Episode Details

A Serious Disc Agreement is the only "serious" podcast on the Australian Internet about "Movie Disc Culture."

Alexei Toliopoulos (Finding Drago, Total Reboot) and Blake Howard (One Heat Minute) are expanding their IMPRINT COMPANION podcast to include the best physical media releases worldwide. For this episode, Blake and Alexei discuss Bill Duke's incredible Deep Cover from the Criterion Collection and have a general "Criterion Catch-Up" on the first batch of UHDs.

Deep Cover

Film noir hits the mean streets of 1990s Los Angeles in this stylish and subversive underworld odyssey from veteran actor-director Bill Duke. Laurence Fishburne stars as Russell Stevens, a police officer who goes undercover as “John Hull,” the partner of a dangerously ambitious cocaine trafficker (Jeff Goldblum), in order to infiltrate and bring down a powerful Latin American drug ring operating in LA. But the further Stevens descends into this ruthless world of money, violence, and power, the more disillusioned he becomes—and the harder it is to make out the line between right and wrong, crime and justice. Steeped in shadowy, neon-soaked atmosphere and featuring Dr. Dre’s debut solo single, Deep Cover is an unsung gem of the nineties’ Black cinema explosion that delivers a riveting character study and sleek action thrills alongside a furious moral indictment of America and the devastating failures of the war on drugs.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interview with director Bill Duke
• AFI Conservatory seminar from 2018 featuring Duke and actor Laurence Fishburne, moderated by film critic Elvis Mitchell
• New conversation between film scholars Racquel J. Gates and Michael B. Gillespie about Deep Cover’s place within both the Black film boom of the early 1990s and the noir genre
• New conversation between scholar Claudrena N. Harold and professor, DJ, and podcaster Oliver Wang about the film’s title track and its importance to the history of hip-hop
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by Gillespie
• 
  
• New cover illustration by Ngabo “El’Cesart” Desire

Citizen Kane

In the most dazzling debut feature in cinema history, twenty-five-year-old writer-producer-director-star Orson Welles synthesized the possibilities of sound-era filmmaking into what could be called the first truly modern movie. In telling the story of the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of a William Randolph Hearst–like newspaper magnate named Charles Foster Kane, Welles not only created the definitive portrait of American megalomania, he also unleashed a torrent of stylistic innovations—from the jigsaw-puzzle narrative structure to the stunning deep-focus camera work of Gregg Toland—that have ensured that Citizen Kane remains fresh and galvanizing for every new generation of moviegoers to encounter it.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and three Blu-rays with the film and special features
• Three audio commentaries: from 2021 featuring Orson Welles scholars James Naremore and Jonathan Rosenbaum; from 2002 featuring filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich; and from 2002 featuring film critic Roger Ebert
• The Complete “Citizen Kane,” (1991), a rarely seen feature-length BBC documentary
• New interviews with critic Farran Smith Nehme and film scholar Racquel J. Gates
• New video essay by Orson Welles scholar Robert Carringer
• New program on the film’s special effects by film scholars and effects