The 30 Best Home Video Releases of 2019

Endlessly proliferating streaming platforms deliver more content each year, successfully tapping heretofore unexpected niche markets and serving an astounding variety of target demographics. (And that’s only the companies that Disney doesn’t own.) What subscribers don’t always realize, however, is that they’re at best leasing that content, even when they appear to have purchased a title outright. Films, in other words, are provisionally available merely at the caprice of our corporate overlords.

All of this is to state what might seem—to legions of devoted cinephiles and collectors alike—a glaringly obvious truth: that there’s a continuing necessity for the acquisition of physical media. Fortunately for us, every year there’s a veritable embarrassment of riches to select from, a bounty of art-house and cult titles dropping each and every Tuesday. They’re supplied by home-video stalwarts like the Criterion Collection and Arrow Video, as well as smaller boutique labels like Vinegar Syndrome, Film Movement, Flicker Alley, and Arbelos—all of whom have released titles that appear on our annual best-of list.

It’s the curatorial expertise these companies lavish on their releases that both renders them eminently collectible and sets them apart from the typically barebones and context-free content available on most streaming services. These companies’ discernment and attention to detail extends not only to the aesthetics of their packaging—replete with often reversible cover art, informative booklets, foldout posters, soundtrack CDs, and other booty—but also to well-chosen supplemental features, which provide a historical and formal framework for developing a deeper appreciation of the films and their makers. Our roundup of the best home-video titles of 2019 cherry-picks those releases that best exemplify these tendencies. Budd Wilkins

American Horror Project Vol. 2, Arrow Video

With American Horror Project: Volume Two, Arrow Video and curators Ewan Cant and Stephen Thrower continue the endeavor they started in 2016 with American Horror Project: Volume One, restoring obscure horror films and according them the respect and prominence of a lush box set with all the trimmings. The existence of such sets is aesthetically and historically symbolic, correctly suggesting that certain films relegated to drive-ins and video stores are worthy of the respect and consideration of tonier productions that are preserved by, say, the Criterion Collection. At the forefront of this project’s concerns are complementary notions of preservation and cultivation. These sets reacquaint us with low-budget films that can be made around and about a small rural area and still potentially attract national attention, while also reminding us of an analogue era, when such films, denied the slickness that can now come at the touch of an iPhone button, practically convulsed with the efforts of their strapped and scrappy creators. These films (Dream No Evil, Dark August, and The Child) are urgent testaments to the cliché of necessity being the mother of invention, as their scarce resources and naïveté beget explorations of madness and alienation that are stripped of the implicit assurances of luxurious, self-effacing studio-style production values. Chuck Bowen

An American Werewolf in London, Arrow Video

Arrow’s new 4K restoration improves considerably on Universal’s previous editions of the film, with colors in low-light and nighttime scenes really coming across. And the studio has ported over practically every available bonus feature from all those earlier Universal home-video releases and added some impressive new ones. The best of the older material is far and away Paul Davis’s 2009 making-of documentary Beware the Moon, which runs slightly longer than An American Werewolf in London itself. Davis covers every detail and aspect of the film’s production from its conception in 1969 to its release and reception in 1981. The new audio commentary from filmmaker Paul Davis miraculously contains little in the way of overlap with his making-of documentary, culling new anecdotes that were uncovered during research for his book on the film, including some fascinating information about deleted and extended scenes whose original elements have been lost. Elsewhere, the terrific feature-length documentary Mark of the Beast is a deep-dive into the figure of the wolf man from a well-selected roster of film historians and technicians, beginning with the ubiquity of the lycanthrope or shapeshifter archetype across human cultures, laying out how screenwriter Curt Siodmak singlehandedly concocted the “lore” of the werewolf (pentagrams, silver bullets, wolf’s bane) for The Wolf Man. Wilkins

Apocalypse Now: Final Cut, Lionsgate Home Entertainment

Just as Lionsgate’s last Blu-ray edition of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now boasted reference-quality audio and video, so, too, were its extras exhaustive. This six-disc release includes everything from the previous release, including Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which as become as legendary at this point as the film its documents. There are too many extras to enumerate, with featurettes on every single aspect of the film’s production, from its casting to its sound mixing. There are deleted scenes, including an entire alternate ending where Kurtz’s compound is napalmed, as well as audio from a 1938 Mercury Theatre radio production of Joseph Conrad’s novella. Astonishingly, there are even more extras this time around, with the final disc containing the documentary and a wealth of new, retrospective features that detail Apocalypse Now’s latest audio and visual restoration. There’s also additional behind-the-scenes footage, as well as a Q&A between Coppola and Steven Soderbergh. Jake Cole

