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The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

The will to view films of the past, and the infrastructure to support this spectatorship, is alive and well.

The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018
Photo: Janus Films

When AT&T decided to drop FilmStruck from its future streaming initiative, cinephiles let out a howl of rage against the machine in the form of a petition hoping to save FilmStruck that garnered over 93,000 signatures. It’s a tale as old as film’s origins, of corporate interests dictating production and distribution, giving the ax to anything not designated a cash cow.

While numerous think pieces have debated FilmStruck’s worth and legacy in the last month and a half, one thing remained constant: the endurance of physical media. As always, cinephiles could still count on Criterion, like Arrow Video and others, to announce their upcoming Blu-ray and DVD releases, thus reminding us of their devotion to keeping physical media alive.

Whether or not physical media remains the best and most enduring means of accessing high-quality transfers of classic and niche films remains to be seen. What is certain, though, is the increasing popularity of boutique home-video labels. Vinegar Syndrome made and sold over 3,000 copies of their limited-edition release of 1983’s Mausoleum during a Black Friday sale alone—a title that’s now fetching over $100 on eBay. Kino Lorber continues to distribute solid HD transfers of films from across film history at a rate so quick that it’s hard to even keep pace. And almost weekly, Twilight Time announces on their Facebook page which of their limited-edition releases have sold out.

The will to view films of the past is alive and well. The 25 Blu-ray and DVD releases chosen as our best of the year highlight the different hungers—for classic art-house films, for ’70s horror, for silent cinema—that these labels continue to satiate. Clayton Dillard


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

The Ancient Law, Flicker Alley

While works of silent cinema continue to receive top-notch restorations from a number of distribution labels, it’s Flicker Alley that often produces some of the finest and most complete releases in terms of image and sound quality and supplemental materials. The crown jewel of their 2018 line of releases is Deutsche Kinemathek’s digital restoration of The Ancient Law, which offers stunning new evidence of Ewald André Dupont’s talents as a filmmaker. The long-unavailable 1923 film now appears in a transfer that has been struck in large part from a combination of two nitrate prints, with color tinting looking especially vibrant. (The film has also been restored to its original 135-minute runtime.) The extras delve into Dupont’s German-Jewish background, including an excellent essay by Cynthia Walk that also highlights the historical circumstances that led to the film’s production. There’s also an essential surviving excerpt from the 1923 documentary Der Film Im Film, featuring on-set footage of Dupont, Fritz Lang, and Robert Weine. Dillard

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The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

The Big Country, Kino Lorber

Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray transfer of The Big Country highlights the film’s extensive use of deep focus in wide shots to an extent that previous home-video releases of William Wyler’s classic haven’t. The result is nothing short of remarkable. Early scenes of McKay’s (Gregory Peck) arrival in the Old West are best at highlighting the film’s depth of field, with figures moving in a multitude of directions behind the action in the foreground, all in sharp focus. On his feature commentary track, historian Sir Christopher Frayling brings his usual acumen to the film’s production, themes, and critical reception. Those familiar with Frayling’s excellent commentaries on releases for Sergio Leone’s films will find his musings to be of equal quality here, particularly in discussions of image construction and how The Big Country fits within the scope and history of other revisionist westerns. Equally useful for William Wyler fans or historians is a one-hour biographical episode of American Masters from 1986 titled “Directed by William Wyler.” Clayton Dillard


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

The Complete Monterey Pop Festival, The Criterion Collection

The image on the Criterion Collection’s previous Blu-ray of Monterey Pop was respectable in its clarity, but there’s no denying that this 4K restoration of D.A. Pennebaker’s 16mm film marks a significant leap in quality. The loud colors of the era’s hippie fashions are far more pronounced now, with purples and reds in particular shining with new intensity. The original stereo tracks were cleaned up by legendary sound engineer Eddie Kramer for the last release, and they still sound rich and full. All of the previous Criterion edition’s extras are accounted for here, including an extra disc that contains nearly all of the performances from Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding’s respective sets. Now more than ever, it’s impossible to deny that Monterey Pop is the definitive live document of the hippie era, a vivid portrait of a cultural movement still in its ascendancy. Jake Cole


