The best Blu-rays and DVDs of 2024

Sounding out a few people before writing this brief overview of the year in home cinema, the phrase ‘golden age’ to describe the current situation kept recurring; hard to disagree with that sentiment. A long ongoing and pronounced narrowing of taste in theatrical releases, most obviously in the diminishing number of non-English language films, has been countered during the same period by a joyous eclecticism and adventurousness in the home cinema market, which ranges far and wide across the globe and the whole of cinema history, peering into dark corners, rediscovering obscure gems, redrafting and rethinking the by and large conservative canon. It’s good to report that – the usual market challenges notwithstanding, to which we can now add the recent National Insurance hike – both established players and newer companies such as the inestimable Radiance report sales holding up.

If one were tasked with finding ways to improve this already rosy picture, you could point to the strategy of limited releases, which means important films becoming unavailable once the run has sold out (they’re rarely republished). Partly for that reason it would be good to see a much broader offer of DVD/Blu-ray items in libraries, particularly smaller-label fare and more obscure films. And for those without access to a multi-region player, the strategy of a major US player like Criterion, making available only a fraction of its releases in region B, can be frustrating. But these are minor quibbles; cinephilia is alive and kicking in the home video arena, and that’s always a cause for celebration. Long live the golden age.

(Faraon)

Second Run

“This standalone release of Pharaoh by Second Run is an event to be celebrated. Although commercially successful and critically lauded in its day, the film, in all its big-budget splendour, had largely fallen out of circulation for many years. The beautiful restoration by Studio Kadr – which director Jerzy Kawalerowicz founded in 1955 and presided over until his death in 2007 – has previously been available to English-speaking audiences only on Volume 1 of Scorsese’s Masterpieces of Polish Cinema box-set in 2014.”

— Adrian Martin, S&S Summer 2024

(No abras nunca esa puerta)

Flicker Alley

“Flicker Alley’s excavation of post-war Argentine noir continues to be a delight – though in this case the noir label is open to discussion. The stories adapted here by director Carlos Hugo Christensen were written by ‘William Irish’, a pseudonym used for contractual reasons by Cornell Woolrich (Phantom Lady, 1944; Rear Window, 1954): in a Woolrich appreciation among the extras, the historian Alan K. Rode suggests that he’s less noir than “the modern version of Edgar Allan Poe”, and certainly these stories have a gothic tinge.”

— Robert Hanks, S&S October 2024

Powerhouse Indicator

“In the 1920s, Slaughter became celebrated as an actor-manager, staging revivals of creaky Victorian melodramas at the Elephant and Castle Theatre in south London. He started out playing heroes, branched into comic roles, and found his niche playing villains, most famously Sweeney Todd (hard not to think that he wasn’t steered at some level by his name, which was not invented). 

“This entertaining set from Indicator contains eight films he made between 1935 and 1940, produced and mostly directed by George King, designed to cash in on his stage notoriety, along with several shorts that one way or another exploit the Slaughter brand.”

— Robert Hanks, S&S March 2024

Radiance

“More than a century old it may be, but Benjamin Christensen’s semi-documentary history and analysis of witchcraft retains its power to inform, amuse, startle and challenge. Its hybrid form, meanwhile – comprising elements of lecture, pageant, provocation and post-modern, self-deconstructing horror movie – feels so witchily ahead of its time as to have the viewer shaking her head in wonderment.”

— Hannah McGill, S&S December 2024 issue

BFI

“The rainy gloom of a devastated country hangs over Floating Clouds, Naruse’s most popular film in his native Japan. Set mainly in post-war Tokyo, it features occasional flashbacks to sunnier, happier times in occupied French Indochina, where Yukiko (played by Takamine Hideko, who starred in 17 of Naruse’s films) first meets and falls for Tomioka (Mori Masayuki), a field-worker for the Japanese Forestry Unit. In the initial passion of their affair Tomioka promises to divorce his sickly wife and marry Yukiko – but back in newly-defeated Japan, he tells her that all such promises have died with the war’s end.