The Blob, Shout! Factory

Shout! Factory gives fans and collectors a Blu-ray that will stand as the definitive edition of Chuck Russell’s undervalued gem for many years to come. For starters, the disc comes with three feature-length commentary tracks, two of which are newly recorded. In the first of those, Russell, special effects artist Tony Gardner, and cinematographer Mark Irwin get into The Blob’s botched theatrical release, the influence of Hitchcock’s Psycho on the film’s narrative misdirects, and the challenges of location shooting and working on a tight budget. The second and other new track, with lead actress Shawnee Smith, offers little more than aimless reminiscing and admiration for how well the film holds up. And the third track is a previously recorded one with Russell and producer Ryan Turek, and as such has a bit of crossover with Russell’s newly recorded one. But their rapport is engaging, and Russell’s passion for his work and that of others is unmistakable, especially as he discusses his personal feelings for Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.’s original The Blob and how he tried to strike new ground with his remake, while remaining respectful of its forebearer. The disc also comes with a staggering 11 interviews, covering virtually every aspect of the film’s production and post-production processes. Derek Smith

Blue Velvet, The Criterion Collection

Per the disc’s liner notes, this new transfer was created in 16-bit 4K resolution from the 35mm A/B negative and was supervised by David Lynch. The results are spectacular, with radiant colors and a purposefully soft grittiness that intensifies the film’s luridly dreamy feeling. Most important, though, is the profound weight and materiality of surface textures in this image, which is important to Lynch’s fetishistic aesthetic. All of Lynch’s pet obsessions—lamps, drapes, lipstick, food, smokestacks—practically pop off the screen. The most notable supplement on the release is a 54-minute collection of deleted scenes, which have been assembled by Lynch more or less in chronological order, suggesting an entire omitted opening act of Blue Velvet. The cut footage fleshes out Jeffrey’s reasons for returning to his hometown from college, and offers many more scenes of his aunt and mother (played by Frances Bay and Priscilla Pointer, respectively). Also essential is “Blue Velvet Revisited,” an 89-minute documentary by director Peter Braatz that uses free-associative editing to offer a one-of-kind portrait of the film’s production. Braatz includes stock footage, intimate still photos, such as of Lynch taping the word “Lumberton” onto an ice truck, and uses interviews as a form of narration. Bowen

The BRD Trilogy, The Criterion Collection

The films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s BRD trilogy pull off a difficult magic trick, feeling timeless and viscerally in the moment. With his supernatural ability to crank out productions at a rapid clip, Fassbinder achieved what Kent Jones describes as a “direct correlation between living and fiction-making”—a quality that’s also evident in Jean-Luc Godard’s early films. These directors worked so fast as to annihilate the distance between inspiration and realization that often governs studio filmmaking. As a result, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss, and Lola are works of many astonishing contradictions, symmetries, parallels, and political and personal reverberations. They are expressions of macro concerns that are wrested from a singular soul. And the pristine restorations available in this set are visual and aural marvels that underscore the profound aesthetic difference between each film in the trilogy. As for the supplements, they have been ported over from Criterion’s 2003 DVD edition with no updates, though this package is so rich and exhaustive it hardly matters, offering a couple of semesters’ worth of context pertaining to German film history, German social upheavals, and the multifaceted life of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Bowen

