Another good transfer from the American Film Theatre series. Watching the long version, it’s fascinating to see the brutal editing they did to get it to three hours. The cut portions, unsurprisingly, don’t match particularly well, but the sound is consistent throughout. Very nice.
Looks great. No complaints.
Weird added grain. It’s very prominent, but it floats on top of the image, as if the image was de-grained, restored to death, and then re-grained. In motion it looks very smeary.
The “grain” here is divorced from the picture and slides away:
Sometimes the dissolving grain moves at a slower frame rate:
(Revised 12-9-25.)
According to the booklet, Criterion applied DVNR for grain reduction and they did their typical hiss reduction. Regrettable, but their work doesn’t have distracting repairs and looks natural overall.
Looks amazing! Clear and sharp, with wonderful grain and a generous bitrate.
Dammit, another upscale from Criterion! They are inconsistent in publishing bonus features and alternate versions in HD, and they never state on the box when they upscale. I even checked Blu-ray.com and DVDBeaver before buying (both said 1080p).
Screenshots make it look ok, but in motion, the aliased deinterlacing and DVD-era artifacting is obvious:
The movie is encoded at 24fps, but transferred slightly slower, resulting in random whiplash-inducing stuttering.
Restoration work is horrible:
Frozen temporal cloning looks terrible in motion. The pause in this video clip is due to the broken pulldown, not an error on my end: