Four A24s, Part 3: A Different Man

Today we have another BD-only (as opposed to 4k Ultra HD) release; but in this case, I'm a little less surprised they went that route.  A Different Man was one of A24's least successful films at the box office, not even recouping half of its modest $1.4 million budget back, which is a real shame.  If you haven't seen it yet, you might be looking at this movie wondering: is this just a Mask 2.0, another afterschool-spirited film made to tell us to be nicer to people with disabilities?  Like that inane one with Julia Louis Dreyfus and the giant parrot?  Thankfully, no.  This is a weird, thoughtful, subversive little movie, perhaps more in tune with the Jim Carrey Mask than the Eric Stoltz Mask.  Although actually, if you were to moleculary fuse the two together in a Brundle pod, you'd be getting closer.

Captain America's Sebastian Stan is surprisingly natural as a nebbish Woody Allen-type, a struggling actor with neurofibromatosis and a crush on his playwright neighbor (Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World).  He agrees to participate in a futuristic medical experiment that transforms him, both physically and circumstantially, until a sort of doppleganger (Adam Pearson, Under the Skin, Drib) arrives to take everything away from him.  What results is a dark, cutting and mind-bending look at the humiliating interplay between art and artist.  Also, the soundtrack is terrific and the special make-up effects won the Academy Award.  I enjoyed writer/ director Aaron Schimberg's first film (Chained for Life) well enough, but this is a much more self-possessed and stimulating work.

2025 A24 BD.

A24 presents A Different Man in its proper OAR of 1.85:1.  This film was shot on 16mm (another reason they might've felt this title would be fine without a 4k), so there's a lot of film grain, which is handy because it makes it easy to judge the transfer.  And I have to say, wow, once again A24 has exceeded my expectations with how perfectly encoded this is.  This is as finely captured and preserved as you could hope for outside of a UHD; and even then, the distinction would probably be fairly mild. 

And they've gone all out in the audio department, too, giving this a 7.1 TrueHD mix with Dolby Atmos, plus an English descriptive track and optional English and Spanish subtitles.

And the extras are strong, too.  Schimberg and his two leading men give a breezy but still incisive audio commentary, backed up by a solid 20+ minute 'making of' featurette.  There are also four deleted scenes, a couple of which we'd heard about in the commentary track, and a fun fifteen minute high-speed document of the entire shoot in 8mm.  Again, no trailer.  I guess A24 doesn't believe in including them.  No biggie, but considering how dedicated to perfection they seem to be with their physical releases in all other releases, it's a bit curious.  We do get another six art cards, this time with pages of the screenplay printed on the back of each one.

A24 is one more consistent production companies in cinema history, especially considering all of the big chances they take with their films.  But still, usually I'm happy to just see them once and move on.  Maybe I'll revisit 'em on streaming a decade down the line when I realize I can barely remember them anymore.  And this is one I really wasn't expecting much of, but it turned out to be a real must-have release for me.  Who knew?

Four A24s, Part 2: I Saw the TV Glow

It took me a while to get my hands on this one.  I Saw the TV Glow sold out fast upon its initial release last summer.  Apparently they seriously underestimated the demand for this title.  And then it popped up on a few online shops, but in very limited quantities.  So if you didn't snatch it up within the first day of its listing, you missed out again.  An alternative Canadian edition came out, but it was missing the special features, so pass.  By the time A24 finally came out with more copies, my enthusiasm had been sapped, and I was questioning whether I really needed this in my collection anyway.  Sure, I'd enjoyed it when it first came out.  It had some great visuals and some funky, weird moments.  But was it really an "I must own it" masterwork, or just a decent new release I got a kick out of?  So I held off.  But I eventually broke down and threw it in the cart when I was ordering some other titles (watch this space for Parts 3 & 4).  And now that I've revisited it on blu, yes, it is a must own masterwork that I needed in my collection.

2024's I Saw the TV Glow is Jane Schoenbrun's follow-up to the her initial cult hit, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.  That was interesting, but it feels like a warm-up for this far more accomplished work.  This film is directed with a more confident hand, with striking visuals and richly layered performances.  It also has a clever, original premise: where young adults' shared obsession with a young adult horror show (a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Goosebumps) overtake their lives to a shockingly literal degree.  This is obviously, not buried particularly deeply in the subtext, a story about coming out - or not - as trans.  But the themes are so personal and universal at the same time, that they should prove powerful for anyone who's ever repressed a dream.