Charley Varrick, Kino Lorber

Kino’s 4K restoration of Charley Varrick is a revelation. Grain looks well-resolved and suitably cinematic, without any distracting artifacts visible, while black levels are deep and uncrushed. The Master Audio mono mix puts the dialogue and few ambient effects front and center, as well as Lalo Schifrin’s relentlessly propulsive score. On the extras front, we get a commentary track from film historian Toby Roan that delves informatively into all the usual suspects, like shooting locations and cast and crew filmographies. Film historian Howard S. Berger’s visual essay “Refracted Personae: Iconography and Abstraction in Don Siegel’s American Purgatory” may possess an imposing title, but it astutely and articulately analyzes Siegel’s formal techniques and thematic concerns in Charley Varrick, with a particular emphasis on those of a spiritual or religious bent. Rounding things out: a feature-length documentary with contributions from Kristoffer Tabori (Don Siegel’s son), actors Andy Robinson and Jacqueline Scott, stunt driver and actor Craig R. Baxley, composer Lalo Schifrin, and Howard A. Rodman (son of screenwriter Howard Rodman); an episode of “Trailers from Hell” for Charley Varrick with comments from screenwriters John Olson and Howard A. Rodman; and a characteristically incisive essay from film critic Nick Pinkerton. Wilkins

Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, Grasshopper Film

In the first of its many paradoxes, Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s best-known film, is both insistently severe and intensely pleasurable. The nominal subject here is the life of Johann Sebastian Bach as told by his wife, Anna Magdalena, though, and as befits a card-carrying member of the ’60s modernist movement that encompassed Godard, Rohmer, Warhol, and late Rossellini, the real one is the relationship between sights and sounds, artifice and reality, the medium and the world. Grasshopper’s Blu-ray is sourced from a detail-rich 2K restoration and the extras include Straub’s introduction of the film at a 2013 screening and author Alicia Malone’s intro to Straub-Huillet’s work for Filmstruck. But the highlights of this disc are two short films from Straub-Huillet’s back catalog. The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp, starring Rainer Werner Fassbinder and several members of his acting coterie, is an experimental work of black-box theater that takes on the political and structural underpinnings of love and incorporates numerous cinematic styles. And The Mother, made by Straub in 2011, tells the story of a murdered hunter whose remorseful reflections suggest the director’s own attempts to cope with Danièle Huillet’s death. Cole

The Complete Sartana, Arrow Video

What unites the wildly unpredictable and unabashedly entertaining Sartana films—despite the disparate contributions of two directors, a bevy of screenwriters, and two very different leading men—are the iconographic elements of the eponymous character himself: There’s the red-and-black magician’s cape, pepperbox pistol, and other baroque gadgets, not to mention the ubiquitous smoke-billowing cigarillo. The storylines, often structured as a mystery, are ingenious Rube Goldberg devices for delivering sudden reversals of fortune, typically emphasizing the perils of deceptive appearances. There’s loads of violence and gunplay throughout, with occasionally astronomical body counts, yet little in the way of graphic blood and guts, which lends the films an aura of old-school charm. Apart from the first transfer, which exhibits some pesky vertical scratching, the 2K restorations look uniformly outstanding, with vivid colors, lifelike flesh tones, properly filmic grain levels, and largely uncrushed blacks. Each film has a dynamic Master Audio mix, which really punch up the idiosyncratic scores from the likes of Piero Piccioni and Bruno Nicolai. There’s a satisfying bumper crop of extras here as well: Three commentary tracks, a visual essay identifying many of the genre stalwarts who turn up in the films, and numerous interviews with cast and crew members. Wilkins

Cruising, Arrow Video

Normally, cruisers would scoff at returning to the same well twice, but since the deluxe edition DVD’s choice extras were so well-done the first time around, it’s not quite a faux pas for Arrow to have licensed the lot of them. On the one hand, a newly recorded commentary track with William Friedkin and Mark Kermode all but renders the old solo commentary track by Friedkin redundant. Friedkin repeats a lot of the same observations and anecdotes in the new track, but Kermode smartly steers the conversation in new directions. Among some of the most eye-opening tidbits, Cruising was at one time earlier in the ’70s earmarked as a project for Steven Spielberg. Talk about close encounters. Equally delicious is Friedkin referring to Al Pacino as the “least prepared actor” he’s ever worked with. Does Friedkin’s explanation of why he inserted subliminal shots of anal sex among the film’s murder sequences come off as hopelessly clueless? Intensely. But one comes away from these commentary tracks understanding just how the final product ended up so confused and contradictory. Eric Henderson

