Opening titles are very blurry and smoothed, as if de-grained and filtered to death. However, the video soon clears up and is generally very nice all the way to the end.
Clipped directly from the BD.
The notes say that the primary source is the original reversal negative, which looks like it could benefit from more physical cleaning. I’m fine with dirt, but there comes a point when I’m sitting in a theater watching a fine but dirty print, and I want to yell to its owner, “Clean your print!”
I complain, but I still prefer to see dirt instead of artifact-inducing temporal cloning.
There weren’t any repairs that made me stop the disc, but I did catch this spot where a frame was held for the duration of three extra frames:
Frame number in yellow.
Instead of freezing, I’d much prefer to edit the sound, see black frames inserted, or, best, see the original damaged frames.
A light touch, but there’s so much damage, that it would’ve looked fine without any repairs. This is a bad restoration not because damage remains, but because the repairs are ugly, creating their own artifacts.
Interpolation:
Hideous interpolated eyes.
Interpolated spot repair. These scenes are over an hour into the movie. Up to this point, I wasn’t even noticing repairs bad enough to take notes until large areas of grain suddenly started warping as if due to terrible compression:
Frozen temporal cloning:
Opening and end credits use some other source, which looks like a recreation, de-grained and filtered to death. Check out that aliasing!
The included interviews use clips from this older, altered source. First, a sample from VS’s version:
Vinegar Syndrome BD
Now, this older version, clipped from the Wen Chao-Yu interview. No wires and no grain:
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:
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.
Clipped directly from the BD.
1926 Promo
Looks amazing! Clear and sharp, with wonderful grain and a generous bitrate.
Processing on Eolomea (1972) was so bad that it deserved its own post. See here.
The Silent Star (1960)
I found a tiny bit of interpolated cloning while looking for a sample, but it’s minor. Looks good overall. The only feature in the set that didn’t have any jarring repairs.
Clipped directly from the BD.
Signals (1970)
Filtering leaves residue from previous frames:
Bad splice handling that uses Interpolation, microloops, and appalling pixelation. How is this better than visible cement splices (which are mostly masked out during film projection)?
Frame numbers in yellow.
General interpolation and misalignment:
In the Dust of the Stars (1976)
There’s some weird masking and screen tearing going on, but I can’t tell if it’s original. Overall ok.
Edit: Turns out, some of the weirdness I was noticing is AI upscaling dreck. Lots of examples in this thread at Blu-ray.com. Deaf Crocodile’s disc apparently is better. Maybe I’ll get it. Still…
Sloppy repairs are few, but present:
Frame numbers in yellow.
Love 2002 (1972)
Very rough, but natural.
Edit: Or is this also an AI upscale? I initially thought the source was 16mm, but those edges and the dull color is very suspicious.
Clipped directly from the BD.
The Robot (1968)
The best looking film in the set.
Clipped directly from the BD.
Pleasingly, the features aren’t overly scrubbed, which makes the repairs all the more frustrating. There are enough remaining flaws that no one would have noticed their presence had they been allowed to remain.
And a pet peeve: these features don’t have end credits, but DEFA added new end screens immediately upon fadeout, destroying what I consider a cool effect, akin to seeing a play without a curtain call. How often do you see movies without end credits?
EDIT 11/17/25 – I just got the Deaf Crocodile release and did a quick spot check. Signals actually looks like 70mm this time, as opposed to Eureka’s grainy 2.35:1. In the Dust of the Stars is the same bad restoration. Grain is poor, looking like video noise. De-graining is frequent.
