Blu-ray, DVD Release: Time Bandits

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Dec. 9, 2014
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion


Time Bandits movie scene

There’s adventure and fantasy afoot in Time Bandits.

The 1981 adventure fantasy Time Bandits is a energetic and engaging voyage through time and space from Terry Gilliam (Brazil).

In the film, a boy named Kevin (Craig Warnock) escapes his gadget-obsessed parents to join a band of time-traveling dwarves. Armed with a map stolen from the Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson, The Four Feathers), they plunder treasure from Napoleon (Ian Holm, The Lord of the Rings trilogy) and Agamemnon (Sean Connery, The Man Who Would Be King)—but Evil (David Warner, Titanic) is watching their every move.

Featuring a darkly playful script by Gilliam and Monty Python’s Michael Palin (who also appears in the film), Time Bandits is at once a giddy fairy tale, a revisionist history lesson, and a satire on technology gone awry.

Time Bandits Criterion Blu-ray boxThe film has been out in various DVD and Blu-ray incarnations over the past decade; the Criterion Blu-ray and DVD editions contain the following features:

• New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director Terry Gilliam, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary featuring Gilliam, cowriter/actor Michael Palin, and actors John Cleese, David Warner, and Craig Warnock
• New piece narrated by film writer David Morgan and featuring production designer Milly Burns and costume designer James Acheson on the creation of the film’s various historical periods and fantasy worlds
• Conversation between Gilliam and film scholar Peter von Bagh at Finland’s Midnight Sun Film Festival in 1998
• Excerpt from a 1981 appearance by actor Shelley Duvall on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow show
• Trailer
• An essay by critic David Sterritt

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.