Detour, The Criterion Collection

This Criterion edition honors Edgar G. Ulmer’s artistry, emphasizing the beauty he conjured even with a few thousand dollars and a week-long shooting schedule. Close-ups are vivid, revealing people’s wrinkles and creases, and clothing textures are shown to be pivotal illustrations of character. Above all, there’s a silkiness to the image, a velvety sheen that honors its aesthetic virtuosity. Meanwhile, the soundtrack gracefully oscillates between the various sounds of the road and diners and hotels, offering a subtle aural portrait of down-and-out life that contrasts with the dynamic mythmaking of the score. On the extras front, Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen, a feature-length 2004 documentary, and a new interview with film scholar Noah Isenberg, author of Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins, cover overlapping ground but are each worthwhile. Both supplements discuss Ulmer’s background as an immigrant from the Czech Republic—though he, like many directors in America who hailed from that part of Europe, claimed to be from the more cosmopolitan Vienna—as well as Ulmer’s early working relationships with legends like F.W. Murnau and legends in the making like Billy Wilder. And both pieces attempt to explain how Ulmer, an intelligent, talented, and cultivated man, failed to achieve the recognition that was enjoyed by, say, Wilder. Bowen

Do the Right Thing, The Criterion Collection

The image on Criterion’s Blu-ray boasts outstanding clarity and vitality, improving significantly on prior restorations of Do the Right Thing. Colors explode off the screen, especially the primary hues that lend the film a kind of hothouse poetry, and textures are viscerally sharp. This upgrade serves to further reaffirm the intoxicating intimacy of Spike Lee’s communal morality play, which of course renders the violence all that more disturbing. The archive extras, mostly ported over from prior Criterion editions, still offer a fantastic glimpse into the making of the film, particularly footage of a table read, in which we see Lee giving the actors notes early into the process of bringing his screenplay to life. But the best supplement, especially for aspiring filmmakers, is still the 1995 audio commentary by Lee, cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, production designer Wynn Thomas, and actor Joie Lee. Lee talks about character motivation as well as Do the Right Thing’s political significance, while Dickerson and Thomas offer sharp detail about the shaping of the film’s aesthetic. Bowen

Fritz Lang’s Indian Epic, Film Movement

The 4K restorations of The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb, each housed on its own Blu-ray disc, look spectacular. Colors are slightly paler, compared to the 2003 Fantoma DVD set, but the overall image is brighter, and there’s more information visible on the sides of the frame. Clarity of details and image depth are increased. Where the Fantoma discs featured both German and English options, Film Movement offers only the German track in a two-channel LPCM mono mix that nicely brings out some of the ambient sound effects (rifle discharges, clanging swords, tiger roars), as well as a pair of rousing scores by Michel Michelet and Gerhard Becker, respectively. And the highlight of the extras are the two commentary tracks by film historian David Kalat. Given the considerable combined run time, Kalat has plenty of opportunity to display his encyclopedic knowledge of Fritz Lang’s life and films. He meticulously traces Lang’s obsession with the Indian Epic from its origins as a novel written by Lang’s one-time wife and screenwriting partner, Thea von Harbou, the rancor Lang felt when the subsequent silent film adaptation he was supposed to helm was taken away from him by producer Joe May, and his desire to “close the circle” by finally filming his own version when offered the opportunity by producer Artur Brauner. Kalat also does an excellent job of pointing out formal and thematic connections between the Indian Epic and Lang’s earlier films, from Metropolis to Moonfleet. Lang

Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films 1954-1975, The Criterion Collection

For its 1,000th release, Criterion has gone all out, starting with the packaging. Foregoing a normal-sized box, the label houses the discs in an oversized book that suggests a commemorative edition of a graphic novel, right down to the highly chromatic artwork commissioned to represent each film. And each film also contains its own essay from a host of contributors, as well as an overarching essay by film historian Steve Ryfle. The set also comes with the English-language version of the original Godzilla, as well as the aforementioned Japanese cut of King Kong vs. Godzilla, alongside a host of other extras. Interviews with filmmaker Alex Cox and critic Tadao Sato extol the franchise’s virtues as political commentary and a source of national pride, while archival interviews with Ishirō Honda and various other members of the series’s cast and crew are included and detail the challenges of working on such effects-heavy productions. Behind-the-scenes documentaries show those extensive practical effects being filmed, and audio commentaries from critic David Kalat on Godzilla and its America re-edit delve into the overall themes and deviations between the two versions. Cole

