Hopefully this is official after a decade.

Another mystery title is a "Kurosawa Box Set" featuring High and Low, Bad Sleep Well and Stray Dog.

Hmmm...announcements tomorrow? They're backed up on newsletter clues too. Assuming that Che is on tap for November, and Mysterious Monument Valley Odyssey for December, should I expect them to announce Wings of Desire, Cronos, Monsoon Wedding, and the Rossellini War Trilogy tomorrow? And of course People On Sunday and Red Balloon et al. were due a year ago.

And Criterion briefly had a "Bunuel's French Films" boxset listed in one of their "Shelves" ages ago.

I get the impression (and I'm sure I'm not alone) that some of those promised titles will be pushed back to 2010, though I'd love to be proven wrong. Or, maybe they'll break precedent and release an increased number of titles in December. Either way, October and November should be pretty stacked. Cronos and Wings of Desire seem like a given for October. Looking forward to seeing what else they have in store.

I kind of like the December "slow month." They often release something either obscure or great (or both!). Like Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Two Takes (loved it, incidentally) or Two-Lane Blacktop.

Kurosawa's Noir?

DVD Empire has been listing Strike as coming soon for years. (The "years" is not a figure of speech.) Last I heard the Eisenstein set ran into source problems. I'd love to see that set but have always wondered what Criterion would call it, since Ivan and Nevsky were The Sound Years. Eisenstein: The Silent Years sounds liuke a biography of Eisenstein in exile.

Sergei Silenstein?

Excepting Monsoon Wedding, that'd actually be a pretty good release month. I think they'll have to release Cronos in October, Che the big release in November.

Anything barring Monsoon Wedding and a new Chasing Amy coupled with two old-new Blu(s) would be an improvement on last month. Cry.

I was expecting Wings of Desire to be announced back in May.... Jeff's right; we do have a glut of newsletter-clue-releases coming.

The Silent Eisensteins have been rumored for a while. I seem to remember reading (someone on this forum, I think) that Potemkin was originally slated for inclusion (which would have been awesome). And yet Kino got a it a few years ago. Whatever the reason, I've attributed that to the box set's delay.

I just saw October last week and would be very happy with a "Eisenstein's Remaining Silents" box set.

The Silent box is one of those ancient rumors. And Potemkin could still be included in the set; I believe it's a film no one owns the rights to, just rights to the good prints. So it's back to an issue of sources, which I doubt will be cleared up soon.

I'm guessing: Wings of Desire, Cronos (Halloween), Walkabout, and hoping for either Shanghai Express or The War Trilogy.

I'm banking on that Naruse-Hayashi Eclipse set as usual.

Any chance we'll see the Andrei Rublev reissue before the end of the year?

revanche seems a possibility for October as well. Cronos seems certain (for halloween), hopefully Walkabout on Blu.

With all these releationships with studios and out-of-print DVD, I wounldn't be surprised with we end up with several surprises that went overlooked past our radar.

Eclipse set of early Joe Pesci/Frank Vincent films

Yup: that's pretty much how it's described.

Or 'All of Eisenstein's Silent Films Except the One You've Heard Of'? If Strike is coming, that's fantastic news, by the way: we've only had one silent (apart from some Painleves) this year

Looks like no announcement today. Strange.

However, in the interest of rumor-mongering:

I briefly saw a link to a FISHING WITH JOHN Blu-Ray.

I guess "end of the week" (or "start of the week") trumps "15th of the month" when it comes to announcements. Dag...

Fishing with John on Blu? I've got nothing against the movie, but, if that is true, they sure are making some odd choices to go to Blu-Ray. I got my Blu For All Mankind this morning, and I'm looking forward to watching it on Monday, thanks in part to Chris's glowing review of it, but grainy 16mm scientific source footage doesn't exactly cry out for HD. Neither does an off-beat TV series like Fishing with John.

To their credit, they've got Kagemusha coming, and they tried for Ran (which I am still dearly hoping will be resolved soon). As has been said here before, I doubt they're sitting around with the Blu rights to The Seven Samurai, just waiting for the right time....

And I wouldn't have expected The Seventh Seal to a needed Blu-ray release, yet it's one of the best in my library.

16mm has a lot more detail than DVD has to offer, but more than anything I like the way 16mm looks because of the film grain, and with Blu-ray, film grain looks a lot more like film grain.

To me, whether a film is "crying out for blu-ray" has a lot more to do with how much the film depends on its visuals. Really? Fishing with John?

Yeah when a film like Amarcord goes Blu you know they are getting serious with pushing their best stuff towards that line. Also surprising that Seven Samurai hasnt gone Blu yet, and that is their most known product in any type of film circle, academic, entertainment, what have you.

Army of Shadows, Double Life of Veronique, Fanny and Alexander, and Mishima would also be great candidates for Blu. Not sure how profitable they would be, but I'm guessing they would garner quite a bit of attention, even from those who own the SD.

Come on people, don't be so hard on FWJ. I would personally love a Blu-ray of the film, especially if I could be in one of the (new) episodes. But I wouldn't be surprised if a new package, barring that the people who work for the CC are earning their keep, and could put together a new release with material that I guarantee, (could) blow all your socks off. And take you all "fishing" once again.

Ah, well, maybe they all came in this morning and said, hey, wait, those Forum guys are right, everything we've been working on IS crap ... and started over from scratch.