“But her obsession with Tomioka persists, though she’s constantly reminded that he hardly deserves her love. Often cutting between present and past in a single shot, or following him, her or the two of them down the narrow streets of dilapidated, red-light district Tokyo, Naruse’s camera quietly studies their body-language, reminding us of the emotional gulf that separates them, yet paradoxically draws them back together.”

— Philip Kemp, S&S 

Criterion

Soviet director Kira Muratova made more than 20 features but it’s only relatively recently that she’s become recognised as one of the most important directors of her generation. These two magnificent films, Brief Encounters (1967) and The Long Farewell (1971), have been beautifully restored and will only enhance her burgeoning reputation in the UK.

“Muratova was drawn to poetic forms of expression, which conflicted with the ideals of socialist realism; and to examining the real lot of Soviet women, whose advertised position was as equal partners in revolution, but who still seemed to get landed with most of the chores… While these two films represent only some aspects of a vastly flexible talent, evident through a stylistically diverse body of work, they display amply the adventurousness of Muratova’s visual imagination, the vibrancy of her storytelling and the sensitivity of her work with actors.”

— Hannah McGill, S&S November 2023

Studiocanal

“Some of the best Archers films – A Canterbury Tale (1944), Black Narcissus – manage to avoid depicting a love relationship at all, and I Know Where I’m Going! and A Matter of Life and Death show only the beginnings of one. In The Red Shoes the choice between dance and “the doubtful comforts of human love”, as presented to Vicky by Lermontov, is binary, and the boyish Julian never stands a chance – nor, ultimately, does Vicky.

“In The Small Back Room there is no such choice: Sammy and Susan’s relationship is complexly entangled with their work, and Susan is as concerned in Sammy’s career as he is – it is 1943 and the imbalance in their formal roles is taken as read. Just because it is realistic, The Small Back Room is seldom nice.”

— Henry K Miller, S&S September 2024

Criterion

“Val Lewton was that rarest of animals in 1940s Hollywood – an auteur-producer of individual vision whose creative imagination was as key to the films he produced as was that of the directors whom he nurtured: Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson, Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise…subtlety and understatement were his aims: shadows rather than shocks, insidious hints of lurking menace with scares implied rather than blatantly shown, scores that whispered unease with quiet murmurs of the lower strings and wind instruments. And so these were the qualities, in the 11 features he produced for RKO from 1942 to 1946, that he encouraged his directors and screenwriters to create.”

— Philip Kemp, S&S November 2024

Radiance

“Some readers will need no introduction to Jacques Rivette’s L’Amour fou (1969) and will care very little what I have to say about this latest release. After the negative of the 35mm film was burned in a warehouse fire in 1973, a scratchy 35mm copy with burned-on subtitles has intermittently appeared at festivals, but until now the film has never had a general release or been available for home viewing. As such, it’s something of a cinephile unicorn – the missing number on the nouvelle vague bingo card.

“Hopefully that will change with the release of Radiance Films’ limited edition Blu-ray, which brings to a wider audience the immaculate 4K restoration of the film that opened the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Assembled under the supervision of cinematographer Caroline Champetier from materials kept at Les Archives du Film and in Éclair-Preservation, the 252-minute film combines the robust intellectualism and languorous pacing of Out 1 with the impish charm of Céline and Julie. Like both, it is semi-improvised and highly self-reflexive, blurring the line between life and art through a series of mise en abymes.”

— Catherine Wheatley, S&S June 2024

Eureka Masters of Cinema

“For years, his name vanished from histories of the cinema, despite the tireless championing of his films by Luis Buñuel, and it wasn’t until Henri Langlois screened Les Vampires at the Cinémathèque française in the 1940s that Feuillade’s reputation started to revive. Today, he’s widely recognised as one of the foremost creative artists of early French cinema; not only did Assayas draw inspiration from Les Vampires, but Georges Franju borrowed the plot of Judex for his affectionate 1963 remake.

“The presentation of these classic melodramas is exemplary. When the films came to light in the 1950s and 60s the original intertitles were missing. But in 2013 Gaumont and Le Centre National du Cinéma in collaboration with the Cinémathèque française recreated them from synopses intended for exhibitors, while scanning the original nitrate negatives in 4K. Eureka supply English-language subtitles and lively musical soundtracks with occasional sound effects, along with ample extras and a substantial 98-page booklet filled with appreciative essays.”