The Harder They Come, Shout! Factory

Featuring a new 4K scan of the original 16mm negative, Shout! Factory’s Blu-ray showcases The Harder They Come in all its grainy, gritty glory. The film’s rich color palette—the deep greens of the forest, the bright yellows of Jimmy Cliff’s wardrobe—truly pop without ever seeming oversaturated. Slight imperfections in the original negative, including subtle scratches and flecks of dust, are rightly preserved, emphasizing the film’s scrappy, low-budget origins. And this extraordinarily thorough collector’s edition features a dense array of extras, making it without a doubt the definitive release of this cult film. The highlight of the set is undoubtedly an entire disc devoted to Perry Henzell’s second feature, the never-released No Place Like Home, a biting attack on the touristization of Jamaica’s countryside. Shout has also provided a feature on the restoration of this lost film, as well as four separate features on Henzell (covering his life and career, his legacy, his home and film production center, and his family). Keith Watson

Ida Lupino Filmmaker Collection, Kino Lorber

Each film in the Ida Lupino Filmmaker Collection comes with a audio commentary track: Barbara Scharres, director of programming at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and film historian Greg Ford on Not Wanted; historian Alexandra Heller-Nicholas on Never Fear; historian Imogen Sara Smith on The Hitch-Hiker; and historian Kat Ellinger on The Bigamist. Each track covers its respective film, as well as Lupino’s broader filmography as a director, writer, and actress. A recurring theme of the commentaries concerns the disconnect between Lupino’s confident direction and her constantly demurred public image, which emphasized her nonthreatening femininity, a subject that also comes up in the booklet essay by critic Ronnie Scheib. The essay is filled with insights into the films in Kino’s set and Lupino’s other directorial output, including the brilliant observation that her films fit comfortably within the more bullishly rebellious work of Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller as attempts to reckon with trauma and forced normality in the postwar era. Cole

Khrustalyov My Car!, Arrow Video

Arrow’s Blu-ray boasts some of the best special features included on a home-video release in years. An audio commentary by Arrow producer Daniel Bird extensively covers Aleksei German’s career, Khrustalyov, My Car!’s aesthetic and thematic touchstones, and details about the film’s complicated production. Critic Eugénie Zvonkine contributes “Between Realism and Nightmare,” a lengthy examination of the director’s perversion of realist techniques. Soviet and Jewish historian Jonathan Brent places the Doctors’ plot in the larger context of European antisemitism and Stalinist paranoia, extensively covering the history that informs the film. An archival interview with German by critic Ron Holloway digs deep into the filmmaker’s life, from the pressures of growing up with an artist father to his reluctance to make art and his pride in both his Russian and Jewish ancestry. Finally, a production documentary contains copious footage of German making the film, allowing an intimate look into the arduous staging of the film’s massive tracking shots. An accompanying booklet contains numerous essays that approach the film from various vantage points. Cole

The Koker Trilogy, The Criterion Collection

The films in Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy have a sense of immediacy—an in-the-moment exactitude—that adds up to an expansive vision of life. Criterion’s restoration and promotion of these films, given their relative obscurity in the West, is good news in itself, though the better news is the formal magnitude of these transfers. The images are pristine, with vibrant and varied colors and healthy grit. The textures of characters’ faces and of Koker’s natural landscapes are stunning, especially the rugged mountains and trees. The soundtracks are also impressive, particularly underscoring Kiarostami’s masterful use of diegetic sounds to establish a sense of place—especially the noises made by domestic animals and machines, such as construction equipment and cars. And the set’s extras offer a wonderful examination of the films and their larger cultural context. For a wide-reaching discussion of Iran’s political textures, and of Kiarostami’s use of varied perspectives, the new audio commentary on And Life Goes On with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, co-authors of Abbas Kiarostami, makes for invaluable listening that will be especially useful for Western audiences. Bowen

