Tuesday Releases: The Little Stranger & Searching

Official Synopsis: After David Kim’s (John Cho) 16-year-old daughter goes missing, a local investigation is opened and a detective is assigned to the case. But 37 hours later and without a single lead, David decides to search the one place no one has looked yet, where all secrets are kept today: his daughter’s laptop. In a hyper-modern thriller told via the technology devices we use every day to communicate, David must trace his daughter’s digital footprints before she disappears forever.

• “Changing The Language Of Cinema”
  
• “Update Username: Cast and Characters”
  
• “Searching For Easter Eggs”
  
• “Audio Commentary with Aneesh Chaganty & Sev Ohanian”

Official Synopsis: Orson Welles’s beautiful, nostalgia-suffused second feature—the subject of one of cinema’s greatest missing-footage tragedies—harks back to turn-of-the-twentieth-century Indianapolis, chronicling the inexorable decline of the fortunes of an affluent family. Adapted from an acclaimed Booth Tarkington novel and featuring restlessly inventive camera work and powerful performances from a cast including Joseph Cotten, Tim Holt, and Agnes Moorehead, the film traces the rifts deepening within the Amberson clan—at the same time as the forces of progress begin to transform the city they once ruled. Though RKO excised over forty minutes of footage, now lost to history, and added an incongruously upbeat ending, The Magnificent Ambersons is an emotionally rich family saga and a masterful elegy for a bygone chapter of American life.

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Two audio commentaries, featuring scholars Robert L. Carringer and James Naremore and critic Jonathan Rosenbaum
• New interviews with film historians Simon Callow and Joseph McBride
• New video essay on the film’s cinematographers by scholar François Thomas
• New video essays by scholars François Thomas and Christopher Husted
• Director Orson Welles on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970
• Segment from a 1925 silent adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons
• Audio from a 1978 AFI symposium on Welles, and audio interviews with Welles conducted by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich
• Two Mercury Theatre radio plays: Seventeen (1938), an adaptation of another Booth Tarkington novel by Welles, and The Magnificent Ambersons (1939)
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by critic Molly Haskell and (Blu-ray only) essays by authors and critics Luc Sante, Geoffrey O’Brien, Farran Smith Nehme, and Jonathan Lethem, and excerpts from an unfinished 1982 memoir by Welles

New cover by Eric Skillman

Official Synopsis: Music icon David Byrne was inspired by tabloid headlines to make his sole foray into feature-film directing, an ode to the extraordinariness of ordinary American life and a distillation of what was in his own idiosyncratic mind. The Talking Heads front man plays a visitor to Virgil, Texas, who introduces us to the citizens of the town during preparations for its Celebration of Specialness. As shot by cinematographer Ed Lachman, Texas becomes a hyperrealistic late-capitalist landscape of endless vistas, shopping malls, and prefab metal buildings. In True Stories, Byrne uses his songs to stitch together pop iconography, voodoo rituals, and a singular variety show—all in the service of uncovering the rich mysteries that lurk under the surface of everyday experience.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION:

• New, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by director David Byrne and cinematogra­pher Ed Lachman, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, supervised by Byrne, on the Blu-ray
• New documentary about the film’s production, featuring Byrne, Lachman, screenwriter Stephen Tobolowsky, executive producer Edward Pressman, coproducer Karen Murphy, fashion-show costume designer Adelle Lutz, casting director Victoria Thomas, consultant Christina Patoski, actor Jo Harvey Allen, and artist and songwriter Terry Allen
• CD containing the film’s complete soundtrack, compiled here for the first time (Blu-ray only)
• Real Life (1986), a short documentary by Pamela Yates and Newton Thomas Sigel made on the set of the film
• No Time to Look Back, a new homage to Virgil, Texas, the fictional town where True Stories is set
• New documentary about designer Tibor Kalman and his influence on Byrne and work on the film, featuring Byrne and artist Maira Kalman, Tibor’s widow
• Deleted scenes
• Trailer
• PLUS: Essays by critic Rebecca Bengal and journalist and author Joe Nick Patoski, along with, for the Blu-ray edition, an essay by Byrne; a 1986 piece by actor Spalding Gray on the film’s production; and a selection of production photography, along with Byrne’s tabloid clippings and writing about the film’s visual motifs

New cover based on concepts by Tibor Kalman/M & Co.

Official Synopsis: In the summer of 1948, Dr. Faraday travels to attend to a patient at Hundreds Hall, home to the Ayers family for more than two centuries. The Hall is now in decline and its inhabitants are haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life. When he takes on his new patient, Faraday has no idea how closely, and how disturbingly, the family’s story is about to become entwined with his own. Based on the book by bestselling author Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger stars Domhnall Gleeson (Ex Machina, Brooklyn) and is directed by Oscar-nominated director Lenny Abrahamson (Room).

• Includes a digital copy of The Little Stranger (Subject to expiration. Go to NBCUCodes.com for details.)
• The Power to Haunt
• Inside
• Hundreds Hall

Official Synopsis: In writer/director Colin Minihan’s suspense horror film, lesbian couple Jackie and Jules (Hannah Emily Anderson and Brittany Allen) decide to spend their first wedding anniversary in an isolated cabin in the woods. After Jackie’s childhood friend Sarah and her husband appear, ominous tension explodes into an urgent and desperate struggle for survival.