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

De Niro & De Palma : The Early Films, Arrow Films

While his twisty, highly stylized exercises in suspense are his brand, Brian De Palma is also one of Hollywood’s most acerbic social satirists. Greetings, from 1968, is a ferociously incendiary, humorously episodic account of young men looking to avoid being drafted. The film features Robert De Niro in his first major role, one that he reprised in 1970’s Hi, Mom!, where his Jon Rubin tries his hand at pornographic filmmaking before landing on domestic terrorism. The former was the first film to be slapped with an X rating by the MPAA and the latter is infamous for its “Be Black, Baby” performance art sequence, during which hoity-toity white audiences are brutalized in a simulation of the black experience in America. Throughout these films, De Palma walks a fine line between the funny and frightening—cackling with us but also sometimes at us. Hi, Mom!, Greetings, and 1969’s The Wedding Party have all been restored for this Arrow Films box set, which is stocked with a plethora of juicy extras, from an appreciation of De Palma and De Niro’s collaborations by critic and filmmaker Howard S. Berger, to a predictably engaging, authoritative, and bullshit-free commentary by film critic Glenn Kenny. Niles Schwartz


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

Dietrich & von Sternberg in Hollywood, The Criterion Collection

The rapturous Dietrich & von Sternberg in Hollywood affirms the profound emotional power of the art born from one of Hollywood’s most influential and idiosyncratic collaborations. Joseph von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich fashioned a fantasy world that embodies the longing that drives one to cinema: for a grandeur that invites our complicity with icons, rendering our anxieties into pop myth. In their unreality, these six films elucidate our sexual hungers as well as the miscommunications and insecurities that often prevent said hungers from being satiated. It’s difficult to communicate the beauty of these six films together in words, and critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin circumvent this problem by offering an evocative juxtaposition of quotations and film footage in their video essay Bodies and Spaces, Fabric and Light. López and Martin manage to elucidate the existential loss of identity that’s communicated by von Sternberg’s obsession with ornamentation, and their work here is one of this package’s highlights. Bowen

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The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

Distant Voices, Still Lives, Arrow Academy

Not the least among its achievements, Distant Voices, Still Lives offers a crystallization of the appeal of the musical. An odd linkage, to be sure, since the genre’s trademark studio boisterousness would seem a world away from the kitchen-sink dreariness of the director’s mood piece about his years growing up with his working-class family in post-WWII Liverpool, dominated by his abusive ogre of a father. Terence Davies’s meticulous blend of realism and impressionism looks resplendent on Arrow’s transfer, which was sourced from the 4K BFI restoration. The grimy and worn façades of buildings are rendered clearly, and appear authentic in their muted drabness, while the vivid colors of the characters’ costumes and their enhanced memories (such as the ghostly lighting of the father on his sickbed) blaze intensely against the film’s naturalistic backgrounds. This release includes a deeply personal commentary track from Davies, a Q&A with the filmmaker, an interview with art director Miki van Zwanenberg, and more. Cole and Fernando Croce


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

Godard + Gorin: Five Films, 1968 – 1971, Arrow Academy

The anti-Gaullist riots of May 1968 galvanized an already radical Jean-Luc Godard to approach his profession, itself a product of American capitalist industry, from a socialist angle. Teaming up with Maoist student Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard formed the Dziga Vertov Group, so named for the Russian constructivist theorist and director, and set about creating a series of films that break apart the formal rules of cinema for the purposes of remaking existing film language and subject matter around socialist ideals. Arrow Academy has bundled five of these films, and together they represent some of the most difficult work of Godard’s thorny career. Where the director’s classic work mixed formal experimentation with genre deconstructions and impish satire, these films opt for socialist-realist asceticism and foregrounded political theory. Rescued from decades of neglect, these look so startlingly clear on home video that it’s easier than ever to appreciate them as crucial stepping stones in Godard’s mutable, constantly self-analyzing career. Cole


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

The Great Silence, Film Movement

Sergio Corbucci makes haunting use of The Great Silence’s snowy landscape, crafting a purgatorial area of endless white. This vision of the Old West contains none of the promise of freedom that even the western’s most revisionist entries indulge before then subverting. The film is so drained of color its practically monochromatic, and Film Movement’s 2K restoration highlights the extreme contrasts of Silvano Ippoliti’s cinematography. The Italian soundtrack is crisp and features wide spacing of sound elements, with added emphasis on the long stretches of silence throughout the film’s confrontations. Two alternate, studio-mandated endings, both more upbeat than what made it into the final cut, are included on the disc, which notably includes an interview with filmmaker Alex Cox, who extols the virtues of The Great Silence and Sergio Corbucci in general. Cole


