'The Magnificent Ambersons' Director: Orson Welles (1942) Criterion Collection Blu-ray

Orson Welles' beautiful, nostalgia-suffused second feature - the subject of one of cinema's greatest missing-footage tragedies - harks back to turn-of-twentieth-century Indianapolis, chronicling the inexorable decline of the fortunes of an affluent family. Adapted from an acclaimed Booth Tarkington novel and starring Joseph Cotten, Tim Holt, and Agnes Moorehead.

Special features include:

• Two audio commentaries, featuring scholars Robert L. Carringer and James Naremore and critic Jonathan Rosenbaum
• New interviews with film historians Simon Callow and Joseph McBride
• New video essay on the film’s cinematographers by scholar François Thomas
• New video essays by scholars François Thomas and Christopher Husted
• Director Orson Welles on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970
• Segment from a 1925 silent adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons
• Audio from a 1978 AFI symposium on Welles, and audio interviews with Welles conducted by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich
• Two Mercury Theatre radio plays: Seventeen (1938), an adaptation of another Booth Tarkington novel by Welles, and The Magnificent Ambersons (1939)
• PLUS: An essay by critic Molly Haskell and (Blu-ray only) essays by authors and critics Lucy Sante, Geoffrey O’Brien, Farran Smith Nehme, and Jonathan Lethem, and excerpts from an unfinished 1982 memoir by Welles