Jan 2010
Humbled and re-energised
We’re extremely humbled by the support that The Masters of Cinema Series has received in some of the big year-end best-of-2009 polls that have hit various media within the last few weeks.
Home Cinema Choice magazine in the UK voted MoC “DVD Label of the Year” in their January issue, and singled out our recent Blu-ray and DVD editions of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans as the “Best Remastering” of the past year.
We were likewise very honoured to learn that the weekly cultural staple Time Out London had acknowledged our releases of Maurice Pialat’s La Gueule ouverte (which package includes nine other shorter Pialat films!) and Al Reinert’s For All Mankind as the #1 and #2 DVD releases of the year, respectively.
The UK’s Sight & Sound magazine asked numerous contributors to list their best DVDs of 2009, and over ten of our 2009 releases were chosen here.
Writers for DVDOutsider and DVDTimes also chose a number of our 2009 releases in their end of year roundups.
Our theatrical releases this year have also been mentioned in end of year roundups, Tokyo Sonata by John White at DVDTimes, and Soul Power (second best film of the year) by Jason Solomons at the Guardian (the Soul Power DVD was picked out by the Metro).
Last but certainly not least, the cumulative votes by contributors of the DVDBeaver DVD and Blu-ray of the Year 2009 global poll ranked our release of The Complete Fritz Lang Mabuse Boxset as the #1 worldwide DVD release of the year, and our Blu-ray edition of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans as the #1 worldwide Blu-ray release of the year. (Other MoC DVD placings included Antonioni’s Il grido, and Pialat’s La Gueule ouverte and Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble as numbers 8, 12, and 18 best of the year respectively, while our edition of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata garnered mention as the #17 best Blu-ray of the year — alongside nods to superlative releases from our friends at Criterion, BFI, Second Run, and Artificial Eye, among others). In the same poll, The MoC Series was also recognised for “Best Cover Design” for our Complete Fritz Lang Mabuse Boxset; “Best Audio Commentary” for the great David Kalat’s work on our editions of the three Mabuse films and F. W. Murnau’s Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs; and “Best Extras” in the way of the short films by Pialat which accompany the La Gueule ouverte release, and the 80-page book that accompanies our edition of Jean-Luc Godard’s Une femme mariée, fragments d’un film tourné en 1964 en noir et blanc (which book will also accompany the Blu-ray edition out this month).
Among such commendations we stand flabbergastedly grateful — to our supporters and all of our collaborators. We promise our fans a tremendously exciting 2010 and beyond. Our 80th anniversary Blu-ray of Murnau’s City Girl has given us goosebumps, and we can’t wait to share it. A wonderful way to kick off the new decade, in glorious 1080p…