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

The Hired Hand, Arrow Academy

In 1971, Dennis Hopper starred in and directed the audaciously self-lacerating The Last Movie, which nearly destroyed his career, and Peter Fonda directed and appeared in The Hired Hand, a western that divorces Easy Rider’s alienation of its glorifying self-pity, offering a morally thorny examination of loyalties that seem to cancel themselves out. The image on Arrow’s Blu-ray release has a wonderfully gritty earthiness, with colors that are appropriately muted yet robust. Blues and browns are particularly vibrant, and the delicacy of Vilmos Zsigmond’s prismatic sense of lighting has been well preserved. Among the notable extras on the disc: a 2003 documentary, “The Return of The Hired Hand,” that includes evocative interviews with most of the film’s key collaborators; an audio recording of Fonda and Warren Oates’s appearance at the National Film Theatre in London in 1971; a short tribute to the film by Martin Scorsese; and a lovely essay by film critic Kim Morgan. Bowen

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The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema, The Criterion Collection

Criterion’s Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema box set doesn’t quite contain everything the Swedish master ever made, but it comes close. The 30-disc set includes 39 of Bergman’s features, a few of his rare shorts, numerous documentaries on his life and work, and a gorgeous 248-page book of photographs and essays. As a consumer, the whole thing can seem rather daunting. So kudos to Criterion for grappling with how to invite a us into this massive body of work by boldly presenting the films not as a dull chronological retrospective, but rather in the spirit of a film festival, kicking things off with an “opening night” spotlighting one of Bergman’s most likable films, Smiles of a Summer Night, wrapping the set up with the filmmaker’s nostalgic masterpiece Fanny and Alexander, and featuring three “centerpiece” presentations of some of Bergman’s most acclaimed works along the way. The set provides a unique opportunity to luxuriate in the progression of Bergman’s imagery, from the high-key naturalism of his earlier works to the haunting, shadowy close-ups of his middle period through to the blazing use of color in his later films. Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema may be exhaustive, but with all the indelible beauty it contains, it’s never exhausting. Watson


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

It’s Alive Trilogy, Shout! Factory

Despite how they were advertised over the years, the It’s Alive films are more than a prolonged riff on Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Writer-director Larry Cohen’s trilogy owes more to films concerned with radioactive fallout and its effects on communities, such as Ishirô Honda’s Godzilla and Arthur Crabtree’s Fiend Without a Face. It’s easy to see how, in the years after the release of the films in Cohen’s series, subsequent staples of this genre, from Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes to Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case, took the premise of a mutant offspring running rampant as a starting point for redressing the atomic and familial anxieties of their respective eras. On Shout! Factory’s three-disc set, each film in the series boats evenly balanced color saturation. Almost all signs of dirt or damage have been removed from the original negatives, while healthy grain levels are on display throughout. On the extras front, the set is most memorable for the three commentary tracks with Cohen and a new featurette that includes interviews with the filmmaker and Actors James Dixon, Michael Moriarty, and Laurene Landon. Dillard


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

The Last House on the Left, Arrow Video

In his feature-film debut, Wes Craven oscillates between broadly comic and nihilistic tones and between moments of trashy amateurishness and piercing existential poetry, criticizing the very notion of tonality. Arrow Video has delicately toggled a fine line between clarity and the look that’s most appropriate to the film, and this balance extends to the monaural soundtrack, which is a little flat and soft in places, though greatly improved over the mixes of prior editions, especially in terms of diegetic effects. And the disc’s supplements package is comprehensive even by the obsessive standards of Arrow Video, consisting of dozens of featurettes that have appeared on various editions of The Last House on the Left over the years as well as a few choice new additions. Inevitably for a film that’s been repackaged so often, there’s quite a bit of repetition here. Over the course of many archive featurettes and two archive commentaries, writer-director Wes Craven, producer Sean S. Cunningham (of Friday the 13th fame), and the cast and crew discuss working on the film and their subsequent relationship with it. Bowen


