Four A24s, Part 2: I Saw the TV Glow

It took me a while to get my hands on this one.  I Saw the TV Glow sold out fast upon its initial release last summer.  Apparently they seriously underestimated the demand for this title.  And then it popped up on a few online shops, but in very limited quantities.  So if you didn't snatch it up within the first day of its listing, you missed out again.  An alternative Canadian edition came out, but it was missing the special features, so pass.  By the time A24 finally came out with more copies, my enthusiasm had been sapped, and I was questioning whether I really needed this in my collection anyway.  Sure, I'd enjoyed it when it first came out.  It had some great visuals and some funky, weird moments.  But was it really an "I must own it" masterwork, or just a decent new release I got a kick out of?  So I held off.  But I eventually broke down and threw it in the cart when I was ordering some other titles (watch this space for Parts 3 & 4).  And now that I've revisited it on blu, yes, it is a must own masterwork that I needed in my collection.

2024's I Saw the TV Glow is Jane Schoenbrun's follow-up to the her initial cult hit, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.  That was interesting, but it feels like a warm-up for this far more accomplished work.  This film is directed with a more confident hand, with striking visuals and richly layered performances.  It also has a clever, original premise: where young adults' shared obsession with a young adult horror show (a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Goosebumps) overtake their lives to a shockingly literal degree.  This is obviously, not buried particularly deeply in the subtext, a story about coming out - or not - as trans.  But the themes are so personal and universal at the same time, that they should prove powerful for anyone who's ever repressed a dream.

2024 A24 BD.

A24 slightly mattes this film to a proper 1.85:1, and occasionally pillarboxes it to 1.38:1 for the show-within-the-show scenes.  You might be surprised to hear that this film was shot on 35mm, and it's very well captured and encoded here.  Film grain is consistent and rendered as well as you could ask for on a 1080 blu-ray.  The director refers to this getting a 4k release in the special features, but A24 only sprung for a BD.  That's a little disappointing (again, it seems like they didn't anticipate the audience this film would develop), but as good as this looks, it's hard to complain.  In other hands, this could've looked worse on a UHD.

A24 has also given this an impressive 7.1 TrueHD mix, with an English descriptive track and optional English subtitles.

And the special features are more satisfying than they were on Showing Up, starting with an audio commentary by Schoenbrun and star Brigette Lundy-Paine.  They start off unserious and frankly a little annoying, but as the film unfurls they find their groove and start providing some genuine insight.  Then there's a 'making of,' which is just over ten minutes, but offers a pretty fun look behind the scenes, followed by a collection of deleted and extended scenes.  Like the other A24 releases, this is a digipack housed in a side-loading slipbox and includes six art cards, in this case styled to look like Polaroids.

So it was a bit of a rocky road, but I'm glad I've finally got my grubby little hands on this.

Four A24s, Part 1: Showing Up

To start off the new year, I'm introducing A24 to our label collection with the next short series of posts.  Now, you might be saying, hey dummy, you've already made several A24 posts: The Lighthouse, On the Rocks, You Hurt My Feelings, Zola...  To which I would say, first of all, "dummy?"  Let's try to keep it civil here.  But no, those were all A24 films they released in conjunction with other labels.  These next four discs are from their own in-house label that they sell primarily through their website.  And depending on the title, specialty dealers like Diabolik might stock a few copies; but they tend to sell out of there fast.  Their first release was Krisha on blu-ray in 2017 and they've got BD and UHD releases of The Smashing Machine due out at the end of the month.

We're starting today with 2022's Showing Up on 4k Ultra HD (they do also have a 1080p BD version).  This film has writer/ director Kelly Reichardt reuniting with Michelle Williams, who'd also starred in her films Wendy & Lucy, Meek's Cutoff and Certain Women.  This time they've created what I would call an especially light comedy about the academic art world.  At least that's the milieu; I guess you'd say the story is more just about Williams stay afloat within this world, which is also populated by her dysfunctional family, passive aggressive landlord, and an ailing pigeon she feels responsible for.  Reichardt isn't really following a plot here so much as just building a world breathing life into it.  It's populated by a bunch of fun supporting players including James le Gros, Amanda Plummer, Matt Malloy (In the Company of Men), Andre 3000 of Outkast and Judd Hirsch.  And the artwork itself fleshes the viewing experience out further.

