Criterion and other premium blu-ray and 4k releases
Recently, I began revisiting some older films and purchased a few Criterion discs. My first one was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988) but I’ve since purchased a few more and am slowly working my way through my small stack. The amount of special features is sometimes overwhelming! I’ve enjoyed some of the interviews (Carmen Maura from Women, Sheryl Lee from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) but have a lot more to get through. Many include a booklet, too.
I also recently got my hands on two of Peter Greenaway’s films - The Draughtsman’s Contract through Kino-Lorber, and Drowning by Numbers in 4K through Severin. I’m a bit spoilt for choice at the moment but there are still films that I’d like to get the “premium treatment.”
Do you enjoy premium/upgraded versions of movies?
Which special features do you look for?
Is there a film that you’d want to get the “premium treatment” or a 4K remaster?
I've been getting Criterion Collection versions of Japanese and Hong Kong films for a long time now. Sometimes other famous stuff, but Asian films are my focus. I'm not just looking for great directors like Kurosawa, but films that were influential or particularly poignant in that time period. CC is good for that, though they have some "feature creep" going on where they're putting out a lot of modern films that seem way too young to be classics.
Mostly what I value is the included audio commentary (some of which you can toggle over the film). The one that comes with Akira Kurosawa's Dreams in almost the full length of the film and is great. It's similar to the preface that Penguin Classics books provide, with a qualified individual telling you some background or history about the story or author and why it was influential.
About a year ago they released a box set of Ingmar Bergman's works and before that The World of Wong Kar Wai. Those box sets are an interesting way to view film and culture or a director's evolution over time. Stanley Kubrick, too. I'd like to see more sets like this. They're actually pretty reasonably priced (until they sell out and get scalped).
I've backed off on buying so many movies though, because most of CC stuff is 2K and I don't know when or if there's any impetus for them to release upscaled versions. I can't imagine that it'd make a huge difference and I'm not enough of a film buff/collector to care. But for the stuff I don't already have, and there's a lot they released on DVD and not blu-ray, it's given me pause for thought.
Do you have any Hong Kong movies you would recommend? There is so much stuff out of Asia that we just don’t have access to here in the west so I am always interested to see more.
Infernal Affairs (which recently released on CC is a must-watch and has been a favorite of mine since the late 2000s. Several of its actors are and have become really famous.
It was remade by Hollywood into a film called The Departed starring Matt Damon and DiCaprio. The HK film is much better in my opinion. Infernal Affairs got "The Godfather treatment" though, so if you're a purist then ignore the other two films they made to make it a trilogy. I enjoyed them, but the first film can stand firmly on its own.
Also, I'm told that the Criterion Channel is worth the $15/mo subscription if you can binge it, but I don't know if it has the extras that come with the discs. Plus the box art and pamphlets are so nice to have ... and it feeds my need to collect, haha.
Can confirm Criterion Channel is 100% worth the $15, although Kanopy has an arguably wider selection for free with your university or public library card! Still, with the Channel you get content curation (as opposed to algorithmic suggestion) so that really allows you to explore a certain theme or era in filmmaking. Like a few months back they had a Czech New Wave collection and I discovered Daises and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders which both kickstarted a love for Czech New Wave. It does have some extras, but the supplemental material that is on there is pretty much made specifically for the channel, like having filmmakers record segments and curate their own watchlists to be featured on the channel and we get to learn about their inspirations and stuff. Anyways it's great for discovering films before making the jump to buy physical.
It was a super vibrant industry for a while there, so it's hard to boil down to a few recommendations, but here's some stuff that's stuck out for me over a few years of watching tons of HK stuff. Some of these have blu-rays or are on streaming services, but a bunch of them aren't legally available in the US...
A quick laundry list of some other big HK filmmakers to check out: Johnnie To, Stephen Chow, Ann Hui, Mabel Cheung/Alex Law
If you're into action stuff, the list is (of course) insanely long, and a bunch of them are probably already familiar. But still: Sammo Hung, Lau Kar-leung, Chang Cheh, Corey Yuen, John Woo, Yuen Woo-ping, Jackie Chan (obviously), Bruce Lee (obviously). Among a zillion others.