2024 A24 BD.

A24 slightly mattes this film to a proper 1.85:1, and occasionally pillarboxes it to 1.38:1 for the show-within-the-show scenes.  You might be surprised to hear that this film was shot on 35mm rather than digital, and it's very well captured and encoded here.  Film grain is consistent and rendered as well as you could ask for on a 1080 blu-ray.  The director refers to this getting a 4k release in the special features, but A24 only sprung for a BD.  That's a little disappointing (again, it seems like they didn't anticipate the audience this film would develop), but as good as this looks, it's hard to complain.  In other hands, this could've looked worse on a UHD.

A24 has also given this an impressive 7.1 TrueHD mix, with an English descriptive track and optional English and Spanish subtitles.

And the special features are more satisfying than they were on Showing Up, starting with an audio commentary by Schoenbrun and star Brigette Lundy-Paine.  They start off unserious and frankly a little annoying - I was starting to think maybe I should've just picked up that Canadian disc and saved myself the hassle.  But as the film unfurls they find their groove and start providing some genuine insight.  Then there's a 'making of,' which is just over ten minutes, but offers a pretty fun look behind the scenes, followed by a collection of deleted and extended scenes.  Like the other A24 releases, this is a digipack housed in a side-loading slipbox and includes six art cards, in this case styled to look like Polaroids.

So it was a bit of a rocky road, but I'm glad I've finally got my grubby little hands on this.

Four A24s, Part 1: Showing Up

To start off the new year, I'm introducing A24 to our label collection with the next short series of posts.  Now, you might be saying, hey dummy, you've already made several A24 posts: The Lighthouse, On the Rocks, You Hurt My Feelings, Zola...  To which I would say, first of all, "dummy?"  Let's try to keep it civil here.  But no, those were all A24 films they released in conjunction with other labels.  These next four discs are from their own in-house label that they sell primarily through their website.  And depending on the title, specialty dealers like Diabolik might stock a few copies; but they tend to sell out of there fast.  Their first release was Krisha on blu-ray in 2017 and they've got BD and UHD releases of The Smashing Machine due out at the end of the month.

We're starting today with 2022's Showing Up on 4k Ultra HD (they do also have a 1080p BD version).  This film has writer/ director Kelly Reichardt reuniting with Michelle Williams, who'd also starred in her films Wendy & Lucy, Meek's Cutoff and Certain Women.  This time they've created what I would call an especially light comedy about the academic art world.  At least that's the milieu; I guess you'd say the story is more just about Williams stay afloat within this world, which is also populated by her dysfunctional family, passive aggressive landlord, and an ailing pigeon she feels responsible for.  Reichardt isn't really following a plot here so much as just building a world breathing life into it.  It's populated by a bunch of fun supporting players including James le Gros, Amanda Plummer, Matt Malloy (In the Company of Men), Andre 3000 of Outkast and Judd Hirsch.  And the artwork itself fleshes the viewing experience out further.

2023 A24 UHD.

This is framed at 1.78:1.  And, well, as I'm always reminding you guys, HDR screenshots look darker than in an online, SD format, because they're intended to be viewed on a higher nit display.  But even on my HDR set, this transfer is kinda low-lit.  I assume this is a originating factor of the film itself, rather than the home video transfer, since new releases being put out by their own distributor are surely taken more or less directly from the DCP.  It's not like we're judging a restoration made from old film elements here.  In fact, despite the deep 16mm-like grain structure here, this movie was shot on digital and made to look more film-like in post.  But the grain is helpful because it shows us this 3840p disc is perfectly rendering each fleck, authentic or not.  This is as sharp and detailed as you can get.  The saturation isn't super high, but the colors are natural and vivid in those scenes where the artwork is prominent and appropriately muted when characters are in their dingy home environments.

The audio is given an impressive True HD 7.1 with Dolby Atmos track.  It also includes an English descriptive audio track for the visually impaired and optional English subtitles for the hard of hearing.  There are Spanish subtitles as well.

Cal State, Long Beach, CA, January 2020

And A24 tends to cook up some nice extras for their releases.  The main special feature here (the specialist?) is an audio commentary by Reichardt, her DP Christopher Blauvert and Michelle Segre, who made a bunch of the art featured in the film.  It's a good chat, but they're diligent in crediting all the local artists whose work appears throughout the movie, and unfortunately this winds up equating to them spending a lot of time dropping an alienating and seemingly endless list of names that means nothing to almost all of the listeners.  Still, most of it is engaging and insightful.  Then there are two "short films" by Reichardt, which are nice to have here, but it's kind of overstating the matter to call them short films.  They're under ten minutes apiece of 1.66:1 footage of some of the art pieces from the film being created.