2023 A24 UHD.

This is framed at 1.78:1.  And, well, as I'm always reminding you guys, HDR screenshots look darker than in an online, SD format, because they're intended to be viewed on a higher nit display.  But even on my HDR set, this transfer is kinda low-lit.  I assume this is a originating factor of the film itself, rather than the home video transfer, since new releases being put out by their own distributor are surely taken more or less directly from the DCP.  It's not like we're judging a restoration made from old film elements here.  In fact, despite the deep 16mm-like grain structure here, this movie was shot on digital and made to look more film-like in post.  But the grain is helpful because it shows us this 3840p disc is perfectly rendering each fleck, authentic or not.  This is as sharp and detailed as you can get.  The saturation isn't super high, but the colors are natural and vivid in those scenes where the artwork is prominent and appropriately muted when characters are in their dingy home environments.

The audio is given an impressive True HD 7.1 with Dolby Atmos track.  It also includes an English descriptive audio track for the visually impaired and optional English subtitles for the hard of hearing.  There are Spanish subtitles as well.

Cal State, Long Beach, CA, January 2020

And A24 tends to cook up some nice extras for their releases.  The main special feature here (the specialist?) is an audio commentary by Reichardt, her DP Christopher Blauvert and Michelle Segre, who made a bunch of the art featured in the film.  It's a good chat, but they're diligent in crediting all the local artists whose work appears throughout the movie, and unfortunately this winds up equating to them spending a lot of time dropping an alienating and seemingly endless list of names that means nothing to almost all of the listeners.  Still, most of it is engaging and insightful.  Then there are two "short films" by Reichardt, which are nice to have here, but it's kind of overstating the matter to call them short films.  They're under ten minutes apiece of 1.66:1 footage of some of the art pieces from the film being created.

And that's it; no trailer or anything else.  Like all of these, it's a digibook in a side-loading slipbox and includes six art cards (particularly appropriate in the case of this movie).  Of the four, this is the slimmest special features package.  But it's an ideal presentation of the film itself, which is a joy that doesn't need to be adorned with bonuses.

Kenneth Branagh's A Midwinter's Tale for Christmas

Happy holidays, everybody! After the last couple horror and cult titles, I thought we could lighten our spirits with a gentle faux-Shakespearian comedy by Kenneth Branagh: 1995's A Midwinter's Tale. This is a film that fans had been pestering to get on DVD for ages, Apparently, the fullscreen VHS was fairly abysmal. But it took until 2010 for Warner Bros to finally release it as part of their Archives MOD collection. I was a little less fussed about the whole thing, since I owned the old 1997 laserdisc from Columbia Tri-Star, which was nice and widescreen. But I'm also always happy to upgrade my old laserdiscs to a more convenient format when I can. So I think this would be the perfect time to compare our two viewing options of this quiet Christmas film.

Update 12/24/25 - 12/24/25: It's Christmastime once again, ten years to the day from when I first made this post, and we're updating this post with Warner Archives' 2023 blu-ray edition.

I used the term "faux-Shakespearian" because this isn't actually another of Branagh's impeccable Shakespeare adaptions along the lines of Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, or Love's Labour's Lost. There is no Shakespeare play called "A Midwinter's Tale." Instead, this is a small, cheerful comedy about an eccentric but mostly determined group of actors who assemble to stage a production of Hamlet on Christmas Eve. Of course things go wrong, people fly in all directions, and of course everybody learns to work together and pull it off in the end.

Originally titled In the Bleak Midwinter, it's a small, privately financed black and white comedy made partially as a break from the studio system after 1994's Frankenstein, feeling sort of like Branagh's Clerks, with simple stagey shots (the stills look impressive here, but you'll find the camera never moves, just settling on a set-up and staying there for minutes at a time), campy jokes and an ensemble of colorful characters played largely by the supporting actors from his previous films. Besides his alumni, though, there are also fun turns by Joan Collins and Absolutely Fabulous's Jennifer Saunders and Julia Sawalha. It's not a masterwork like some of Branagh's grander accomplishments, but it's an agreeable little comedy I can't imagine many people disliking, and one you can easily forget and return to again and again.

1) Columbia Tri-Star 1997 LD; 2) Warner Bros 2010 DVDR; 3) Warner Archives BD.

