Summer is still sizzling and Paramount Home Media Distribution is making waves with the release of Baywatch. This new extended version features outrageous footage not seen in theaters, on 4K Ultra HD Combo Pack and Blu-ray Combo Pack. Take a dip now that the flick has been released.
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When a dangerous crime wave hits the beach, legendary Lt. Mitch Buchannon (Dwayne Johnson) leads his elite squad of badass lifeguards on a mission to prove you don’t have to wear a badge to save the bay. Joined by a trio of hot-shot recruits including former Olympian Matt Brody (Zac Efron), they’ll ditch the surf and go deep undercover to take down a ruthless businesswoman (Priyanka Chopra), whose devious plans threaten the future of the bay.
The Baywatch 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray Combo Packs include both the extended and theatrical versions of the film and are loaded with special features, including interviews with the sensational cast, a look at the “Baywatch” legacy, behind-the-scenes footage of the spectacular stunts, as well as deleted and extended scenes. The film also boasts a Dolby Atmos soundtrack remixed specifically for the home theater environment to place and move audio anywhere in the room, including overhead.
May we serve you a nice cup of tea? Imbibe, as long as the beverage isn’t being served by Mary Ann Cotton. Inspired by the book Mary Ann Cotton: Britain’s First Female Serial Killer by noted criminologist David Wilson, the PBS program Dark Angel(PBS Distribution) dramatizes the events that drew a troubled woman ever deeper into a career of casual murder, while her loved ones and friends, who were also her victims, never suspected a thing.
Joanne Froggatt, who stole the hearts of millions of viewers as Anna, the loving and resilient lady’s maid on Downton Abbey, stars in a totally different role in the spine-tingling two-part drama. Dispensing death from the spout of a warm teapot, Froggatt plays the notorious Victorian poisoner.
A Golden Globe-winner and three-time Emmy nominee for her Downton Abbey performance, Froggatt is joined by an exceptional cast, including Alun Armstrong as Mary Ann’s stepfather, Mr. Stott; Thomas Howes as her husband number two, George; Jonas Armstrong as her longtime lover, Joe; Sam Hoare as husband number three, James; Laura Morgan as her best friend, Maggie; plus additional actors playing other husbands, her many children, and the few citizens who suspect that something is not quite right about Mary Ann.
Born in North East England in 1832, a child of the coalfields, Mary Ann Cotton grew up in poverty with the dream of escaping the hard life of a miner’s family, a goal she came tantalizingly close to achieving. Her chosen means were her good looks, sexual allure, and the dirty secret of nineteenth-century suspicious deaths: arsenic, which is tasteless and easily disguised in a cup of tea.
For authorities, the problem was that arsenic poisoning, if done skillfully, mimicked the symptoms of two of the major public health scourges of the day: typhoid fever and cholera. The passing of a child or husband after a week of severe stomach pains, convulsions, and other portents of disease was all too common—and even less surprising when several members of the same household succumbed.
Mary Ann did tempt fate by taking out a modest insurance policy on her intended victims, whenever possible, but she inadvertently hit on the major success strategies of a serial killer: keep moving, be charming, and exude self-confidence. And along with others in this line of criminality, her body count can never be certain; the current best estimate is at least thirteen, ranking her far above her Victorian male counterpart, Jack the Ripper.
Female serial killers are so rare that criminologists continue to debate what makes them tick. Is it a thirst for power, a desire for material gain, or a sadistic delight in undermining gender stereotypes when they ask, “Why don’t I make you a nice cup of tea?”
Shot on the stunningly beautiful Ards Peninsula Ards Peninsula in Northern Ireland, My Mother and Other Strangers(PBS Distribution) portrays the culture clash when a U.S. bomber base is established near the fictional village of Moybeg in 1943, bringing hundreds of gum-chewing, swing-band-listening American airmen to a remote Ulster farming community, with its winsome women and stolid workingmen.
The action is framed from the point of view of a young boy, Francis Coyne, whose childhood is populated by strangers. On the one hand, there are the friendly Americans in their Jeeps and airplanes, who treat him like a little brother.
Then there is his mother, Rose, an upright Englishwoman who married Michael Coyne and moved to his hometown, Moybeg, where she is raising their three children, teaching in the village school, and tending a grocery shop next to Michael’s pub. Despite being a pillar of the community, Rose has never fit in. She speaks more properly than the locals, loves English literature, and has a lively interest in the wider world.
Into this isolated domain comes Captain Ronald Dreyfus, U.S. Army Air Forces, who encounters Rose during a walk on the heath. When they meet again, he quotes her a line from Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”—one of her favorite poems.
Captain Dreyfus is as reserved as Rose is. But in his capacity as base liaison officer, he has occasion to see her frequently: dealing with a fracas between airmen and regulars at the pub, arranging for an army nurse to care for a sick child, and planning a Christmas party for the school.