And some drive-by recs of more out there and/or lower budget stuff:
The Cat, Riki-Oh, Angel Terminators 2 (and other Lou Chun-ku movies), Child of Peach (okay, that one's Taiwanese...)
Stephen Chow is actually one of my favorite filmmakers. I love his older comedies. And of course Kung Fu Hustle is a masterpiece, coming from someone who generally loves Kung Fu / Wuxia films.
I don't mind recommendations for Taiwanese or even Chinese movies. I'm a bit more interested in the Hong Kong ones simply because a lot of the movies I've seen that were made there tend to be better than the ones from the other Southeastern Asia countries. Though to be fair, I haven't really seen many that were made in the last 20 years or so, during which time I have actually seen some fantastic ones out of China.
Chow is super fun — my favorite is God of Cookery I think, but there's a bunch I haven't seen. I'll admit that I always feel like there's stuff I'm not getting in his movies since I don't speak the language. I caught Shaolin Soccer at a rep theater (in the US) not too long ago — the laughs from the Chinese speakers in the audience revealed just how many jokes I missed. Definitely plenty of funny stuff in his movies that doesn't need any translation though.
TBH there hasn't been much recent stuff out of Hong Kong that I've been too into — the industry is definitely in a slump these days, and a lot of the big names from there are working in the mainland at this point. I totally agree about Chinese stuff lately. I really dug Black Coal Thin Ice, A Touch of Sin, and Long Day's Journey into Night.
Since no one else has mentioned it I thought I'd bring up Ann Hui's Boat People. Made during the Hong Kong New Wave era:
It's pretty heartbreaking, but also socially fantastic and really endearing as a narrative. Highly recommend.
I don't think I'm emotionally prepared to watch that kind of movie right now, but I'll definitely bookmark this so I can circle back to it when I am.
Maybe not a shocker, but I'm a total Criterion slut. Me and my friends, no matter where we are in the world, always find a way to gather at Barnes & Nobel every July and November to participate in the 50% off Criterion sale. I'm up to three boxsets and 200 blu-ray discs (and Armageddon), it's a problem. And before you ask, yes we are the life of the party lol.
Anyways, I'll sing their praises all day long for making physical media collecting fun through their art, booklets, supplements, and restorations, and for just the preservation and accessibility to films.
When looking for special features in looking for two things: more media and the people who made the movie talking about the movie. Like the release for Eraserhead has 5 or 6 of David Lynch's first short films. Or the release for The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, sidenote: am I the only one who prefers the original to the remake here?) Has some great interviews with Hitchcock before his death talking about his philosophy in filmmaking, suspense in particular, which were super insightful to hear.
As for films that ought get the treatment... my opinions aren't original, but Synecdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufman would have supplements that I would die for, and Happiness by Todd Solondez never got the physical release it deserved (can you tell my favorite actor is Philip Seymour Hoffman?) I'm sure there's more world cinema that's much more deserving if the Criterion treatment, but I usually discover those films through Criterion or Criterion Channel, not the other way around
I couldn’t agree more that “Happiness” needs a good, up to date release. I love this movie and have seen it a dozen times or more. Its in my favorite genre of 1990’s “here’s five different plots lines and/or characters and we are going to show them intersecting together” movie.
I also love Hoffman. Have you seen “Love, Liza”? That one hits me really hard.
Yeah, I scored big-time finding the widescreen DVD at my local DVD shop for $5 (usually goes for like, $50). Even still the quality leaves... a lot to be desired. Would have loved to see it in a theater, but I was a mere concept at the time of release. Solondz's films in general I feel like are strangely difficult to get a hold of, at least in good quality, for how popular they are in the film community.
I have not heard Love Liza, but now I've got something to hunt for next time I hit up my local DVD shop!
I was already onboard with Hoffman at top billing, but this Letterboxd review sold it to me:
I agree about Solondz being hard to find. I love all of his movies. To me, he seems to inhibit the same space as Gregg Araki in public/movie consciousness with the same sort of notoriety but difficulty in finding releases. That was a great score on the “Happiness” DVD!
LOL at that review! But, yeah - thats pretty much the premise. He plays depressed very well.
I bugged CC on social media for years to put John Sayles’ “Matewan” in the collection. They finally did a couple years back, and I like to kid myself that I had something to do with it.
