Sirius (BLU-RAY)

A truly marvelous rediscovery courtesy of the National Film Institute (NFI) in Hungary, director Ákos D. Hamza’s SIRIUS is an intensely romantic time-travel film with overtones of the Christopher Reeve/Jane Seymour-starring SOMEWHERE IN TIME and BACK TO THE FUTURE. In the 1940s, a brash Hungarian playboy (László Szilassy) travels back two hundred years with a mad scientist to the mid-18th century world of wigs and pompadours, where he falls in love with a penniless opera singer (Katalin Karády) and makes enemies of all the aristocratic fools he encounters (including his own great-grandfather). But can he make it back to the present before dawn with his new love – or will he lose her forever? One of the first great divas in Hungarian film and music, lead actress Katalin Karády was brutally tortured by the Nazis during WW2 and saved the lives of a number of Hungarian Jewish children who were set to be executed by the Danube River, for which she was posthumously honored by the Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to victims of the Holocaust. Beautifully restored from the original 35mm B&W nitrate negative by the NFI, and released for the first time on Blu-ray in the U.S. by Deaf Crocodile.