New on Blu-ray: CONVERSATION PIECE / GRUPPO DI FAMIGLIA IN UN INTERNO (1974)

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Product Description: This compelling Italian drama by Luchino Visconti stars Burt Lancaster as a misanthropic, retired American professor whose life is changed when an eccentric countess (Silvana Mangano) and her daughter move into his palazzo. Will the professor be sorry he allowed them to sign a yearlong lease once he discovers his old-fashioned values don't quite square with theirs? The international cast also includes Helmut Berger, Claudia Marsani, Stefano Patrizi.

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New on Blu-ray: LUDWIG (1973) Starring Helmut Berger & Romy Schneider

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Product Description: A string of masterpieces behind him – including Ossessione, Senso, The Leopard and Death in Venice – the great Italian director Luchino Visconti turned his attentions to the life and death of King Ludwig II of Bavaria in 1972, resulting in an epic of 19th-century decadence. Dominated by Helmut Berger (The Damned, The Bloodstained Butterfly) in the title role, Ludwig nevertheless manages to find room for an impressive cast list: Romy Schneider (reprising her Elisabeth of Austria characterisation from the Sissi trilogy), Silvana Mangano (Bitter Rice), Gert Fröbe (Goldfinger), John Moulder-Brown (Deep End) and Trevor Howard (Brief Encounter) as Richard Wagner. As opulent as any of Visconti’s epics – Piero Tosi’s costume design was nominated for an Academy Award – Ludwig is presented here in its complete form in accordance with the director’s wishes.

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DVD & Blu-ray: THE DAMNED (1969) Starring Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling - Criterion Collection

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Product Description: The most savagely subversive film by the iconoclastic auteur Luchino Visconti employs the mechanics of deliriously stylized melodrama to portray Nazism’s total corruption of the soul. In the wake of Hitler’s ascent to power, the wealthy industrialist von Essenbeck family and their associates—including the scheming social climber Friedrich (Dirk Bogarde), the incestuous matriarch Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), and the perversely cruel heir Martin (Helmut Berger, memorably donning Dietrich-like drag in his breakthrough role)—descend into a self-destructive spiral of decadence, greed, perversion, and all-consuming hatred as they vie for power, over the family business and over one another. The heightened performances and Visconti’s luridly expressionistic use of Technicolor conjure a garish world of decaying opulence in which one family’s downfall comes to stand for the moral rot of a nation.

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DVD & Blu-ray: L'INNOCENTE (1976) Starring Laura Antonelli and Giancarlo Giannini

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Product Description: Tullio, Giancarlo Giannini, an insatiable aristocrat, grows bored with his timid wife, neglecting her for his exciting mistress. After learning that she is having a torrid affair of her own, he begins to descend into madness.

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DVD & Blu-ray: DEATH IN VENICE (1971) - Criterion Collection

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Product Description: Based on the classic novella by Thomas Mann, this late-career masterpiece from Luchino Visconti is a meditation on the nature of art, the allure of beauty, and the inescapability of death. A fastidious composer reeling from a disastrous concert, Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde, in an exquisitely nuanced performance) travels to Venice to recover. There, he is struck by a vision of pure beauty in the form of a young boy (Björn Andrésen), his infatuation developing into an obsession even as rumors of a plague spread through the city. Setting Mann’s story of queer desire and bodily decay against the sublime music of Gustav Mahler, Death in Venice is one of cinema’s most exalted literary adaptations, as sensually rich as it is allegorically resonant.

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