Now I’ve moved on to George Cukor’s 1939 fast talking dazzler “The Women.” That sumbitch needs to get the Criterion treatment.
As a sidenote, a lot of Criterion Collection films (if not all) are available through Kanopy which is available to me through my library. I am using Houston's Public Library as an out-of-state member.
I've been building my collection of physical media for a few years now, and I love Criterion's work in particular.
A fun special feature I've encountered is the inclusion of multiple edits. I know Criterion has done this with some of Terrence Malick's films. Their release of The New World has three cuts (first, theatrical, extended), and their release of The Tree of Life has two (theatrical and extended). Anyone know of any other releases like this, which include more than one cut?
Another feature is simply the packaging itself. The artwork and booklet of essays is usually top notch. The "digipak" releases tend to have the most physical goodies such as folded up posters, cast photos, and paper versions of the movie's props. My favorites of these are Dr. Strangelove and Moonrise Kingdom.
One film I'd been hoping would get the "Criterion treatment" was Klimov's Come and See, and that wish was granted recently (err, is 2020 still "recent"?). The restoration, while still only 2K, is so much better than the early 2000s Kino Lorber DVD I'd seen first. That one might have even had burned in subtitles IIRC.
And one film I'm still hopeful will get the "treatment" is Malick's Voyage of Time. It's a documentary of sorts, and there are two versions of it that have played to audiences: a shorter IMAX version narrated by Brad Pitt and a longer 35mm version narrated by Cate Blanchett. I caught the former streaming on MUBI once, but have never seen the latter. This would be a perfect opportunity for a Criterion release, as they already have a working relationship with Malick, and notably one in which they've released multiple cuts of his films.
I'm a huge sucker for commentary tracks, that's the biggest thing I miss from the age of buying DVDs and Blu-rays.
Streaming services have no incentive to load up on extra content. Disc sales used to be a second bump of money for the production, bringing many movies from red to green on the balance sheet so the studios were incentivised to load them up with commentary tracks and behind the scenes material.
Now commentaries are a lost art and BTS stuff is just shoved on YouTube and TikTok to get people to subscribe to the service.
I'm so bummed that commentary tracks are disappearing. Streaming services already support different audio tracks anyway, and these have to be among the quickest and cheapest special features to make — I don't get why they don't do them at least sometimes.
It's great they're still around on fancy blu-ray releases. The Uncut Gems track on the Criterion release was a recent standout for me. Super funny, with some great little details and some real insights.
I still hold out hope that some day PT Anderson’s films are given their just dues. Boggles me that I had to import his film “Hard Eight” from the UK if I wanted better than an old DVD.
Bogdonavich could also use a lot of love. A big ‘ol Bergman-sized boxset that also includes a trove of all of his interviews and commentaries. His knowledge of film and the relationships he had with film greats is unparalleled. With his death and his movies falling further out of availability there is a lot that could be on offer here and not just lost like a lot of it is now. I’d even just settle for a boxset of just all of his films instead of this goofy mishmash of digital, import, DVD and Criterion releases.
I love Criterion (about 150 releases on my shelves) but some of there recent releases especially in the 4K category have been hit or miss in my opinion.
Personally, I hate how impossible it is to find lesser known American movies from the 1920s-40s. I do realize that they won’t make money by releasing them so they won’t but these films need to be proper preserved and they are vanishing from the public. TCM may show some of them (for now), WB may release a burned DVD-R of some and others live in various 360p video files on Russian download sites.
For the old films that have fallen into the public domain, the Internet Archive has quite a few films. I don't know how well they're labeled by year, but the filter suggests that they have thousands of films (short and feature-length) from 1920-'39. It's worth a look.
I have some films from Criterion and some from Arrow. I've thought about buying stuff from Vinegar Syndrome but blind buying that stuff is more of a gamble than the other two since there's at least some form of quality control from Arrow.
I buy physical media, I never actually open and play them. I just like having the boxes. I recently bought The Celebration from the B&N sale to replace the DVD copy I had of it (which was really just a pirated version of the film). It's a problem I have where I don't really re-watch films. I prefer watching films I've never seen before rather than re-watching my favorites.
Loosely related: I feel like watching the bootleg pirated version of a Dogme 95 film is the best way to watch a Dogme 95 film