Apparently they are releasing on Feb. 9:

Away With Words (Doyle, 1999)
Eagle Shooting Heroes (Lau, 1993)

+
Wong Kar-Wai - Jet Tone Collection
The Laurent Cantet Collection
First Love - Litter On The Breeze

Away With Words and First Love are pleasant surprises -- the first is frankly overwhelming, more or less what you would expect from an untethered '90s-era Doyle; it's wearing after an hour and half, and truth be told, I was hard-pressed to remember more than a few minutes of the film after I finished it, but it's pretty fun eye and ear candy, and I suspect it can look better than the R2J disc I saw. First Love is a different animal, pitched about halfway between a Wong Kar-wai parody and pastiche (borrowing Doyle and a couple of Wong's actors) and works reasonably well as both, although mileage will vary based on your tolerance for Eric Kot (his voice is nails on a chalkboard even when he's not doing the "Eric Kot voice").

Artificial Eye is releasing some more things on March 23rd. Claire Dolan, Chocolat, Let's Talk About the Rain.

...

...and The Wind Will Carry Us.

Ooh! Excellent news. Very much look forward to the Kiarostami and a surely-anamorphic Denis.

Given their track record, is there any reason to think The Wind Will Carry Us won't just be a straight port of the (six-year-old) MK2 release?

Taste of Cherry was, so I doubt this will be different. I haven't actually bought the Mk2 yet (despite the fact that it's been around for half a dozen years), so I hope they port over the second disc of extras too.

Just wondering about the 'A Man Escaped'-dvd-cover. My copy has the same image as the VHS-edition listed at Amazon (and not this image). I prefer the one without Jost.

Thanks for answering this, MichaelB. You can ignore my question in the Ruscico thread, since you've answered it here.

I have the older Ruscico PAL edition, and I assume the picture in the Artificial Eye is identical. If that's the case, the Kino NTSC disc *may* be slightly softer if you do a side-by-side comparison, but I find the difference barely discernible. Otherwise the PAL-NTSC conversion on the Kino disc is actually quite good. If you already own the Kino, the Artifical Eye is probably not worth the upgrade.

DVD Times on The Banishment and Times and Winds

Is it me or AE site isn't updated very often?

Yes. The Artificial Eye site is pretty hopeless.
It hasn't had a refresh for years.
Anyone using a non-skippable splash screen and a home page that is a single image with some mapped links is doing themselves no favours.
My guess is that they have no real content management system so find it very difficult to update the site regularly.
A quick glance at the source code indicates a lack of stylesheets and non-accessibility compliant design and HTML etc. etc.
Nasty.

A real pity given the interest of many of their releases...

DVD Outsider review of The Banishment.

Emm that review states "no sign of compression artefacts" which is not quite true.
The transfer is good but not perfect.
The weirdness noted in the DVD Times review is definitely present. Somewhat glad to see it confirmed by someone else since it is pretty strange.
Some more full size captures here (although not trying to highlight these minor transfer issues).

Those captures look pretty underwhelming to me, and absolutely nothing like the lovely, silvery 35mm print I saw. For such a recent film, surely the transfer should have been a lot better.

Thanks for the reminder about Alexandra, Colin.

That's OK! Sorry, I had taken my message down in the meantime when I realised ellipsis7 had already mentioned the release of the Rohmer film on the last page. Very much looking forward to Alexandra too though!

I've just e-mailed Noel Megahey to ask if they are in fact framegrabs or distributor stills, because he's tended to favour the latter in his other reviews. I'll report back when I hear from him.

(UPDATE: That'll teach me not to read the review properly first! They are actual framegrabs, as acknowledged in the text - though he does say he went out of his way to capture a perceived defect.)

AE are usually exceptionally reliable for contemporary films, but this transfer looks very below-par. No great loss all the same - on the scale of recent abortion films, I'd say that this languishes far behind 4 Months, perhaps somewhere between the The Silence of Lorna (good) and Juno (excruciating).

So far no specs on the upcoming Wong Kar Wai discs?

Here's the Moviemail listings for Ashes of Time: Redux, Chungking Express, Happy Together, and the box set of the three films.

It looks as if Ashes of Time and Chungking Express have interviews and Happy Together has no extra features.

Any confirmation on the region-coding of the Blu Ray of Ashes of Time Redux?

This seems pretty ridiculous if true, since even their previous (horrible) release of Happy Together managed to cough up Buenos Aires Zero Degree -- a fantastic extra IMO.

I just wanted to leave a quick note addressing the quality of the print AE used for The Banishment:

It is very strong, and, as far as I am concerned, lovely-looking for a standard-def replica of the theatrical presentation. Yes, as Noel notes, there are a few tiny compression issues, but in motion this print is probably the best you could expect to get in standard-def.

Also, the Russian disc for Aleksandra, which has been out for almost a year now, is very strong. It is English-friendly as well.

Pro-B

Just viewing AE's disc of Rohmer's ASTREA AND CELADON - barebones package, transfer a bit soft, colour a little desaturated, otherwise fine...

The digital projection (theatrical release) I saw of this was top notch - very sharp and clearly defined. Wonder why it's a bit soft (by DVD standards, presumably) - surely a digital to digital 1.37 transfer wouldn't present much of a problem...?

As for The Banishment - perhaps it's just charaluta's caps, but the transfer looks very compressed (hazy and blotchy) to me, more like a sub-standard avi file than a 35mm print. A good DVD transfer should be closer to the latter, and this looks very little like what I saw in the theatre...