So, I wasn't as excited as most fans about Warner Bros putting this out in widescreen since I already had it that way on the laserdisc; but I have to say their DVD does look better. The AR is roughly the same on both discs - the laserdisc claims 1.85:1 on the back, but is more like 1.80:1, and the DVD is 1.78:1. But Warner Bros manages to find more picture on all four sides. The grain looks fairly grainy for standard def and detail is definitely more refined than on the laser. Edges look artificially enhanced on occasion; but for an MOD DVDR, it's pretty good.

But of course, the new HD master is better.  The aspect ratio has been adjusted to 1.66:1, which mostly uncovers more vertical information, but trims the sides a little bit.  Gone, thankfully, is that edge enhancement, which looks more obvious to me now that I'm comparing it to the blu without any of it.  It's a brighter image, which brings out a little more detail from the previously murky shadows.  Grain is surprisingly light, even less evident than the DVD.  It's probably worth noting that almost every other Warner Archive that was released the same month as this was from a new 4k scan; they were probably sitting on this master for a while before they put this out.  But it's certainly a strong improvement on everything that came before it.  And that includes the original mono audio which has been bumped up to lossless DTS-HD.

The laserdisc had nothing by way of extras, so I wasn't too surprised by all the online reports of Warner Bros' DVD being entirely barebones as well. Being a DVDR, it doesn't even have smart chapter stops; they're just every 10 or 15 minutes, and the menu's completely generic. It's not entirely a wasteland, though, as neither the case nor posts I've read about this disc mention it, but it does have the film's trailer on it, which even the laserdisc didn't have. So that's nice. On the other hand, the laser had closed captioning, while this DVD has no subs or anything. And it's got better cover art, because whose ever idea it was color everybody's glasses yellow on the laserdisc cover really ought to take some vacation time. And now the BD is still essentially barebones, but it's the best of the three with the trailer, proper menus, optional subtitles and even less colorized artwork.

So sometimes Kenneth Branagh makes great films, and sometimes he makes fun things to catch on cable one night. This falls into the latter category, but it's one of his best out of that secondary tier.  Plus it's a Christmas film, and we certainly need more of those that aren't schmaltzy and terrible (this is only moderately schmaltzy), so it could be a good one for your collection.

The Slightly More Definitive Rabid

So, Arrow had a little trouble with their release of David Cronenberg's commercial debut, Shivers, what with TIFF remastering a cut version of the film and David himself approving it without apparently looking at it. But they're fixing it (gotta love it when these companies do the right thing by their fans), and eventually they'll be reissuing their loaded special edition blu-ray with a proper uncut transfer which is finally here! In the meantime, they created a similarly packed special edition of Cronenberg's follow-up feature, Rabid, which happily is not cut or otherwise problematic. In fact, it's pretty great. So while we wait for that Shivers fix, let's take some time to appreciate Arrow's Rabid.

Update 5/8/15 - 12/23/25: It's a decade later, and Rabid's circled back around for another swipe at the crown, this time via Scream Factory's 2025 2-disc 4k UHD special edition.

Rabid is in a lot of ways very much like Shivers: a weirdly sexual, medically induced form of slimy body horror turns into a contagious disease that makes people lose control and become homicidal. But this one's bigger in scope - where Shivers was confined to one apartment building, the chaos in Rabid spreads throughout the entire city of Montreal. It also stands apart for being the one straight film by the quite famous model/ porn star Marilyn Chambers. And she's quite good here; it's a little surprising she didn't go on to more regular acting work. Anyway, the whole film is much more intelligent and gripping than its description makes it sound like it has any right to be. And it's thanks almost entirely to David Cronenberg who really knows how to tell this bizarre yet curiously relatable story.

So Rabid got a very healthy 2015 upgrade in the UK with this Arrow's blu-ray/ DVD combo pack, but we don't have to look at it in a vacuum. I've also got the 2004 US special edition DVD from Somerville House, which was the best release going for a long time.  Metrodome's disc in the UK, which I used to own, was a better, anamorphic picture, but it was cut - so forget that.  Heck, now in 2025, you can pretty much forget every past release, thanks to Scream Factory's new BD/ UHD film upping the film to 4k.  Well, maybe.

1) 2004 Somerville DVD; 2) 2015 Arrow DVD; 3) 2015 Arrow BD;
4) 2025 Scream Factory BD; 5) 2025 Scream Factory UHD.

