Known for its meticulously considered DVD releases, Criterion outdid itself with its new 20-disc Wes Anderson collection. Containing the director’s first 10 films on 4K UHD DVD, the Anderson Archive brings the auteur’s precise design sensibilities to this stunning box set. At $400, the price dares potential purchasers to wait for one of Criterion’s many 50% off sales. Still, with the holidays around the corner, it’s a hefty, luxurious gift for the extremely lucky Anderson fanatic in anyone’s life, or the perfect start to a burgeoning cinephile’s physical media collection. We highlighted the collection back in the fall, but it bears repeating: This set contains new 4K masters of the director’s first 25 years of output, running from his early breakout Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and Royal Tenenbaums through 2021’s The French Dispatch. His two stop-motion features, Isle Of Dogs and The Fantastic Mr. Fox, appear alongside 25 hours of special features, 10 illustrated books, and new essays from writers Richard Brody, Bilge Ebiri, and Moeko Fujii, as well as filmmakers James L. Brooks and Martin Scorsese. Could we ask for anything else? Sure, Asteroid City and The Phoenician Scheme. For now, this is most satisfactory.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED TWENTY-DISC 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION COLLECTOR’S SET FEATURES
– New 4K digital masters of Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, and The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, supervised and approved by director Wes Anderson, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks
Ten 4K UHD discs of the films presented in Dolby Vision HDR and ten Blu-rays with the films and special features
– Over twenty-five hours of special features, including audio commentaries, interviews, documentaries, deleted scenes, auditions, short films, home movies, commercials, storyboards, animation tests, archival recordings, still photography, discussions/analyses, and visual essays
– English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
– PLUS: Essays by Richard Brody, James L. Brooks, Bilge Ebiri, Moeko Fujii, Kent Jones, Dave Kehr, Geoffrey O’Brien, Martin Scorsese, and Erica Wagner
Isle of Dogs courtesy of our friends at Fox Searchlight, 19 March at AMC Loews Lincoln Square in NYC! If you score passes, arrive early because they usually overbook these things.
As we speculated back in April, Isle of Dogs will open at the 68th Berlin film festival. Isle of Dogs will see daylight on February 15th 2018 at the film festival, shortly after which it’ll be released in theatres in the US, UK and Australia.
I’m most delighted that Wes Anderson will kick off the Berlinale Competition again. Isle of Dogs will be the first animated film to open the Festival – a film that will capture audiences’ hearts with its Wes Anderson charm -Festival Director Dieter Kosslick.
When we made ‘Moonrise Kingdom’, Wes, Roman, Jason, Bill Murray and I all shared a big old house in Newport. It was about as fun as it gets. Like making home movies with your friends in middle school, except it ends up Opening Night at Cannes. We didn’t want it to end so after the premiere we went to Italy for a hang and we’ve kept it up. ‘Grand Budapest’ got handed out for a read the first summer and ‘Isle of Dogs’ was outlined the next. Bill wasn’t with us this summer but we wore his #WilliamMurrayGolf shirts to infuse the idyll with his spirit of fun. And #BMW loaned us incredible rides to get the growing families over the dusty bumpy Tuscan roads to gelato at the town on the hill. If I had to get stranded with a group on an island, I could make it work with these cats.
Along with a release date, Wes Anderson’s next film Isle of Dogs got a new poster today. In the poster a broken down fighter plane is depicted along with its pilot and some dogs.
The film will be released in April (About a year from the time of writing) as was the Grand Budapest Hotel, so it’ll likely first be seen at the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival in February.