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

The Last Hurrah, Twilight Time

A lack of simultaneousness plagues American political films, which often follow a protagonist in an elected position who neatly handles one self-contained crisis after another, in succession per the necessities of a narrative that’s engineered to impart a moral lesson. In actuality, politicians are endlessly bombarded by varying factions, conflicting loyalties, and unresolvable issues. In this context, John Ford’s The Last Hurrah is a refreshing anomaly, a rare film to wrestle with the ongoing rhetorical tap dancing that’s necessary to keeping a public career afloat. In a superb audio commentary included on Twilight Time’s discs, film historians Nick Redman, Julie Kirgo, and Lem Dobbs discuss Ford’s artistry while confronting his legendary eccentricities and abuses of power—particularly his bullying and attitudes about class and race. The historians also draw resonant parallels between Ford’s stock company of actors, the characters in this and other films, and Ford’s family. Meanwhile, a fascinating debate runs through the commentary, particularly between Kirgo and Dobbs, as to whether The Last Hurrah is charged with youthful vitality or is weighed down by the sagging energy of Tracy and maybe Ford himself. Bowen

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The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

The Last Movie, Arbelos

With The Last Movie, Dennis Hopper fulfills the promise of Easy Rider, detonating and embracing American genre myths, fashioning a visionary personal cinema that blends improvisation, documentary, and traditionally scripted fictional forms. Before watching this Arbelos disc, I most recently saw The Last Movie in the Library of Congress archives, and the print was murky and hazy, suggesting that the film had been shot through a muddy filter. Quite a bit of grit and grime has been removed from this transfer, allowing the film’s colors to resound with a newfound vibrancy. The Last Movie is now conventionally beautiful, which offers a piercing counterpoint to Hopper’s formalist experimentation. And on the extras front, Alex Cox’s “Scene Missing” offers unflinching oral recollections on the making of the film. Other notable extras include a new documentary that investigates how The Last Movie production felt from the vantage point of the community that got enmeshed in Hopper’s fever dream. Arbelos offers a landmark restoration of a raw, self-devouring work of auto-critical cinema that was decades ahead of its time. Bowen


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

The Magnificent Ambersons, The Criterion Collection

The Criterion Collection continues its heroic restoration of Orson Welles’s lost and unappreciated masterpieces with this extraordinarily beautiful presentation of The Magnificent Ambersons. This disc’s 4K restoration of the film is positively transformative and gorgeous. The foregrounds, middle grounds, and backgrounds of the images have equal crystal clarity, allowing one to fully appreciate the virtuosity of Orson Welles’s cinematic imagination. And the expansive and detailed supplements package offers varying perspectives on how the film influenced Welles’s subsequent career, and was shaped by historical events such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Many familiar Welles authorities have been recruited here, from film historians Simon Callow and Joseph McBride, who turn up in interviews filmed in 2018 exclusively for this edition, to filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, who speaks with Welles in archive conversations that were recorded for Bogdanovich’s essential book This Is Orson Welles. Unsurprisingly, these supplements focus quite a bit on the gutting of The Magnificent Ambersons by RKO, and on the fall from grace that Welles suffered after the controversy of Citizen Kane and the mixed preview screenings of The Magnificent Ambersons. Bowen


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

Night of the Living Dead, The Criterion Collection

The Criterion Collection’s knack for netting existing commentary tracks if what they could come up with themselves wouldn’t be markedly better works once again in their favor. Because it’s hard to imagine besting the two existing cast-and-crew tracks with George Romero, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, John Russo, Russell Streiner, Vincent Survinski, Judith O’Dea, S. William Hinzman, Kyra Schon, and Keith Wayne. They’re convivial and informative, and worth the price of admission alone for the running joke that Eastman absconded with every piece of furniture and every prop she could get away with once the shoot was finished. The other meatiest supplement is the original 16mm work print of The Night of the Living Dead, then under its original title Night of Anubis. While mostly of historical interest, it also is reportedly missing the scenes that Romero excised before the final edit and were later destroyed in a flood. That being said, there’s a reel’s worth of dailies that feature some of that extra footage that fans are likely to be craving. Elsewhere, Guillermo del Toro, Robert Rodriguez, and Frank Darabont pay tribute to the film’s impact and legacy, and cast and crew members are featured in interview excerpts both new and old. In short, only fans of the short spoof Night of the Living Bread are likely to be disappointed. Eric Henderson


