Three very different love stories are now available on 4K and/or Blu-ray.
A Man and a Woman — Blu-ray — Criterion
As someone who prides himself on seeing Oscar-nominated performances, I am somewhat ashamed that it took me this long to experience Claude Lelouch’s Academy Award–winning international cinematic triumph, A Man and a Woman, the Grand Prix recipient at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival.
Lelouch had made a series of forgettable movies before he hit big with this sweepingly romantic tale of two widowed single parents who discover each other, amidst the misty backdrop of the Normandy coast.
Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a race-car driver and Anne (Anouk Aimée) is a film-script supervisor. They meet while dropping their respective children off at school and soon find themselves enamored with one another. But are they over their respective spouses?
What makes A Man and a Woman singular is the way Lelouch tells his story, using color photography for exterior shots and black-and-white for interiors (it turns out for financial reason), his remarkable roving camerawork (by the director himself) and the fascinating timefucked editing as well as the famous evocative score by Frances Lai, who won a Golden Globe for this film and would go on to win an Oscar for Love Story.
Oh and, burying the lead, the two magnificent central performances are paramount.
Trintignant became a star after appearing opposite Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim’s infamous 1955 film, And God Created Woman, but A Man and a Woman catapulted him to international fame.
Aimee had already made her mark in two Federico Fellini masterworks that defined the decade, La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 ½ (1963). Lelouch’s film landed her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, after she won the Golden Globe for her lovely performance.
Seeing the film in 2026, it’s a thrilling, mesmerizing, sensory experience. Back in 1966 the film pretty much reignited romantic dramas at a time when films were becoming more politically and socially motivated.
Lelouch would make two sequels with his two stars, A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later in 1986 and The Best Years of a Life in 2019.
Criterion gives this gem the sensational treatment it deserves with a director-approved new 2K digital restoration with uncompressed monaural soundtrack. It looks and sounds fabulous.
Extras include a terrific new interview with the writer-director where he discusses how the movie was shot in three weeks and edited in three weeks as well as the shocking success culminating in his winning an Oscar for Best Story and Screenplay — Written Directly for the Screen (with Pierre Uytterhoeven) and picking up a second Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (although, strangely, this Oscar has always gone to the country and not the director—still today!). Lelouch delivers a fascinating account of how he fell in love with cinema.
The disc also contains a behind the scenes doc made at the time of filming but mislabeled as 1996. Included is great archival footage of Lelouch at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival and C’était un rendez-vous (1976), a short film by Lelouch, with a new introduction.
The filmmaker was genre mixing with A Man and a Woman before it ever became popular. In the Cannes Film Festival profile, he even brings up how we humans genre mix every day, so why not do it in cinema?
https://www.criterion.com/films/34966-a-man-and-a-woman
Somewhere in Time — 4K-UHD — Kino Lorber
Although it’s been frequently recommended to me throughout the years, I managed to avoid seeing Jeannot Szwarc’s Somewhere in Time until just recently. I have always been a fan of the gorgeous score, by John Barry. I tend to listen to it over and over again. But that wasn’t enough to get me to watch the film. Why? I think I was probably swayed by the avalanche of bad reviews it received when it was first released in 1980. As a budding cinephile, I allowed the opinions of certain critics to push me towards certain movies and warn me away from others. Shame on them. And shame on me for allowing the opinion of anyone to stigmatize me from giving a movie a chance.
I’ve learned my lesson. I hope.
Much to my surprise and admitting it has its share of hokey and oddly edited moments, Somewhere in Time proved to be a rich and captivating film that I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s easy to understand why it has such a rabid cult following. A big pooh on the critics that annihilated it way back when!
The plot centers on playwright Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve, coming off of his tremendous Superman success) on the eve of the opening night of one of his stage works. He is approached by an elderly woman who hands him an old gold watch and implores him, “Come back to me.” Eight years later and plagued by writer’s block, he drives back to the Grand Hotel and inside is enchanted by an old photograph of a gorgeous young woman, Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour), a celebrated actress who stayed there in 1912. Richard becomes certain she is the same person as the old woman who gave him the watch and becomes obsessed with going back in time to find her. And he finds a way to do so.
Then we have the leap-of-faith, “Jeff Daniels walks off the screen to speak to Mia Farrow” Purple Rose of Cairo moment where you either buy into or you do not. I mean, we’ve given into cinematic conceits like this one so many times in the past, and for lesser works starring much less bewitching actors. So, why not?