— Philip Kemp, S&S December 2024

Critic, US

1. All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror volume 2 (Severin Films)
2. CC40 (Criterion)
3. Mary’s Not a Virgin Anymore & The Films of Sarah Jacobson (AGFA)
4. I Am Cuba (Criterion)
5. Brief Encounters / The Long Farewell: Two Films by Kira Muratova (Criterion)

Critic and Blu-ray technical producer, UK

1. Peter Strickland – A Curzon Collection (Curzon)
2. Alexander Ptushko Fantastika Box (Deaf Crocodile)
3. Louis Feuillade: The Complete Crime Serials 1913-1918 (Eureka Masters of Cinema)
4. Wojciech Jerzy Has: Antologia filmowa (16-disc box set) (DI Factory)
5. Fugitive Images: Selected Works by Andrea Luka Zimmerman (Second Run)

This year, I seem to have been doing a lot of ploughing through ambitious ‘filmography in a box’ projects, of which the 2024 standout is Curzon’s admirably completist Peter Strickland survey, which includes all the features and umpteen shorts dating back to the 1990s. (A caveat: four out of its six discs are identical to previous, albeit excellent, Curzon releases.)

Deaf Crocodile cemented its status as my favourite new (post-2020) label with this four-film collection of lavish fantasy epics by the Ukrainian-born Alexander Ptushko, the Soviet Union’s exact equivalent of Ray Harryhausen and Karel Zeman — the singing, Cossack-dancing squirrel in The Tale of Tsar Saltan is almost worth the price on its own! — while Eureka similarly did Louis Feuillade proud with their most impressive release in years.

Most ambitious of all is the massive (16 discs, 14 features, 11 shorts), 100% English-friendly survey of the complete work of Wojciech Jerzy Has, a great filmmaker who’s still disproportionately recognised west of Poland for just two films, The Saragossa Manuscript and The Hourglass Sanatorium, by no means his only masterpieces.

And Second Run reminded us that they’re not an exclusively eastern European-oriented label with this near-complete pre-2024 survey of the work of filmmaker-activist Andrea Luka Zimmerman.

Associate editor, Sight and Sound

1. L’amour fou (Radiance)
2. Louis Feuillade: The Complete Crime Serials 1913-1918 (Eureka Masters of Cinema)
3. The Small Back Room (Studiocanal)
4. I Walked with a Zombie / The Seventh Victim: Produced by Val Lewton (Criterion)
5. Pharaoh (Second Run)

Cinema Curator, Barbican

1. The Criminal Acts of Tod Slaughter (Powerhouse Films)
2. The People’s Joker (Altered Innocence)
3. A Dry White Season (BFI)
4. Face to Face (Imprint)
5. Drifter (Kino Lorber)

Powerhouse Films’ Tod Slaughter boxset isn’t just my favourite box set of the last 12 months, it’s simply one of the best boxsets I’ve ever owned. Every film was a joy, each and every one of the many extras was informative and enormous fun. I can’t recommend it enough.

Any Euzhan Palcy Blu-ray release is a cause for celebration. A Dry White Season, her scathing critique of Apartheid, some of it filmed undercover in Soweto, remains a potent rallying cry. It was, of course, immediately banned in South Africa. The extras are excellent. Here’s hoping her great works from Martinique – Sugar Cane Alley (1983) and Siméon (1992) – become available on Blu-ray in the future.

Not every film on my list is a masterpiece but the extras truly elevate the discs. Face to Face is not one of my favourite Ingmar Bergman films but the excellent commentary by Michael Brooke and video essay by Kat Ellinger are both marvellous.

An underground masterpiece of queer cinema Pat Rocco’s Drifter is not, but the beautiful restoration and his superior short films, included on the set, are superb.

And finally, Altered Innocence continue their exemplary work in showcasing fascinating queer cinema. The People’s Joker, a mischievous queer take on the first Joaquin Phoenix film, is a constantly funny joy, and the extras echo the endearing DIY aesthetic of the movie. Elsewhere in their 2024 roster, they released a number of quality Blu-rays, including an excellent package of early features by François Ozon, including Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000), still his best film. I can’t wait to see what they release next.