Kundun, Kino Lorber

Kino’s transfer beautifully renders Roger Deakins’s cinematography, highlighting its emphasis on the vibrant reds of monks’ robes and the Chinese flag, as well as the golden hues of palatial interiors and warmly lit landscapes. The audio is no less bombastic, with the rhythmic swelling of Philip Glass’s score filling all the surround channels, while dialogue remains clear in the center speaker. An audio commentary with film historian Peter Tonguette makes an extended case for the film as one of Martin Scorsese’s most underappreciated, countering notions of Kundun as an anomaly in the director’s canon with numerous connections both great and small to his other work. A second disc comes loaded with more extras, including two feature-length documentaries, one on the production itself and one on the real Dalai Lama. The latter is a typical social-issue documentary made for television, observing the Dalai Lama’s activities in exile and providing a summary of the history of Tibet’s conflict with China, while the former includes interviews with the crew about Kundun, along with copious footage of Scorsese filming and navigating the unpredictability of child actors, groups of non-professionals, even animals. Cole

The Man Who Laughs, Flicker Alley

Flicker Alley’s transfer of a new 4K restoration by Universal Studios brings a remarkable depth and level of detail to almost every shot. A healthy amount of grain is evident throughout, and the strong image contrast highlights both the film’s impressively detailed set design and the intricacies of the actors’ faces, particularly that of Conrad Veidt, whose tortured, tragicomic expressions present the film’s pathos at its most overwhelming. The lone extra on the disc, aside from a collection of production stills, is the short but informative “Paul Leni and The Man Who Laughs.” Despite its title, the featurette’s focus is less on Leni than on studio head Carl Laemmle, whose “fondness for literature’s quirky side” led him to produce The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Phantom of the Opera before taking on The Man Who Laughs. After quite a bit of historical context surrounding Universal’s release of the film and the reasons behind the studio’s inability to cast Lon Chaney in the lead, Leni is given his proper due, rightfully celebrated for his uncanny ability to mix black humor with an expressionistic eye. The Blu-ray, and accompanying DVD copy, comes with a 20-page booklet with an array of production stills and two essays. Smith

Micky and Nicky, The Criterion Collection

With a beautiful and lively transfer, the Criterion Collection brings Elaine May’s neglected masterpiece of male alienation back to pulsating life. The image boasts an astonishing range of light and degrees of darkness, to which prior home-video editions of Mikey and Nicky only alluded, fully honoring the rich spectrum of visual textures that May captures in the film. In the supplemens department, critics Richard Brody and Carrie Rickey perceptively discuss May’s creation of Mikey and Nicky, linking it to her formative partnership with Mike Nichols and to her first films as a director, A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid. Brody also emphasizes May’s gift for texture, for fashioning seemingly peripheral moments that are truly the subject of her work, while Rickey discusses May’s ability to empathize with men while scrutinizing them. Brody also shares a fascinating tidbit: that the Mikey and Nicky screenplay, long in development, helped to forge the partnership that arose in the early ’70s between John Cassavetes and Peter Falk in the former’s films. Which is to say that Mikey and Nicky is a response to a body of work that it also helped to perpetuate. Bowen

Mutual Appreciation, Arbelos

The new 2K restoration of Mutual Appreciation, from which this transfer is sourced, offers an image quality with far more depth and sharpness than what’s typically afforded to home-video releases of the low-budget, mumblecore films of the aughts. A good deal of grain remains from the 16mm negative, preserving the film’s raw integrity. There’s also a nice balance in the contrast between blacks and whites, with exterior scenes looking neither too bright nor blown out and interiors never overly dark. The sound is clean and evenly mixed and the dialogue is easy to understand even when characters trip over their words or talk over one another. And in an appropriately low-key, clever commentary track, parents of various cast and crew members offer up an array of observations, complaints, and dad jokes. Very much in the spirit of the film, these off-the-cuff comments abound in charmingly awkward attempts at humor and amateurish stabs at interpreting Mutual Appreciation. There are moments of genuine insight, but it’s primarily a light-hearted addendum to the film, with some choice moments of parental disappointment, whether it’s a bit actor’s parents complaining about how the framing leaves their son off screen for most of his 20-second appearance to another parent declaring, “Well, this, we know, is just solipsistic masturbation.” Smith