Right off the bat, the Somerville disc isn't even anamorphic, plus it's interlaced; so the fact that it's standard def isn't even the worst part. It's also the same basic 1.78:1 framing, but zoomed in closer so there's less picture around all four edges. The colors are pretty different, too, though there it's hard to say which is better. The Somerville looks a little more natural, but Cronenberg doesn't always seem to prefer natural, so that's maybe a little up in the air.  But clearly Arrow's transfer, which was done by Lions Gate and the fine folks at TIFF, has blown the old DVD out of the water in all other respects: detail, naturally rendered film grain, compression (it's a dual-layer disc, of course).

But now Scream Factory has come to take the film to 4k, with a fresh scan of the CRI negative (color replacement... basically a generation in between the original camera negative and prints that would've been struck from it).  And interestingly, they've opened it up to 1.67:1, revealing another smidgen of additional picture.  The colors have been re-timed again - the second set of shots is most obviously cooler, but the colors have changed throughout.  In the first set of shots, it actually looks more like the Somerville (should his robe have blue or green spots?  I wish I knew).  Grain isn't super clearly captured, even on the UHD.  It's actually a more modest upgrade than I expected, which I guess is more to Arrow's credit.

All three discs offer the original English mono track, though the Arrow and SF are lossless (LPCM and DTS-HD respectively.  Somerville also has a French mono dub, but lacks subtitles, which Arrow and SF both do have.  Arrow also threw in an isolated music track, which Scream dropped.

Extras-wise, it's another big win. First of all, the DVD special edition already delivered the goods with Cronenberg's commentary, which is excellent, and his video interview, plus the theatrical trailer.

Then Arrow adds a bunch of new stuff, too. There's a second audio commentary, by William Beard, who wrote a book on Cronenberg. He's quite well prepared and has plenty to say, another very good commentary. Then there are interviews with producer Ivan Reitman and Don Carmody of Cinepix, both of which are fun and insightful. And there's another good interview with Joe Blasco, which is good but also rather short. David Cronenberg's episode of The Directors, a 50+ minute retrospective of his career with a lot of big name stars (including Chambers), is here too. It's turned up on a couple of Cronenberg's releases, so if you're like me, you've already got it on your Scanners DVD or something else - or maybe you've even got it on its stand-alone DVD, since it was originally released separately. But it's quite good, and a number of fans probably haven't already got it, so it's cool they gave us another opportunity.

Then there's another featurette on Rabid and Cinepix, which is mostly pretty redundant, where one woman tells us things we already heard on the other features... though we do get a bit more from Biasco as well. Really, my only complaint about the extras, which are otherwise excellent, is the redundancy. You'll hear certain anecdotes, like how Cinepix started in softcore porn or how Marilyn Chambers was the Ivory Snow soap girl, literally four or more times. It starts to feel like a bit of a chore by the third time they come around.

The DVD had a nice little 2-page insert with notes, but Arrow trumps that with a 40+ page booklet, including an interview with Marilyn Chambers. And for hardcore collectors, there's a steelbook edition available as well; but me, I like the reversible cover art with the original poster art, as you see above.

And now we have Scream Factory's edition, which both adds and subtracts.  All the DVD stuff is here, as is most of Arrow's.  They dropped The Directors, which isn't too surprising, as well as that short Biasco interview.  But they make up for it with new stuff.  First of all, I should point out that Scream released this on blu in 2016, so shortly after the Arrow but well before this.  And that edition had some unique extras, which have been carried over here, including an on-camera interview with Susan Roman, who played Chambers' best friend, a unique commentary with two pornography experts (focusing, naturally, on Chambers' career), as well as a critical visual essay.  Plus they added a photo gallery, a TV spot and a dew radio spots.

So those are nice additions if you're coming from the Arrow, but if you already had the 2016 Scream blu, they've only added two new things for 2025: a pair of expert interviews, which, eh, are okay; but they don't add much to the conversation that all the other extras didn't already.  I'm happy to take 'em, but these shouldn't be the reason you triple-dip.  It does also come in a nice slipcover.

So, yeah I'll go ahead and call Scream Factory's latest edition of Rabid the new definitive edition.  But it's not going to blow your mind.  And you'll still want to hang onto your Arrow discs.  Or not.  The extras we lost aren't that big a deal.  In fact, it's pretty minor if you already have The Directors on another disc, like many of us do.  It's all rather incremental.