Critic, US/UK

1. Green Border (Kino Lorber)
2. Afire (Criterion)
3. The Settlers (Mubi)
4. Archangel: A Tragedy of the Great War (Zeitgeist Films)
5. Louis Feuillade: The Complete Crime Serials 1913-1918 (Eureka Masters of Cinema)

‘Home entertainment’ shouldn’t merely be entertaining. Agnieska Holland’s The Green Border, Christian Petzold’s Afire and Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s The Settlers address the refugee crisis, climate change and genocide, respectively – each a masterful film that urges political engagement rather than the intellectual detachmement of Petzold’s self-absorbed writer protagonist. 

Now that Guy Maddin has gone mainstream, sort of, with the scathing co-directed G7 satire Rumours, it’s a pleasure to iris-in again on the great pasticheur’s Archangel, a scarcely untopical wartime melodrama that uses Soviet montage and peers through a vaselined Sternbergialn lens to address battlefield PTSD, amnesia and romantic loss in the Russian Arctic city occupied by anti-revolutionary forces.

The four silent crime serials in the 628-minutes Feuillade are meanwhile indispensable as foundational works for Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, and film noir.

Critic, UK

1. Chantal Akerman Masterpieces 1968-1978 (Criterion)
2. Louis Feuillade: The Complete Crime Serials 1913-1918 (Eureka Masters of Cinema)
3. Love Me Tonight (Indicator)
4. The Small Back Room (Studiocanal)
5. The Day of the Locust (Arrow)

This year, I broke my own tedious rule that prohibits voting for two releases that include my own small contributions. First, for the truly magnificent Feuillade collection, the number one silent release of the year, and a splendid set. Second, in honour of the late Lee Gambin, whom we sadly lost this year. His work on The Day of the Locust was tireless and comprehensive.

It was a great year for silent cinema on disc – alongside Feuillade, the Laurel and Hardy back-catalogue excavation releases by Flicker Alley and Eureka were exemplary in many regards, and the new Radiance release of Häxan is a stunner.

A good year for Powell (and Pressburger) of course. As well as the joy of seeing the new restorations of this excellent film, thanks be to the BFI for unleashing the Quota Quickies – on Blu-ray no less.

Film historian and reviewer

1. Louis Feuillade: The Complete Crime Serials 1913-1918 (Eureka Masters of Cinema)
2. Häxan (Radiance)
3. I Walked with a Zombie / The Seventh Victim: Produced by Val Lewton (Criterion)
4. Laurel and Hardy: The Silent Years (1927) (Eureka Masters of Cinema)
5. Two Films by Ozu Yasujiro (I Was Born, But… & There Was a Father) (BFI)

DVD/Blu-ray is perhaps the ideal medium for restoring to availability films that have been unduly overshadowed or overlooked. Particularly so in the case of silelnt movies; to quote the intro to Pamela Hutchinson’s review of the Laurel & Hardy set: “Some silents are worth making a noise about.”

Critic, UK

1. L’amour fou (Radiance)
2. Black God, White Devil (Mawu Films)
3. Michael Powell: Early Works (BFI)
4. The Small Back Room (Studiocanal)
5. The Valiant Ones (Eureka Masters of Cinema)

Few public or academic libraries seem to be collecting the incredible wealth of films that are still coming out on Blu-ray in relatively small editions, and the commercial rental market is nonexistent. Streaming is unreliable and the streamers don’t bother with extras; the cost of Blu-rays is prohibitively expensive; and you might not want to watch them twice; plus there ought to be some way of ensuring that these films remain available.