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

The Outer Limits: Season One, Kino Lorber

Over 50 years after its cancellation in 1965, The Outer Limits still exudes a distinct and wonderful strangeness. A horror and science-fiction anthology series that was inspired by Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, and which would subsequently inspire countless other film and television productions, The Outer Limits is a heady cocktail of Cold War anxiety, film noir, Brechtian theater, creature feature, and gothic expressionism. In one of his audio commentaries for the set, film historian Tim Lucas describes certain reactions that he encountered online to the news that Kino Lorber would be restoring The Outer Limits for Blu-ray. Many people, die-hard fans, felt that their DVDs would be good enough, and would better honor the rough look of the show. As Lucas observes, this assumption is incorrect, and the proof is in the pudding of this stunning transfer. And on the extras front, the various audio commentaries by a collection of critics and experts offer a peek behind the curtain of a classic production. Also of note is “There’s Nothing Wrong with Your Television Set,” a 40-page booklet essay, written by Schow, tht offers more notes on the genesis of The Outer Limits as well as capsule reviews of every episode, including discernments of when the episodes were produced versus when they actually aired. Don’t let the short list of supplements fool you: This package is an essential and mammoth undertaking. Bowen

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The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers, Kino Lorber

A collection of over 50 shorts and features directed by women, Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers adds substantial momentum to the recent, and long overdue, push to reestablish the crucial roles that female filmmakers played in developing cinematic form and defining genres during cinema’s infancy. Kino Lorber’s six-disc set celebrates the work of virtually unknown directors alongside slightly more established figures such as Alice Guy Blaché and Lois Weber (each of whom are given a disc dedicated solely to their work). Among the more notable works are Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic films; 1916’s The Curse of Quon Gwon, which is the earliest known film directed by an Asian American, Marion Wong; and 1917’s ‘49-‘17, the first western made by a woman, Ruth Ann Baldwin; as well as a multitude of other films that address such taboo issues as abortion and birth control. Smartly packaged with a beautiful 80-page booklet filled with essays, pictures, and capsules about every film, Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers vibrantly traces a neglected period in film history. The array of interviews with film preservationists and historians also included in the set help to contextualize the reasons why so many of these films remained in dusty film canisters for nearly a century. Derek Smith


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

Rocco and His Brothers, Milestone Films

Milestone’s Blu-ray release of Rocco and His Brothers is an impressive feat of restoration. The searing black-and-white cinematography gleams with the appropriate contrast, especially in outdoor scenes lit with natural light. Grain and emulsion is present throughout, suggesting that the image hasn’t been compromised by extensive digital enhancement. The monaural track is clean and crisp, without distortion. Dialogue is mixed at a consistent level, as is Nino Rota’s unforgettable score. In an in-depth interview, Caterina d’Amico, daughter of screenwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amico, details how her mother worked with Visconti on both this film and others, including 1957’s White Nights. D’Amico puts much of the film’s production into context, claiming at one point that nearly 40 scenes were cut from the original screenplay during pre-production. Furthermore, she delves into how the film generated controversy at the Venice Film Festival in 1960. The disc also contains an archival interview package with cast and crew, compiled with permission from Caterina d’Amico and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Dillard


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

Suspiria, Synapse

Synapse Films’s 4K restoration of Suspiria’s original uncut, uncensored Italian 35mm camera negative has been under discussion in cinema circles for a while now. This transfer is an obsessive labor of love, a miraculously dense and beautiful work of historical preservation. Younger audiences seeing Suspiria for the first time, and accustomed to beautiful Blu-ray releases on a weekly basis, may take this disc for granted, but those of us who’ve suffered through butchered, severely letterboxed prints of Dario Argento’s film will understand the gift that Synapse has imparted. Colors are not only breathtaking, they’re viscerally present in the film as additional characters. The soundtracks are even more revelatory, imbuing Suspiria with an immersive soundstage that hasn’t been equaled by prior home-video editions. As crazy and seemingly in its own headspace as the film seems to be, it was researched and deeply rooted in history, literature, and contemporary pop culture. The disc’s extras thoroughly parse Argento’s various influences, from his obsession with modern art, witchcraft, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to his collaboration with his co-writer and lover Daria Nicolodi. Bowen


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Vinegar Syndrome

A cinematic fusillade melding gonzo humor and guerrilla filmmaking tactics, Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is at once an intellectual enterprise and a communal rallying cry. Vinegar Syndrome has done everything within its power to make this 4K transfer the definitive version of the film. A pre-feature card acknowledges that there are some sections of the film’s existing source materials which are damaged beyond complete repair. Fortunately, those instances are few and far between, totaling only a few minutes of the film’s entire running time. The remainder of the restoration is a revelation, with superb color saturation and image clarity throughout. The finest extra is an extensive Q&A with Melvin Van Peebles following a screening in 2013 of the film at the Maysles Center in Harlem. Van Peebles addresses how the Black Panthers made the film a success, why he doesn’t comment publicly on contemporary black filmmakers, and how his upbringing bestowed a fearlessness in him that he tried to bring to his filmmaking. It’s an added bonus whenever the camera pans to the audience, which reveals Albert Maysles sitting, and grinning, near the front row. Dillard