Notorious, The Criterion Collection

Notorious is a perfect work of control, yet it also anticipates the madness that would bubble up in Alfred Hitchcock’s later and more daring art, as he pushed himself further into the realms of the emotionally uncanny, increasingly linking himself with his tortured and monstrous male protagonists. The superb new featurettes on this release offer a master class in Hitchcock’s aesthetic, diving deep into his mastery and obsessiveness, while refuting at least one cliché: Here, Hitchcock is said to have improvised the creation of imagery, shaping certain pictorial counterpoints on the fly, rather than remaining chained to storyboards. And this material is ably complemented by “Writing with the Camera,” in which filmmaker David Raim further examines Hitchcock’s pre-production process. Elsewhere, David Thompson’s 2009 documentary “Once Upon a Time…Notorious” offers a traditional discussion of the film’s impact that might appeal more to casual viewers, with less of the cinephiliac inside baseball of the newer supplements. And of the two audio commentaries ported over from prior editions is the one by film historian Rudy Behlmer, who fascinatingly dissects the politics, those of Washington as well as of Hollywood, that govern classical American filmmaking of yesteryear. Bowen

Police Story and Police Story 2, The Criterion Collection

For contemporary American audiences, action cinema generally comes in two flavors. There are superhero fantasias with wall-to-wall effects and interchangeably bloodless, consequence-free warfare, and the occasional hard-R slaughter-fest for those viewers who’ve grown nostalgic for the vigilante cop thrillers of the 1970s and ’80s. In this climate, Jackie Chan’s Police Story and Police Story 2 remain distinctive for their balletic grace and aura of easygoing charm. Criterion’s supplements package, a well-curated mixture of old and new features, offers a full and exciting history of the film. A vintage TV program from 1964 discusses Beijing-opera training, which is pivotal to Jackie Chan’s physical discipline and to his style of action cinema. While clearly serving a promotional purpose, Jackie Chan: My Stunts is a feature-length 1999 documentary that’s nearly as exhilarating as the filmmaker’s best productions. Chan takes the audience behind the scenes to his stunt lab, a warehouse in which he devices and works out routines with his team. This is a case in which knowledge of the mechanics of a magic trick only intensifies the spell, as Chan’s action choreography involves rigorous split-second timing and editing that stiches multiple takes together to offer an illusion of effortlessness. Bowen

Princess Mononoke, Shout! Factory

Shout! Factory’s transfer of Princess Mononoke might just be the most stunning home-video presentation that any Hayao Miyazaki film has received to date. There’s an impressive clarity to the images that makes it impossible to not fixate on every textural dimension of the animation, from the film’s most elaborately conceived creatures such as the Deer God and possessed boar, to simpler elements like grass, flowers, trees, and animal fur. The colors are truly eye-popping, particularly the greens of the natural world and the bright, rich reds of blood and the fabrics of characters’ clothing. On the extras front, most notable is the option to view the film with storyboard stills of every shot in place of the final animated frames. These sketches are often crude, but the presentation is fascinating for allowing us such a detailed glimpse of Miyazaki’s vision in its nascent stage. The very simplicity of the sketches offers a compelling contrast to the rich, fully materialized world of the finished film, highlighting the staggering amount of time, effort, and imagination that goes into constructing a hand-drawn animated film. Smith

Putney Swope, Vinegar Syndrome

Sourced from a 4K restoration, Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-ray renders Putney Swope’s black-and-white cinematography in crisp detail. The table of the advertising firm’s boardroom positively gleams, and contrast levels are finely separated, from the dark levels of suits to the neutral grays of soundstage walls. The color scenes are also impressive, as the exaggerated hues of Truth & Soul’s commercials are well saturated and no less finely detailed than the monochrome scenes. The lossless mono track perfectly balances the film’s antic, overlapping dialogue, with each voice distinct in the mix as the characters bicker at length. In terms of extras, the audio commentary with Robert Downey Sr. is a treasure trove of production details, such as the filmmaker’s amusing recollection of the black actors who played Putney’s new executives needing to hide under the boardroom table during the opening scene because the crew wasn’t allowed to hang out outside the room. Downey also shares numerous anecdotes about his efforts to secure financing and distribution for this groundbreaking indie. A second audio commentary track finds critic Sergio Mims breaking down the film on more formal levels, explicating its thematic acidity and its shrewd parody of advertising. Cole