Groucho-Chico-Harpo At the Circus!

It's a good month for us Marx Bros fans this December, as Warner Archives have just released a brand new 4k restoration (albeit on 1080p BD) of At the Circus, which we're told has been made from "the best preservation elements."  Hopefully it doesn't prove to be one of the last releases from Warner Archives, because there's still more Marx Brother films that haven't made it to HD (not to mention so many other WB catalog titles).  But for today, let's just enjoy this.

Admittedly, 1939's At the Circus is post-peak Marx films.  This is them on the decline, but early enough in the decline that it's still plenty of fun.  This doesn't contain any of their best, wittiest work, but the brothers are still cheerfully game.  The routine of Chico keeping Groucho off the train because he doesn't have a badge feels like their earlier material, and Harpo is working with a new animal in practically every scene, culminating in him riding a live ostrich!  And the scene in the circus midget's house is classic 30's comedy.  The circus itself isn't particularly funny, but it's at least making the effort with big, elaborate production numbers, including a large orchestra, an elaborate trapeze act and they even shoot Margaret Dumont out of a cannon... at a rampaging gorilla!

What more could you possibly want?  Romance?  Well, that's this movie's weakest point.  People always knock the love stories in Marx Brothers movies, but it's particularly soppy here.  Their attempt to turn "Three Blind Mice" into a romantic duet called "Two Blind Loves" has to be the worst song in any of these movies.  But this is also the movie where Groucho sings "Lydia the Tattooed Lady," one of his most beloved songs of all time.  And Harpo's musical number is one of the studio's most ambitious arrangements... although it certainly hasn't aged well in terms of racial representation.  I often mistake this for being the one where they get into blackface (it's not... that's A Day At the Races), but apart from that single detail, it definitely feels like a fairly successful attempt to recapture the success of "All God's Chillun' Got Rhythm" in the best and the worst ways.  ...II suppose the gender politics of Florence Rice adopting the role of Kenny Baker's tamed horse in the big reprise is a little eyebrow raising as well.  Welcome to the 30s!

So Warner Bros first released At the Circus on DVD as a double-bill with 1938's Room Service in 2004, both by itself and as a part of their 5-disc Marx Brothers Collection boxed set.  If anybody ever releases Room Service in HD (hopefully, one of these days), I'll circle back around and give it fuller coverage.  But in brief, Room Service is the theatrical adaptation originally written without the Marx Brothers' personas in mind, though they reverted at the last minute.  It co-stars Lucille Ball and Ann Miller and has some funny bits, but is another of their generally weaker films.  It's a flipper disc, and the Room Service side features the fairly fuzzy 1.33:1 transfer you see above and optional English, French and Spanish subtitles.  Extras include the trailer and, as Warner often throws in with their films from this period, an unrelated Our Gang short called Party Fever and a short Looney Tunes cartoon called Daffy Doc.

2004 Warner Bros DVD top; 2025 Warner Archives BD bottom.

So, returning to At the Circus, we're starting with a 1.31:1 transfer, which the new 4k scan widens to 1.37:1, while pulling out to reveal a little more picture along all four sides.  The DVD just had very light, sporadic print damage, but that's been cleaned up on the BD - note the white spot above Groucho's head or the black spot in front of Chico's chin, both of which are only on the DVD.  The DVD is a little clearer than the Room Service transfer, but still soft compared to the new blu.  It also has minor edge enhancement, which has since been cleaned up.  Detail is crisper and film grain is visible, although a little faint compared to what would surely be possible on a proper UHD disc.  In short, it's a solid upgrade, with more noticeable improvement than some of the early Paramount ones.

Both discs offer the original mono audio in 2.0, but the blu bumps it up to DTS-HD.  Both discs also offer optional English subtitles, though only the DVD also offers French and Spanish.

Jitterbug Follies
2004 Warner Bros DVD top; 2025 Warner Archives BD bottom.

There's not a whole lot for special features.  Both disc include the trailer, the Our Gang short Dog Daze and the MGM Cartoon Jitterbug Follies, featuring Count Screwloose and JR the Wonder Dog.  For the record, the fullscreen shorts have not been remastered and seem to have been copied as-is from one disc to the other, as you can see above.  The blu-ray then goes one small step further, though, adding the vintage Leo Is On the Air radio promo, which highlights many of the film's songs.