And that's it; no trailer or anything else.  Like all of these, it's a digibook in a side-loading slipbox and includes six art cards (particularly appropriate in the case of this movie).  Of the four, this is the slimmest special features package.  But it's an ideal presentation of the film itself, which is a joy that doesn't need to be adorned with bonuses.

Kenneth Branagh's A Midwinter's Tale for Christmas

Happy holidays, everybody! After the last couple horror and cult titles, I thought we could lighten our spirits with a gentle faux-Shakespearian comedy by Kenneth Branagh: 1995's A Midwinter's Tale. This is a film that fans had been pestering to get on DVD for ages, Apparently, the fullscreen VHS was fairly abysmal. But it took until 2010 for Warner Bros to finally release it as part of their Archives MOD collection. I was a little less fussed about the whole thing, since I owned the old 1997 laserdisc from Columbia Tri-Star, which was nice and widescreen. But I'm also always happy to upgrade my old laserdiscs to a more convenient format when I can. So I think this would be the perfect time to compare our two viewing options of this quiet Christmas film.

Update 12/24/25 - 12/24/25: It's Christmastime once again, ten years to the day from when I first made this post, and we're updating this post with Warner Archives' 2023 blu-ray edition.

I used the term "faux-Shakespearian" because this isn't actually another of Branagh's impeccable Shakespeare adaptions along the lines of Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, or Love's Labour's Lost. There is no Shakespeare play called "A Midwinter's Tale." Instead, this is a small, cheerful comedy about an eccentric but mostly determined group of actors who assemble to stage a production of Hamlet on Christmas Eve. Of course things go wrong, people fly in all directions, and of course everybody learns to work together and pull it off in the end.

Originally titled In the Bleak Midwinter, it's a small, privately financed black and white comedy made partially as a break from the studio system after 1994's Frankenstein, feeling sort of like Branagh's Clerks, with simple stagey shots (the stills look impressive here, but you'll find the camera never moves, just settling on a set-up and staying there for minutes at a time), campy jokes and an ensemble of colorful characters played largely by the supporting actors from his previous films. Besides his alumni, though, there are also fun turns by Joan Collins and Absolutely Fabulous's Jennifer Saunders and Julia Sawalha. It's not a masterwork like some of Branagh's grander accomplishments, but it's an agreeable little comedy I can't imagine many people disliking, and one you can easily forget and return to again and again.

1) Columbia Tri-Star 1997 LD; 2) Warner Bros 2010 DVDR; 3) Warner Archives BD.

So, I wasn't as excited as most fans about Warner Bros putting this out in widescreen since I already had it that way on the laserdisc; but I have to say their DVD does look better. The AR is roughly the same on both discs - the laserdisc claims 1.85:1 on the back, but is more like 1.80:1, and the DVD is 1.78:1. But Warner Bros manages to find more picture on all four sides. The grain looks fairly grainy for standard def and detail is definitely more refined than on the laser. Edges look artificially enhanced on occasion; but for an MOD DVDR, it's pretty good.

But of course, the new HD master is better.  The aspect ratio has been adjusted to 1.66:1, which mostly uncovers more vertical information, but trims the sides a little bit.  Gone, thankfully, is that edge enhancement, which looks more obvious to me now that I'm comparing it to the blu without any of it.  It's a brighter image, which brings out a little more detail from the previously murky shadows.  Grain is surprisingly light, even less evident than the DVD.  It's probably worth noting that almost every other Warner Archive that was released the same month as this was from a new 4k scan; they were probably sitting on this master for a while before they put this out.  But it's certainly a strong improvement on everything that came before it.  And that includes the original mono audio which has been bumped up to lossless DTS-HD.

The laserdisc had nothing by way of extras, so I wasn't too surprised by all the online reports of Warner Bros' DVD being entirely barebones as well. Being a DVDR, it doesn't even have smart chapter stops; they're just every 10 or 15 minutes, and the menu's completely generic. It's not entirely a wasteland, though, as neither the case nor posts I've read about this disc mention it, but it does have the film's trailer on it, which even the laserdisc didn't have. So that's nice. On the other hand, the laser had closed captioning, while this DVD has no subs or anything. And it's got better cover art, because whose ever idea it was color everybody's glasses yellow on the laserdisc cover really ought to take some vacation time. And now the BD is still essentially barebones, but it's the best of the three with the trailer, proper menus, optional subtitles and even less colorized artwork.