RoboCop, Arrow Video

The collection of extras on this set are gargantuan even by Arrow’s obsessive standards. Three versions of RoboCop are included: the director’s cut, the theatrical cut, and an edited TV cut. There are also interviews and tributes, new and archival, centered on many a significant person involved in the film’s production, including Paul Verhoeven, screenwriters Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, the film’s stars (and even supporting bad guys), and the FX specialists who created the RoboCop suit and the ED-209. One of the most revealing of these programs is the interview with second-unit director and frequent Verhoeven collaborator Mark Goldblatt, who offers a succinct and informative description of the precise function of second-unit work, while discussing his specific role in Verhoeven’s productions. There’s also an archival commentary with Verhoeven, executive producer Jon Davison, and Neumeier, as well as two new commentaries by film historian Paul M. Sammon and fans Christopher Griffiths, Gary Smart, and Eastwood Allen, respectively. These commentaries, taken together with photo galleries, storyboards and alternate scenes, offer a comprehensive history of RoboCop.And, yes, the filmmakers are very aware of the film’s mixed political messaging, and discuss it frankly, particularly in “RoboTalk,” a new conversation between Neumeier and filmmakers David Burke and Nicholas McCarthy, and in a 2012 panel discussion with most of the pivotal players who worked on the film. The best description of RoboCop is attributed to Davison, who’s said to have called it “fascism for liberals.” Bowen

The Shining, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment

Warner Bros.’s impressive restoration of Stanley Kubrick’s filmography continues apace with their new 4K presentation of The Shining. While not as substantial an overhaul as their transfer for 2001: A Space Odyssey last year, Warner Bros.’s new render of the director’s horror masterpiece only enriches the film’s stark beauty. Contrast between black and white levels is consistently sharp, while the vivid splashes of color—the dried blood and orange tones of the carpet, the ominous red of the elevator doors—pop against the more naturalistic hues elsewhere. Grain and texture are so natural that at times you’d swear you were watching a pristine 35mm print instead of a digital transfer, and the enveloping 5.1 mix judiciously distributes the original mono across speakers without noticeable panning effects. The extras, ported over from the 2007 Blu-ray edition of the film, remain modest, with the only in-depth feature being a commentary track by Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown and Kubrick biographer John Baxter, but when a film has inspired so many decades of intense scrutiny, it’s reward enough to have this elusive object in its greatest visual clarity to date. Cole

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

Sony’s Blu-ray wondrously represents Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’s vibrant and expansive color palette, really showing off the animation’s glowing neon streaks of purple and yellow-green amid all those old-school, 3D-aping blues and reds. The chummy and funny commentary track featuring directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman alongside producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller is rich in details about the film’s plot and animation. It will also be a treat for those who think they’ve found all of the film’s Easter eggs. “Alternate Universe Mode” offers a sort of recut version of film, now with alternate scenes—some finished and some still in storyboard phase—that flesh out the secondary characters and, in some cases, offer up some significant plot diversions, such as Miles’s roommate learning his secret almost right away. The recut is significantly longer and paced more like a lugubrious, plot-heavy live-action blockbuster than the kinetic kaleidoscope of the release cut. “Caught in a Ham,” a short film centered on Spider-Ham, is a fun, Looney Tunes-inspired barrage of antic shtick, puns, and self-reflexive visual humor. And rounding out the extras is a series of short but informative themed featurettes on subjects ranging from the film’s innovative animation to tributes to the late Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Cole

The Tarnished Angels, Kino Lorber

The Tarnished Angels, written by George Zuckerman, complicates character motivation and action by using flashbacks and ellipses that sometimes make it difficult to discern when, or even if, certain events are taking place. Douglas Sirk uses black-and-white images to stage a contrast between the oneiric promise of the film’s nostalgic feelings for past glories and the stark reality its characters face when death comes knocking at their door. Crucial to this effect is the black-and-white cinematography, which is consistently balanced on Kino’s Blu-ray, which also boasts a DTS-HD Master Audio track that maximizes the potency of Frank Skinner’s memorable score. Also noteworthy is the lovely feature-length commentary track by film historian Imogen Sarah Smith, who contextualizes Sirk’s career while offering an insightful reading of the film itself. Smith has put in the work here, speaking almost nonstop from beginning to end in a style that accomplishes the depth and rigor of a master’s thesis, with dates, names, and tidbits so thoroughly entwined with analysis that it’s an immediately essential listen for anyone who’s serious about their knowledge or study of Sirk. Clayton Dillard