Product Description

A group of bourgeois cosmopolitans are invited to a mansion for dinner and inexplicably find themselves unable to leave, in Luis Buñuel's daring masterpiece The Exterminating Angel. Made just one year after his international sensation Viridiana, this is a furthering of Buñuel's wicked takedown of the rituals and dependencies of the frivolous upper classes, full of eerie and hilarious absurdity.

SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET FEATURES:
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
The Last Script: Remembering Luis Buñuel, a 2008 documentary featuring Jean-Claude Carrière and Jean Luis Buñuel
New interviews with filmmaker Arturo Ripstein and actress Silvia Pinal
Theatrical trailer
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by film scholar Marsha Kinder and a reprinted interview with Buñuel

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9268 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 2009-02-10
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled
• Original language: Spanish
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 94 minutes

Review
Extraordinarily powerful and imaginative. --The Spectator

Review
Brilliant. --Roger Ebert

Customer Reviews

Bunuel's BEST - and that's saying quite a lot.
A brilliant concept if I've ever heard one, Bunuel's finest film involves a group at a dinner party who are inexplicably unable to go home. Absolutely nothing is holding them back -- doors are unlocked, there are no barriers -- but they just can't leave the house. Kind of a precursor to Godard's 1967 masterpiece, WEEKEND, we then witness socialites and the upper-class reduced to barbaric acts of desperation. Although Bunuel claims ANGEL has no literal meaning, his contempt for the rich has never been more obvious, and he would return to similar terrain with 1972's DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE, where dinner guests find themselves unable to sit down and eat. Subtle surreal touches round off this film, as random scenes repeat for absolutely no reason and sheep run about the house; not to mention the frustratingly incomprehensible yet inexplicably appropriate final scenes.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
When invited guests arrive for an elegant dinner party and find themselves unable to leave the dining room, Spanish surreal master Luis Bunuel, enters the undeworld of human desires and relations, peeling the crust of the burgoeis thinking and emancipating the subconcious of all the characters. After three days, hunger, thirst and desperation take over, leaving the semi-savage guests to undergo a formidable transformation of both, mind and spirit. After hearing the disturbing news, the social institutions (police, army, politicians, even other citizens) are unable to even enter the house, moved by the same invisible force. Filmed in 1962 and considered by many his greatest surreal film after L'age D'or, Exterminating Angel gives Bunuel a chance to go back to his cultural roots of the French Surrealism, not allowing culture, education, religion or other institutions to interfere with the content of characterization but to allow his characters to roam free like dreams or sometimes nightmares in a world of pre-fabricated emotions.

Arthur A. Sabina New York END

The real Surreal
For those of you who have never seen a Luis Bunuel film, The Exterminating Angel is both an excellent beginning and one of his very best.

The famous dinner party. The guests that can't leave. The animals (human and otherwise). The dark house. The repeating scenes. All this and more await you.

But it's the camera work that really leaves no doubt that we are seeing the work of a master of masters of the cinema. LB moves right and left, in and out without changing the lens setting, which sets up an erie feeling in perfect relationship to the subject matter of the film. A film not to be missed, and a movie to take a chance on. You won't be disappointed.