So sometimes Kenneth Branagh makes great films, and sometimes he makes fun things to catch on cable one night. This falls into the latter category, but it's one of his best out of that secondary tier.  Plus it's a Christmas film, and we certainly need more of those that aren't schmaltzy and terrible (this is only moderately schmaltzy), so it could be a good one for your collection.

The Slightly More Definitive Rabid

So, Arrow had a little trouble with their release of David Cronenberg's commercial debut, Shivers, what with TIFF remastering a cut version of the film and David himself approving it without apparently looking at it. But they're fixing it (gotta love it when these companies do the right thing by their fans), and eventually they'll be reissuing their loaded special edition blu-ray with a proper uncut transfer which is finally here! In the meantime, they created a similarly packed special edition of Cronenberg's follow-up feature, Rabid, which happily is not cut or otherwise problematic. In fact, it's pretty great. So while we wait for that Shivers fix, let's take some time to appreciate Arrow's Rabid.

Update 5/8/15 - 12/23/25: It's a decade later, and Rabid's circled back around for another swipe at the crown, this time via Scream Factory's 2025 2-disc 4k UHD special edition.

Rabid is in a lot of ways very much like Shivers: a weirdly sexual, medically induced form of slimy body horror turns into a contagious disease that makes people lose control and become homicidal. But this one's bigger in scope - where Shivers was confined to one apartment building, the chaos in Rabid spreads throughout the entire city of Montreal. It also stands apart for being the one straight film by the quite famous model/ porn star Marilyn Chambers. And she's quite good here; it's a little surprising she didn't go on to more regular acting work. Anyway, the whole film is much more intelligent and gripping than its description makes it sound like it has any right to be. And it's thanks almost entirely to David Cronenberg who really knows how to tell this bizarre yet curiously relatable story.

So Rabid got a very healthy 2015 upgrade in the UK with this Arrow's blu-ray/ DVD combo pack, but we don't have to look at it in a vacuum. I've also got the 2004 US special edition DVD from Somerville House, which was the best release going for a long time.  Metrodome's disc in the UK, which I used to own, was a better, anamorphic picture, but it was cut - so forget that.  Heck, now in 2025, you can pretty much forget every past release, thanks to Scream Factory's new BD/ UHD film upping the film to 4k.  Well, maybe.

1) 2004 Somerville DVD; 2) 2015 Arrow DVD; 3) 2015 Arrow BD;
4) 2025 Scream Factory BD; 5) 2025 Scream Factory UHD.

Right off the bat, the Somerville disc isn't even anamorphic, plus it's interlaced; so the fact that it's standard def isn't even the worst part. It's also the same basic 1.78:1 framing, but zoomed in closer so there's less picture around all four edges. The colors are pretty different, too, though there it's hard to say which is better. The Somerville looks a little more natural, but Cronenberg doesn't always seem to prefer natural, so that's maybe a little up in the air.  But clearly Arrow's transfer, which was done by Lions Gate and the fine folks at TIFF, has blown the old DVD out of the water in all other respects: detail, naturally rendered film grain, compression (it's a dual-layer disc, of course).

But now Scream Factory has come to take the film to 4k, with a fresh scan of the CRI negative (color replacement... basically a generation in between the original camera negative and prints that would've been struck from it).  And interestingly, they've opened it up to 1.67:1, revealing another smidgen of additional picture.  The colors have been re-timed again - the second set of shots is most obviously cooler, but the colors have changed throughout.  In the first set of shots, it actually looks more like the Somerville (should his robe have blue or green spots?  I wish I knew).  Grain isn't super clearly captured, even on the UHD.  It's actually a more modest upgrade than I expected, which I guess is more to Arrow's credit.

All three discs offer the original English mono track, though the Arrow and SF are lossless (LPCM and DTS-HD respectively.  Somerville also has a French mono dub, but lacks subtitles, which Arrow and SF both do have.  Arrow also threw in an isolated music track, which Scream dropped.

Extras-wise, it's another big win. First of all, the DVD special edition already delivered the goods with Cronenberg's commentary, which is excellent, and his video interview, plus the theatrical trailer.