Critic, UK

1. The Battle of Chile (Icarus Films)
2. Columbia Noir #6: The Whistler (Indicator)
3. The Village Detective: A Song Cycle (Second Run)
4. Phase IV (Vinegar Syndrome)
5. Häxan (Radiance)

Critic, UK

1. Daiei Gothic — Japanese Ghost Stories (Radiance)
2. The Silence of the Lambs (4K UHD) (Arrow)
3. Floating Clouds (BFI)
4. J-Horror Rising (Arrow)
5. Fist of Legend (4K UHD) (88 Films)

A particularly great year for East Asian cinema releases from the UK’s boutique labels, including titles from Third Window Films, Eureka, Second Sight and others that just missed the cut. I’ve only been able to get just a few releases from international labels this year (primarily via eBay), but I’d like to give a special mention to Kani Releasing, Chameleon Films and Vinegar Syndrome Archive.

Critic, US

1. Victims of Sin (Victimas del pecado) (Criterion)
2. Never Open That Door (No abras nunca esa puerta) (Flicker Alley)
3. Brief Encounters / The Long Farewell: Two Films by Kira Muratova (Criterion)
4. The Dragon Painter (Kino Lorber)
5. Black Tuesday (Eureka Masters of Cinema)

Most of my selections reflect the heroic work of film archives, foundations, historians and festivals to not only restore endangered or forgotten films but to build new audiences for them. I will never forget seeing Emilio Fernandez’s Victims of Sin for the first time at a Film Noir Foundation festival in 2014 and having my mind blown. Ten years later, it is finally available on disc. 

The FNF has also been behind the ongoing revival of Argentine noir, rescuing some films from near-oblivion. It is also a joy to see that Hugo Fregonese’s electrifying B noir Black Tuesday, which was long available only in murky public domain copies, is getting the full Masters of Cinema treatment (full disclosure: I contributed to the disc.) “Noir” remains a great way to package and sell little-known films: e.g. Helmut Kautner’s stunning Black Gravel, on Radiance’s World Noir Vol. 2. 

Silent cinema is no doubt a tougher sell (though the restorations of Laurel and Hardy’s silent films, from Eureka and Flicker Alley, will surely find an eager audience), which makes Kino Lorber’s release of the very beautiful Sessue Hayakawa vehicle The Dragon Painter all the more noteworthy.

Critic, UK

1. The Conversation (Studiocanal)
2. Happiness (Criterion)
3. Floating Clouds (BFI)
4. Prime Cut (Kino Lorber)
5. Watership Down (BFI)

Documentary filmmaker, writer on film, UK

1. Jerzy Skolimowski: Walkover / Barrier / Dialog 20-40-60 (Second Run)
2. La Marge (Plaion)
3. L’amour fou (Radiance)
4. Bluebeard’s Castle (BFI)
5. The Music Lovers (BFI)

My choices are all of films once hard to find and now beautifully restored. Skolimowski’s early Polish films are revealed to be works of a unique and brilliant talent. Rivette’s L’amour fou was the missing piece in his exploration of the fragile boundaries between art and life. Powell and Russell gloriously match imaginative filmmaking to great (classical) music. And while Borowczyk’s delirious Behind Convent Walls was given a stunning makeover by Arrow, his darker and more surprising La Marge is a film I feared was lost forever. So my selection reflects how responsibly packaged discs are so often the only way to discover the cinema of the past at its most sublime.

BFI digital features editor

1. Louis Feuillade: The Complete Crime Serials 1913-1918 (Eureka Masters of Cinema)
2. L’amour fou (Radiance)
3. Misunderstood (Radiance)
4. I Walked with a Zombie / The Seventh Victim: Produced by Val Lewton (Criterion)
5. Happy End (Second Run)

As ever a mix of favourites that it’s great to finally have on Blu-ray — Feuillade, Lewton, Rivette! — and the thrill of new discoveries, none more thrilling than the exhilarating topsy-turvy genius of Oldřich Lipský’s Happy End (1967) and the bottomlessly sad father-son drama Misunderstood (1966), with Anthony Quayle playing the UK consul in Florence. 

I was also very grateful for Claire Denis’ debut, Chocolat, courtesy of BFI; Indicator’s edition of Fritz Lang’s noirish department-store fable (and Christmas film) You and Me; and Criterion’s release of William Dieterle’s All That Money Can Buy, a proto-Night of the Hunter struggle between good and evil in the American heartland that’s far better than anyone has ever told me. Great year!