So it might've been nice if they'd sprung for an expert commentary like they did for some of the other Marx Bros films.  But apart from being a little light on special features, this is a very satisfying upgrade, and my fingers are crossed for more.

Keep Your Eyes Wide Shut

It occurred to me that if DVDExotica were ever to be audited, I'd come up 0% Kubrick. And then, I don't know if they'd come take me away or what, but I'm getting out ahead of any such eventuality with an in-depth look at his final film, Eyes Wide Shut. One of the reasons I chose this one is because, for the longest time, it was only available censored in the US, and if you wanted to see it uncut, you had to import a foreign region release. Fortunately, Warner Bros has since corrected that, and reissued it on both DVD and blu. And now I've got both versions here, ready to be scrutinized.

Update 1/27/16 - 12/7/25: And now Criterion is here to give us this film in 4k with their new, highly sought after, 3-disc BD/ UHD combopack special edition!  But don't be too quick to throw out your older editions.

I didn't just pick it because of the censorship thing. Eyes Wide Shut has an interesting appeal for me. In some ways, it's his most delicate, human story, thanks probably to the source material (it's an adaptation of a 1920's Austrian novel called Dream Story). It's also fantastic and unnatural, elusive in how it's meaning isn't made explicitly clear. You don't even really know whether Tom Cruise's journey through the bulk of this film actually happened or was a dream. Although as a psychological exploration, that doesn't really matter much. Just like Nicole Kidman's infidelity, it emotionally affected her partner just as though it had happened, even though there's no question her story was anything but a dream. The characters and the audience feel the effects of experience regardless. And because it's Kubrick, it's a vivid, stirring experience... even if it's a bit tawdry and ridiculous on the surface. I'd say this is Stanley Kubrick's most exotic film.

So this 1999 film was a new released when it debuted on DVD in 2000 by Warner Bros. It was quickly repackaged in 2001 as part of The Stanly Kubrick Collection. As I say, it was cut, and you had to order a disc from... well, pretty much any other country, to get a copy of the film uncut. So what's missing from the cut film? Well, in terms of screen time, technically nothing. No shots were removed or trimmed. Instead, they opted for a more dubious, sneaky method of adding CGI characters to shots to basically block the camera's POV from the sex, Here, I'll show you.

Warner Bros 2001 censored DVD top; Warner Bros 2007 unrated BD bottom.

This is just one example, there are multiple shots where multiple couples are blocked by multiple CGI characters in robes. This one particular example I've chosen is funny because not only do they add another hooded figure, but another naked woman on the couch in front of him, making the unseen sex going on in front of him in the R-rated cut decidedly kinkier than what we see taking place in the unrated version. Anyway, movie-censorship.com actually does a great job breaking down every single shot that's been tinkered with. But in short, all the blocking takes place in this one brief section of the film. Nothing else was changed throughout the movie.

So, right. That's the 2000/ 2001 DVD. Eventually, Warner Bros re-released it on DVD and blu in 2007. The DVD is a 2-disc set, with new extras added to the second disc, whereas it's all fit onto the one double-layer blu. This also gets us into the open matte widescreen debate that's heatedly followed all of Kubrick's DVD releases around, although it isn't really any different than with most any other film. Kubrick shot for a widescreen theatrical framing in mind, but also kept the rest of the frame in mind for future television/ home video screenings. So both are valid in their way, but especially with the switch to widescreen TVs, I think fullscreen ultimately lost out. This is evidenced by how the 2000 and 2001 DVDs are fullscreen, and the 2007 discs went wide.  And Criterion's 2025 4k restoration?  Widescreen, too.

1) Warner Bros 2001 DVD; 2) Warner Bros 2007 DVD;
3) Warner Bros 2007 BD; 4) 2025 Criterion BD; 5) 2025 Criterion UHD.

So yes, I guess I follow the mainstream majority in preferring the widescreen theatrical framing. But it's nice to know that the 1.33:1 fullscreen version is available on the older discs for those who want it. It's a question of open/ closed mattes, so the fullscreen actually has additional vertical information, and both have the same amount on the sides. Transfer-wise, there isn't a huge deal of difference across any of these older discs. If you look at the earlier set of shots I showed of the censorship, you'll notice the lamps have a purple discoloration on the 2001 DVD which is nicely corrected on the 2007 blu; and the HD is naturally a bit cleaner and better compressed. But all three discs seem to be taken from the same old master.  It's time for a new one.

