Search - Husbands and Wives on DVD

MPAA Rating: R Content Advisory: Adult Situations, Not For Children, Profanity, Sexual Situations Movie Release: 1992 DVD Release: 04/16/2002 Format: DVD - Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV,Pan and Scan Edition: Dual Layered,Restored/Remastered Audio Tracks: English, French Subtitles: English, French, Spanish SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 1 hrs 43 mins Studio: Columbia TriStar Members Wishing: 17 Genres: Comedy Drama, Satire, Sophisticated Comedy, Urban Comedy, Domestic Comedy

One of Woody Allen's most seemingly biographical films, Husbands and Wives opens with upper-middle class Manhattan couple Sally (Judy Davis) and Jack (Sydney Pollack) announcing to their best friends, the Roths, that they are splitting up. Gabe Roth (Allen) and his wife Judy (Mia Farrow) are taken aback by their casual revelation. Jack begins dating his dim, but sexy, aerobics instructor and Sally starts up a tentative romance with Michael (Liam Neeson). Gabe and Judy begin analyzing their marriage, discovering that they might not be meant to stay together. English professor Gabe begins a serious flirtation with a student of his named Rain (Juliette Lewis) and Judy begins to have feelings for Michael. Eventually, Sally and Jack reconcile, but have not improved their relationship. Gabe and Judy end up going their separate ways. Husbands and Wives was seemingly influenced by Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide

Woody Allen - Gabe Roth
Judy Davis - Sally
Mia Farrow - Judy Roth
Sydney Pollack - Jack
Juliette Lewis - Rain

The reception to Husbands and Wives was initially hurt by (or at the very least, confused with) the very ugly breakup between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, and the fact that the entire film was shot with an often shaky handheld camera. Now that the tabloid fever has died down, this Columbia TriStar DVD release of Husbands and Wives shows that it's one of Allen's best movies. It also helps that it's now commonplace for feature films and TV shows to use handheld cameras extensively. Carlo Di Palma's warm, naturalistic lighting and camera work is actually one of the joys of the picture and is well represented by the disc's anamorphic widescreen transfer. Allen may have once experimented with the look of his pictures, but never with sound, so this disc simply transfers the mono audio track cleanly and evenly and the DVD also offers closed captioning for the hearing impaired. Like all Woody Allen DVDs released so far, there are no real extras to speak of unless you count two trailers. The silver lining to be found in all of this is that Columbia TriStar has released the DVD at a budget price while not skimping on the disc's technical details. ~ Nick Dedina, All Movie Guide