This strange time-travel fantasy-romance refreshingly has no time machines or dumb-ass comic bits like the legion of time-warped films that followed. It doesn’t even bother to explain all-too-well how the journey back in time works. It doesn’t really have to because Reeve does all the heavy lifting for us in the first 45 minutes. We believe he wills his way back to 1912 because his current life isn’t all that special for him to want to stay in 1979. But there’s real love waiting in the past. He just needs to avoid a pesky penny (see the film).
If you’re looking for Back to the Future with all the time-travel hooey and the silly mom-is-hot moments, this is not the film for you. If, however, you are in the mood for a lush, super-romantic love story that transcends time and space and all that jazz, then you will be transported. I was. Shockingly. It was rather magical experience, but the bizarre ending is messily filmed.
Reeve was an intrepid actor who enjoyed taking risks post-and-during his Superman reign, from playing a gay man, opposite Jeff Daniels, on Broadway in Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July in 1980 to playing Michael Caine’s lover in the film version of Deathtrap in 1982 to teaming up with Merchant Ivory on two wonderful films, The Bostonians (1984) and The Remains of the Day (1993). I don’t think he ever got the credit he deserved for his talent. Somewhere in Time was only his third motion picture.
Seymour had a more difficult role. She didn’t have a lot to play with in terms of the script by Richard Matheson. She was more of a dream lover than a real person. But the actress managed to find quite a few shadings.
Seymour’s fame came when she played the Bond gal, Solitaire in Live and Let Die in 1973. Her true talents would really be tapped in Dan Curtis’s masterpiece miniseries, War and Remembrance in 1988-89. The fact that she lost the Emmy for her brilliant work in that limited series is one of the many stains on the television academy.
Somewhere in Time also featured future Oscar-winner, Christopher Plummer and past Oscar-winner Teresa Wright.
And speaking of Oscars the film received one nomination, Best Costume Design (Jean-Pierre Dorléac) which it deserved, but how Barry’s incredible score wasn’t included is a mystery.
Kino Lorber does a swell job with the 4K-UHD disc, a brand new HDR/Dolby Vision Master – from a 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative. Isidore Mankofsky’s stunning cinematography pops. There are two new audio commentaries by novelist/critic Tim Lucas and film historian/writer Julie Kirgo and writer/filmmaker Peter Hankoff as well as an older commentary by Szwarc.
The Blu-ray disc includes a wonderful hour-long doc by Laurent Bouzereau, Back to Somewhere in Time as well as a short featurette on the loyal fan club, both from 2000.
https://kinolorber.com/product/somewhere-in-time-4kuhd
Dead Again — 4K-UHD/Blu-ray – Kino Lorber
In 1991, Kenneth Branagh was awash in the great success of his 1989 screen adaptation of Henry V,which garnered the multi-talented artist two surprise Oscar nominations for acting and directing, and co-starred Derek Jacobi and Emma Thompson, who would both go on to appear in his sophomore directorial effort, Dead Again.
That neo-noir supernatural romance mystery thriller, written by Scott Frank (who would go on to be Oscar-nommed for Out of Sight), centers on a young amnesiac (Thompson) who cannot speak and is haunted by horrific nightmares. L.A. private eye Mike Church (Branagh) is asked by the church to investigate her identity, which leads them to an enigmatic antique dealer/hypnotist (Jacobi) who discovers that the young woman may have a connection to Margaret Strauss (also played by Thompson), a world-famous pianist who was allegedly murdered by her composer husband (Branagh) back in 1948. Breath! The narrative bounces back and forth in time as the viewer is slowly given hints as to what really went down back then, which may be related to the contemporary plot.
Branagh, as he’s shown in recent years with his Agatha Christie adaptations, has a keen sense of how to keep his audience is suspense and sucker-punch surprise them. Scissors play an important role in this film, and I seemed to see them days after my rewatch of this movie.
Also, the chemistry between the two lead actors is palpable.
The film features solid supporting turns by Andy Garcia, Hanna Schygulla and an unbilled Robin Williams.
Matthew F. Leonetti’s glorious camerawork and Patrick Doyle’s bombastic score goes a long way towards keeping us on the edge of our seats.
The only negative is the aging makeup, which hasn’t “aged” well, especially in 4K.
Kino Lorber does a fine transfer job via a brand new HDR/Dolby Vision Master – from a 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative. The look and sound are fab.
Extras are a bit disappointing with only the trailer and two audio commentaries, one by Branagh and the second by screenwriter Frank and producer Lindsay Doran.
The Branagh/Thompson collaboration would continue with two more films, Peter’s Friends (1992) and Much Ado About Nothing (1993) before the couple split later in the decade.