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The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

Time Regained, KimStim

A master of visualizing the slippery, illusory nature of memory, Raúl Ruiz was the ideal director to tackle Marcel Proust’s opus In Search of Lost Time. Nominally adapting only Finding Time Again, the seventh and last volume of the novel, Time Regained acts as a feverish recapitulation of the entire work, with scenes depicting the final years in the life of Marcel (Marcello Mazzarella) interspersed with various flashbacks to the narrator’s past as he lived through the massive upheaval of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Sourced from a restoration by the Centre National de la Cinématographie, this Blu-ray captures Time Regained’s intense beauty. The smoky, greenish hue that suffuses Ruiz’s film glows with inviting warmth, while background detail is rich with vivid colors. On the extras front, critic Bernard Génin contributes an interview in which he discusses In Search of Lost Time’s circuitous route to the screen, from a Harold Pinter-penned screenplay for a Joseph Losey film that was never made to Ruiz’s successful adaptation of the seventh volume. Génin offers copious information on this film and how it differs from other cinematic stabs at Marcel Proust’s opus. Génin in particular praises the manner in which the director avoided mere plot adaptation to transpose the novel’s crucial impressionistic perspective into cinematic terms. Cole


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

The Tree of Life, The Criterion Collection

If The Tree of Life can be called a cinematic cathedral, then the Criterion Collection treats the film with a magnificence that verges on the holy. Terrence Malick and Emmanuel Lubezki supervised this disc’s 4K transfer, which was scanned from the film’s original 35mm camera negative. Among the remarkable extras collected on the disc is Kent Jones essay on the film, a video essay by Benjamin B on Malick’s new approach to cinematography, and, of course, the extended version of The Tree of Life, which incorporates 50 additional minutes into the film. This new version of the film is one of Criterion’s biggest projects to date, as Malick and Lubezki apparently gave the entirety of the extended, 188-minute cut a new color grade. But Malick doesn’t want people to consider this a director’s cut, nor a better version of the original release. I sympathize with something Seitz says in his video essay: that The Tree of Life feels unfinished and may be unfinishable by design. But by letting the branches grow a little more unwieldy, this new version brings the film closer to completion. Niles Schwartz


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

Underground, Kino Lorber

The Blu-ray itself is a barebones affair, with only a trailer to accompany the main feature, but two DVD discs contain the complete TV cut of the film, alternately titled Once Upon a Time There Was a Country. This cut uses its additional two-and-a-half hours of running time to dig into the story’s satire at a more leisurely pace, resulting in a fuller study of the characters and historical context compared to the theatrical version’s more impressionistic feeling of madness. The DVDs also come with behind-the-scenes footage, as well as a 75-minute making-of documentary, “Shooting Days,” that not only shows the intricacy of Emir Kusturica’s technical achievement, but also the careful consideration beneath the filmmaker’s seemingly freewheeling aesthetic, such as the way that recurring images act as anchors for the film and help to mark the passage of time. Finally, a booklet contains an essay by critic Giorgio Bertellini that digs further into the controversy that greeted Underground while also explicating the complexity of the film’s themes. Cole


The 25 Best Blu-rays of 2018

Universal Classic Monsters: Complete 30-Film Collection, Universal Studios Home Entertainment

While it seems that almost every year brings some form of a new release or restoration of Universal’s 1930s monster movies, it’s 2018 that will likely be remembered as the apex, if not the stopping point, for fans of these films. Universal Classic Monsters: Complete 30-Film Collection is the studio’s most comprehensive effort to date, compiling pristine, HD transfers of 30 films from 1931 to 1956 into a lovely box set that, while hulking in size, gives enough breathing room to each film to avoid compression issues, with the majority of titles receiving their own disc. The set “showcases all of the original films featuring the most iconic monsters in motion picture history,” including Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, and Creature from the Black Lagoon (there’s even Universal’s 1943 adaptation of Phantom of the Opera). Bonus features will take days to comb through, with 13 feature commentaries, featurettes on Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and a 48-page book that’s unique to this release. Dillard

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