Both would-be lovers fight against the stronger feelings that are overwhelming them—emotions that are increasingly evident to those around them.
Wary of betraying her husband, Rose feels seized by some otherworldly force, a sentiment she can only recognize from a piece of literature—Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights—which she quotes from memory: “Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”
During its recent UK broadcast, viewers and critics were deeply moved by this bittersweet tale. “No other recent drama has captured quite so keenly a sense of the complex, hidden, unspoken desires that can roil away beneath even the quietest surface,” wrote the reviewer for The Telegraph.
Filmed over the course of several intense months, from deep winter to early summer, Great Yellowstone Thaw: How Nature Survives (PBS Distribution) intercuts the stories of several different animal families—including wolves, bison, grizzlies, beavers and great gray owls. The program follows the animals in the Yellowstone ecosystem as they emerge from winter’s cold and adapt to an early spring thaw, before encountering the soaring summer temperatures. From winter to summer, Yellowstone’s temperature typically swings 140 degrees.
Dr. Kirk Johnson, Sant Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and a renowned paleontologist and author, hosts the program. Johnson and a team of Yellowstone experts explore how these animals fend off floods, starvation, and fires, as well as the area’s extreme evolution from cold to heat during the spring season. The program showcases the extraordinary survival instincts Yellowstone’s natural species possess. Viewers will learn how the early thaw brings the bears of the Rocky Mountain region out of hibernation prematurely, creating concern over food supply. The wolves, which have recovered from their extinct status in the 1990s, are now beginning to thrive, but the fluctuating temperatures pose a threat to the species once again. While the beavers have to make their homes in freezing rivers, the great gray owls must migrate to find food in thawed areas in order to survive.
Remember the parasite threat from season one of Fortitude? It is gone, but the residents are still fleeing the Arctic town in droves. Cut off from the mainland, those who remain in Fortitude battle on. However, in the wilderness, nature is growing restless and unpredictable. When the sky turns red, locals fear it is a bad omen for the town.
Welcome to Public Media Distribution’s Fortitude Season 2 on Blu-ray and DVD. The new series sees Dennis Quaid, Ken Stott Parminder Nagra, Robert Sheehan and Michelle Fairley join its stellar international cast.
Having disappeared after shooting Elena, Sheriff Dan Anderssen (Richard Dormer) is presumed dead. Vincent (Luke Treadaway) remains traumatized by his attack and Hildur (Sofie Grabol) struggles to hold on to her marriage, and her office. Eric (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson) fails to step into Dan’s shoes, leaving Ingrid and Petra to police a fragile community. New faces are pulled into Fortitude’s vortex, including Ingrid’s stepfather Michael (Quaid). A fisherman, he is desperate to raise funds to buy treatment for his dying wife, and desperate times call for desperate measures.
At the research center, ambitious newcomer Dr. Surinder Khatri (Nagra) spots an opportunity that encourages her to push both medical and ethical boundaries. Then, a horrendous death rocks Fortitude. What looks like a careless accident involving a snowplow turns out to be a barbaric murder. As the police team investigate, a strange new figure appears hell-bent on destroying an evil spirit he believes has descended upon Fortitude and its inhabitants. There’s a demon amongst the herd and it has to be stopped, no matter what the consequences . . .
In the mood for a madcap comedy, “an ingeniously intricate goofball comedy that evokes heroes of legend while bringing sociological abstractions to mucky life”, as New Yorker scribe Richard Brody calls it? Look no further than The Treasure(IFC), coming to DVD on September 19.
The Cannes prize-winning charmer from acclaimed director Corneliu Porumboiu spotlights a hunt for buried treasure that sends two men on a surprising comic caper. Costi (portrayed by Cuzin Toma) is a workaday family man whose cash-strapped next-door neighbor (Adrian Purcarescu) makes him an intriguing proposition: Help him find the fortune reportedly buried somewhere on the grounds of his family’s country home and split the profits. But as the two men dig, they unearth more than they bargained for, excavating not only dirt, but traces of Romania’s often tumultuous history. Part modern-day fable, part profound social commentary,The Treasure confirms Porumboiu’s status as second scribe (Scott Foundas of Variety) gushes that the director is “one of our great contemporary observers of the human comedy”
Have you ever wanted a second chance? To give someone a gift you weren’t able to give? Tell them you loved them one last time? These are the questions at the heart of Chicago native writer/director Kenneth Mader’s award-winning sci-fi thriller Displacement (All Channel Films), a character-driven time travel story that explores themes of love and loss, the power of forgiveness, and the consequences of turning back the clock.
The flick stars Courtney Hope, Bruce Davison, Susan Blakely, Sarah Douglas, Lou Richards and Christopher Backus.
“The response to the film in theatrical, digital and festival release around the country has been great,” says Mader, “and I’m thrilled to be able to bring it to DVD fans nationwide.”