And we finally got one - a 4k restoration taken from the original 35mm camera negative.  It's still widescreen, now matted to 1.85:1, but the new scan pulls back a little bit further to show slivers more picture along all four sides compared to the old blu.  And it's brighter and more colorful than the past discs, which might be a little controversial in itself.  I've been reading the debate forums, Film Twitter, etc.  DoP Larry Smith, who supervised this new restoration, has been giving interviews like this one, essentially pointing out that Kubrick never got to finalize the timing, meaning there can never be a definitively "correct" look.  So we're all just out here with our own opinions.  But it's certainly a more attractive image than the older discs, and Smith at least has approved this particular transfer.  Admittedly, rhe highlights are a bit blown out on the BDs, but they're okay on the UHDs.  Plus, the new 4k scan is just so much finer than the old master.  The way these discs capture film grain put other recent Criterions to shame.  The UHD is a stunning 95GB encode.

Audio-wise, the original DVD has a 5.1 audio track, but that's it. No subs or anything. The 2007 DVD has the same 5.1 track, but adds optional English subs, plus other language options, specifically a 5.1 mix of the French dub, plus French and Spanish subs. The blu-ray goes a good bit farther, though, including the English and French 5.1 mixes, plus additional 5.1 dubs in Spanish, Japanese, German and Italian. And of more interest is its additional uncompressed PCM 5.1 mix of the audio track, giving us two English options for the first time. Plus, it has a whole host of subtitles options: English, English HoH, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish.

The original 5.1 surround track was remastered for Criterion's new edition, which they give to us in DTS-HD.  And they strip away all the foreign language options, but they do still include optional English subtitles.

It's here that I should point out, too, that the 2007 DVD packaging lies. It reads on the back, "Selectable in Both Rated and - and for the First Time Ever in North America - Unrated Versions." But this is simply not true. The 2007 DVD only features the unrated version.  If you had to leave off one version, at least they went the right way. But still, you should know, it ain't true. You are never given the option to watch the R-rated cut, and I ripped the whole disc just to check: the censored version isn't anywhere on the disc. And it's the same now with the Criterion: unrated only.  Not that I can imagine any fan wanting to go back to the censored cut, but it would've been neat if they included the shots with the extra CGI people as a deleted scene, just for the novelty value.

They didn't include any deleted scenes, but they do have some decent supplements. Even the old DVD featured some superficial but still worthwhile on-camera interviews with Cruise, Kidman and Steven Spielberg, plus some trailers and TV spots. Those are carried over to the 2007 discs, plus a bunch more. The main feature is a 3-part British television documentary called The Last Movie: Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut. Really only one of the three parts focuses on Eyes Wide Shut, but it's all interesting for fans of Kubrick as it delves into the rest of his life and career. Then there's Lost Kubrick: The Unfinished Films of Stanley Kubrick, which is a 20+ minute featurette on some of his work that never got made, including a Napoleon biopic. And finally, there's a short clip of Kubrick's speech accepting a DGA award.

And here's why I mentioned holding onto your old discs: because most of that stuff has not been carried over to the new Criterion release.  The interviews with the stars, the feature length documentary?  Gone-zo.  All that's made the transition is the one 20-minute Lost Kubrick featurette, the DGA awards clip, the trailer and TV spots.  On the other hand, Criterion has provided a collection of new stuff in their stead.

First, they conducted three brand new on-camera interviews of their own, with Larry Smith, second-unit director Lisa Leone and archivist Georgina Orgill.  They also acquired an archival interview with Stanley Kubrick’s wife, a 2019 featurette interview people like Kubrick's daughter and a Warner Bros executive who worked with him since the 60s, a vintage press conference for the film (which gives us Kidman and Cruise interviews back), and a different feature-length documentary: 2014's Kubrick Remembered.  It's a career overview, interviewing people from Kubrick's personal life to actors like Vincent D'Onofrio.  Plus, there's a 28-page booklet with an essay by author Megan Abbott and a 1999 interview with Sydney Pollack.

So Criterion's new set is easily the single best release of Eyes Wide Shut.  But people in the 4:3 camp will still want to hang onto their OG DVDs.  And while there are enough special features on the Criterion to satisfy casual viewers, more dedicated fans will want to hang onto one of the older special editions for all those exclusive extras that didn't get preserved.