faye’s career fails to take her beyond roles as an extra, her life becomes increasingly desperate and her relationships with men take a darker turn, reaching fever pitch at a red-carpet movie premiere that explodes into barbaric chaos.

A bitter critique of tinsel-town’s empty promises and the lost souls cheated by them, featuring lush, dreamlike cinematography by Conrad Hall (In Cold Blood), and stunning performances by its talented cast, The Day of the Locust remains a relevant and shattering experience.

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New on Blu-ray: A KIND OF LOVING (1962) Starring Alan Bates & June Ritchie

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Product Description: The debut full-length feature film from acclaimed director John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy), A Kind of Loving stars Alan Bates as Vic Brown, a young draughtsman whose search for love leads to Ingrid Rothwell (June Ritchie, in her silver screen debut), an employee in the company. Ingrid quickly falls in love with Vicbut when she becomes pregnant, Vic only reluctantly agrees to marry her. Finding himself forced into a life he never wanted, Vic resents Ingrid and the position of sudden responsibility. When Ingrid ends up losing the baby, Vic, spurred on by the acid-tongue remarks of his sour mother-in-law (Thora Hird), makes a decision that could change all of their lives forever.

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New on Blu-ray: VISIONS OF EIGHT (1973) - Documentary - Criterion Collection

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Product Description: In Munich in 1972, eight renowned filmmakers each brought their singular artistry to the spectacle of the Olympic Games—the joy and pain of competition, the kinetic thrill of bodies in motion—for an aesthetically adventurous sports film unlike any other. Made to document the Olympic Summer Games—an event that was ultimately overshadowed by the tragedy of a terrorist attack—Visions of Eight features contributions from MILOŠ FORMAN, KON ICHIKAWA, CLAUDE LELOUCH, JURI OZEROV, ARTHUR PENN, MICHAEL PFLEGHAR, JOHN SCHLESINGER, and MAI ZETTERLING, each given carte blanche to create a short focusing on any aspect of the Games that captured his or her imagination. The resulting films—ranging from the arresting abstraction of Penn’s pure cinema study of pole-vaulters to the playful irreverence of Forman’s musical take on the decathlon to Schlesinger’s haunting portrait of the single-minded solitude of a marathon runner—are triumphs of personal, poetic vision applied to one of the pinnacles

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DVD & Blu-ray: HONKY TONK FREEWAY (1981) Starring William Devane, Beverly D'Angelo and Beau Bridges

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Product Description: Restored in 4K! Something Funny Is Happening on This Freeway! From John Schlesinger, the legendary director of Midnight Cowboy, The Day of the Locust, Marathon Man, The Falcon and the Snowman and The Believers, comes this hilarious road comedy with an all-star cast. Welcome to Ticaw, Florida, a tiny town just off the highway with big dreams of attracting huge tourist dollars. But when construction of the new freeway leaves them without a crucial exit ramp, the desperate townsfolk decide to take motor matters into their own hands. Now with the help of a water-skiing elephant, a rampaging rhino, some well-placed explosives and an invasion of very odd travelers, this busy freeway is about to take one extremely strange detour. Starring Beau Bridges (The Landlord), Hume Cronyn (Lifeboat), Beverly D’Angelo (Finders Keepers), William Devane (Rolling Thunder), George Dzundza (Basic Instinct), Teri Garr (Miracles), Howard Hesseman (Amazon Women on the Moon), Geraldine Page (The Beguiled), David Rasche (Delirious), Daniel Stern (The Milagro Beanfield War) and Jessica Tandy (Still of the Night).

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DVD & Blu-ray: BILLY LIAR (1963) Starring Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie

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Product Description: From John Schlesinger, the acclaimed director of Darling, Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday, The Day of the Locust, Marathon Man and The Falcon and the Snowman, comes this British New Wave comedy-drama starring Tom Courtenay (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The Dresser) and Julie Christie (Doctor Zhivago, Fahrenheit 451). Courtenay gives a flawlessly nuanced performance as Billy Fisher, the underachieving undertaker’s assistant whose constant daydreams and truth-deficient stories earn him the nickname “Billy Liar.” Julie Christie is the handbag-swinging charmer whose free spirit just might inspire Billy to finally move out of his parents’ house. Deftly veering from gritty realism to flamboyant fantasy, Billy Liar is a dazzling and uproarious classic, beautifully shot in black-and-white CinemaScope by Denys N. Coop (The Mind Benders, Rosebud).

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New on Blu-ray: PACIFIC HEIGHTS (1990) Starring Melanie Griffith and Michael Keaton

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Product Description: John Schlesinger directed this upscale horror film about a landlord with the ultimate problem tenant. Patty Palmer (Melanie Griffith) and Drake Goodman (Matthew Modine) are a middle class couple who lie on their financial statement in order to buy an old Victorian house in San Francisco, planning to renovate it and rent it out. Unfortunately, they select as a tenant Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton), a psychotic real estate bargain hunter who plans to drive Patty and Drake into foreclosure proceedings and then buy the house cheap. Carter starts the ball rolling by refusing to pay his rent and driving out a couple who had rented the rear flat by hammering and sawing all night -- and then releasing a tidal wave of cockroaches. What follows is a psychological war between Carter and the Yuppie couple, with Carter succeeding not only in provoking Drake into more extreme means of eviction, but also causing a rift between Drake and Patty.

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New on Blu-ray: THE BELIEVERS (1987) Starring Martin Sheen and Helen Shaver

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Product Description: Recently widowed psychiatrist Cal Jamison (Martin Sheen) has just moved back to New York City with his young son, Chris (Harley Cross), in an attempt to start over after his wife's horrific accidental death. Cal takes an assignment helping the police with the investigation of a cult-like and bizarre ritualistic double murder. As Cal gets closer to the truth, he realizes that he and those close to him may be the target of supernatural and deadly forces, and that the enemy is closer than he knows.

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Classic Movies: MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969) - Criterion Collection

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Product Description: One of the British New Wave’s most versatile directors, John Schlesinger came to New York in the late-1960s to make Midnight Cowboy, a picaresque story of friendship that captured a city in crisis and sparked a new era of Hollywood movies. Jon Voight delivers a career-making performance as Joe Buck, a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy city women; he finds a companion in Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo, an ailing swindler with a bum leg and a quixotic fantasy of escaping to Florida, played by Dustin Hoffman in a radical departure from his breakthrough in The Graduate. A critical and commercial success despite controversy over what the MPAA termed its “homosexual frame of reference,” Midnight Cowboy became the first X-rated film to receive the best picture Oscar, and decades on, its influence still reverberates through cinema.

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