Grieving over the death of her mother (Blakely) to cancer, Cassie must find a way to reverse the anomaly and solve the mystery of Brian’s death, all while avoiding a shadowy group that is dogging her every move, sending Cassie on a journey that will shake her very core, setting off a chain of events that brings her to the brink of complete emotional and physical collapse.
In order to untangle the anomaly, Cassie seeks counsel from her old physics professor (Davison), encounters her estranged physicist father (Richards) and finds herself being repeatedly interrogated by the mysterious Dr. Miles (Douglas) all of which reveal clues that lead her further down a path toward discovery and potential redemption. But at how steep a price?
It’s the summer of 1967, and the effects of the Cold War and ’60s counterculture are being felt in Oxford. It has barely been two weeks since the events depicted in the season three finale, and we find Oxford’s finest picking up the pieces of their personal and professional lives. Endeavour waits to hear the result of his Sergeant’s Exam, and self-medicates to numb his heartache over Joan, but whisky and Tännhauser will only get a man so far. Meanwhile, Thursday and Win deal with their own sense of grief. Their home is empty, Sam gone to the Army and Joan . . . who knows where?
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Welcome to Masterpiece Mystery: Endeavour Season 4 will be available on DVD and Blu-ray on September 5. The program will also be available for digital download. Save the date!
A description of each of the episodes from Season 4 is listed below.
Game Endeavour, struggling with Joan Thursday’s sudden departure, finds himself consumed by a nightmarish hunt for a serial killer. He must race against time to find the connection between a chess-playing “thinking” machine and a baffling drowning.
Canticle When morality advocate Joy Pettybon receives a death threat, Endeavour must protect her at all costs. But the arrival of a rebellious band, The Wildwood, quickly drags Endeavour into a bloody war of social attitudes that just had its first fatality.
Lazaretto Whispers of a cursed ward at the local hospital and a seemingly innocuous death begin a chain of events that leads Endeavour to investigate the dark depths of the hospital, its staff and its patients. Meanwhile, he is forced to confront his own ghosts as he discovers a chilling secret.
Harvest The extraordinary discovery of a 2,000-year-old body reveals a new lead in a missing person case. Endeavour and Thursday must investigate the eerie village of Bramford, where nature is pitted against man and pagan rites hide nuclear mysteries.
Remember the controversy? The first photo of Scarlett Johansson as Major Motoko Kusanagi in the film Ghost in the Shell [below] was released and fans and fanatics cried that the casting of the live-action adaptation of Masamune Shirow’s manga series was “another Hollywood whitewashing incident.”
Steve Paul, one of the flick’s producers left his shell and promised “everybody is going to end up being really happy with it, when they see what we’ve actually done with it. I don’t think anybody’s going to be disappointed.”
You decide now that Ghost in the Shell is available on4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray 3D and Blu-ray Combo Packs from Paranount Home Entertainment.
Manga maniacs know the story: Major (Johansson), who believes she was rescued from near death. The first of her kind, Major is a human mind inside an artificial body designed to fight the war against cyber-crime. While investigating a dangerous criminal, Major makes a shocking discovery . . . the corporation that created her lied about her past life in order to control her. Unsure what to
believe, Major will stop at nothing to unravel the mystery of her true identity and exact revenge.
Says Scarlett: “I think when you have a character that’s so beloved, people have a lot of opinions about these characters that they love and grew up with and are inspired by and so forth. I try to kind of clean the slate and really follow my instincts with the character and hope that I give the character as much integrity as people expect,. Bringing these pages to life is a kind of challenge. Because you can’t rip it off the page, it’s totally different. You’re playing it as a–it’s not really a person, but it’s a human brain, it’s someone who’s having this life experience. Which is very different from just ripping stuff off from the manga.”
Following a successful and acclaimed U.S. theatrical release, Cohen Media Group will release Katell Quillévéré’s Heal the Living on Blu-ray, DVD and digital platforms on August 29, 2017.
Director and co-writer Quillévéré’s film, adapted from the Booker Prize-longlisted novel by Maylis de Kerangal, is an elegant and moving drama about families brought together by shocking news. Quillévéré carefully weaves together three seemingly unrelated stories: a French teenager and his friends on a surfing road trip that leads to tragedy; a woman in another town who learns that her weak heart is beginning to fail and action must be taken; and two teams of doctors and medical experts who struggle through their day-to-day attempts to save lives.
These plot threads are tied together in unexpected ways, creating an emotionally intense drama involving estranged parents, family secrets and a tragic accident. Ultimately, Heal the Living is an impassioned story of personal connections that philosophically, spiritually and literally plumbs the depths of the human heart.
Emmanuelle Seigner, Tahar Rahim, Anne Dorval and screen newcomer Gabin Verdet star in this moving and eloquent film.
The film was an Official Selection at the Venice Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. It has received widespread praise, both for its stylistic innovation and its emotional power.
Bonus features on the Blu-ray and DVD include an interview with director Katell Quillévéré.
