Is anyone having trouble playing the blu? My LG had no trouble when I popped in two other B blus (The Killers and Boy Meets Girl) but after a dozen tries switching it to Region B it still gives me the region warning menu.

My disc is fine. You can turn off the machine and restart by pressing 2 (=B). I have an LG too. I always turn on my LG by pressing 2, not the power button.

Mine only turns on when I use the power button, but I tried it anyway. No luck that way.

That's really weird - there's nothing special about the region locking on that disc. It sound like a glitch in the multiregion playback feature of your player.

Some of the Region B discs I tried have the region lock screen in video (the video counter is running when the lock screen is shown). So if I get that region lock screen shown in the region A mode, then switch to the Region B mode, the video resumes from where I left off - the region lock screen. In this case, I just start the disc from the beginning (my Oppo gives the option to resume the video or start from the beginning when the play button is pressed), and the disc starts up fine.

I'm not sure if the L'assassino disc has the same kind of region lock screen, though (hope to get the disc soon)...

Mondo Digital.

Observer.

Blu-ray.com:

Arrow made a sound judgement in retaining the Italian title, The Assassin sounds less inviting and far more trad. It conjures images of the Sly Stallone vehicle. *shudder*

I honestly don't know where The Assassin came from - it's never been anything other than L'Assassino for the entire period that I worked on the project, and it was also called L'Assassino when it opened theatrically in Britain in 1963. As far as I'm aware, Arrow has never called it anything else.

A striking debut film. For anyone interested in Elio Petri early works, I also suggest the chapters on Italian nouvelle vague in our recent Titanus book.

Just to say Saimo, of the two marketplace sellers of your impressive looking Titanus book on Amazon, the publisher Edizioni Sabinae has immediate availability however they only ship within Italy on current settings, while Amazon.it itself estimates shipping within 4-6 weeks & no guarantee of availability even at that stage... Any possibility of rectifying these, I wonder?...

OT: the book is already available in many Italian bookshops, so I don't know why Amazon.it estimates 4-6 weeks. I think they will probably dispatch much earlier...

Criterioncast.com.

US version coming in April

US version calls this film The Assassin, presumably to secure a purchase from that old forum member Trees.

Trees' face when he checks the Arrow release