OTHELLO (1951 CRITERION)

Gloriously cinematic despite its tiny budget, Orson Welles's Othello is a testament to the filmmaker's stubborn willingness to pursue his vision to the ends of the earth. Unmatched in his passionate identification with Shakespeare's imagination, Welles brings his inventive visual approach to this enduring tragedy of jealousy, bigotry, and rage, and gives a towering performance as the Moor of Venice, alongside Suzanne Cloutier as the innocent Desdemona, and Micheál MacLiammóir as the scheming Iago. Shot over the course of three years in Italy and Morocco and plagued by logistical problems, this fiercely independent film joins Macbeth and Chimes at Midnight in making the case for Welles as the cinema's most audacious interpreter of the Bard.

Special Features and Technical Specs:

• NEW, restored 4K digital transfers of two versions of the film, the 1952 European one and the 1955 U.S. and UK one, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-ray
• NEW interview with Welles biographer Simon Callow
• NEW interview with scholar François Thomas on the two versions
• NEW interview with Ayanna Thompson, author of Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America
• Audio commentary from 1995 featuring filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich and Orson Welles scholar Myron Meisel
• Return to Glennascaul, a 1953 short film made by actors Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton
• Edwards during a hiatus from shooting Othello
• Souvenirs d'"Othello," a 1995 documentary about actor Suzanne Cloutier by François Girard
• Interview from 2014 with scholar Joseph McBride
• Optional English SDH subtitles
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Geoffrey O'Brien