Then Arrow adds a bunch of new stuff, too. There's a second audio commentary, by William Beard, who wrote a book on Cronenberg. He's quite well prepared and has plenty to say, another very good commentary. Then there are interviews with producer Ivan Reitman and Don Carmody of Cinepix, both of which are fun and insightful. And there's another good interview with Joe Blasco, which is good but also rather short. David Cronenberg's episode of The Directors, a 50+ minute retrospective of his career with a lot of big name stars (including Chambers), is here too. It's turned up on a couple of Cronenberg's releases, so if you're like me, you've already got it on your Scanners DVD or something else - or maybe you've even got it on its stand-alone DVD, since it was originally released separately. But it's quite good, and a number of fans probably haven't already got it, so it's cool they gave us another opportunity.

Then there's another featurette on Rabid and Cinepix, which is mostly pretty redundant, where one woman tells us things we already heard on the other features... though we do get a bit more from Biasco as well. Really, my only complaint about the extras, which are otherwise excellent, is the redundancy. You'll hear certain anecdotes, like how Cinepix started in softcore porn or how Marilyn Chambers was the Ivory Snow soap girl, literally four or more times. It starts to feel like a bit of a chore by the third time they come around.

The DVD had a nice little 2-page insert with notes, but Arrow trumps that with a 40+ page booklet, including an interview with Marilyn Chambers. And for hardcore collectors, there's a steelbook edition available as well; but me, I like the reversible cover art with the original poster art, as you see above.

And now we have Scream Factory's edition, which both adds and subtracts.  All the DVD stuff is here, as is most of Arrow's.  They dropped The Directors, which isn't too surprising, as well as that short Biasco interview.  But they make up for it with new stuff.  First of all, I should point out that Scream released this on blu in 2016, so shortly after the Arrow but well before this.  And that edition had some unique extras, which have been carried over here, including an on-camera interview with Susan Roman, who played Chambers' best friend, a unique commentary with two pornography experts (focusing, naturally, on Chambers' career), as well as a critical visual essay.  Plus they added a photo gallery, a TV spot and a dew radio spots.

So those are nice additions if you're coming from the Arrow, but if you already had the 2016 Scream blu, they've only added two new things for 2025: a pair of expert interviews, which, eh, are okay; but they don't add much to the conversation that all the other extras didn't already.  I'm happy to take 'em, but these shouldn't be the reason you triple-dip.  It does also come in a nice slipcover.

So, yeah I'll go ahead and call Scream Factory's latest edition of Rabid the new definitive edition.  But it's not going to blow your mind.  And you'll still want to hang onto your Arrow discs.  Or not.  The extras we lost aren't that big a deal.  In fact, it's pretty minor if you already have The Directors on another disc, like many of us do.  It's all rather incremental.

Groucho-Chico-Harpo At the Circus!

It's a good month for us Marx Bros fans this December, as Warner Archives have just released a brand new 4k restoration (albeit on 1080p BD) of At the Circus, which we're told has been made from "the best preservation elements."  Hopefully it doesn't prove to be one of the last releases from Warner Archives, because there's still more Marx Brother films that haven't made it to HD (not to mention so many other WB catalog titles).  But for today, let's just enjoy this.

Admittedly, 1939's At the Circus is post-peak Marx films.  This is them on the decline, but early enough in the decline that it's still plenty of fun.  This doesn't contain any of their best, wittiest work, but the brothers are still cheerfully game.  The routine of Chico keeping Groucho off the train because he doesn't have a badge feels like their earlier material, and Harpo is working with a new animal in practically every scene, culminating in him riding a live ostrich!  And the scene in the circus midget's house is classic 30's comedy.  The circus itself isn't particularly funny, but it's at least making the effort with big, elaborate production numbers, including a large orchestra, an elaborate trapeze act and they even shoot Margaret Dumont out of a cannon... at a rampaging gorilla!

What more could you possibly want?  Romance?  Well, that's this movie's weakest point.  People always knock the love stories in Marx Brothers movies, but it's particularly soppy here.  Their attempt to turn "Three Blind Mice" into a romantic duet called "Two Blind Loves" has to be the worst song in any of these movies.  But this is also the movie where Groucho sings "Lydia the Tattooed Lady," one of his most beloved songs of all time.  And Harpo's musical number is one of the studio's most ambitious arrangements... although it certainly hasn't aged well in terms of racial representation.  I often mistake this for being the one where they get into blackface (it's not... that's A Day At the Races), but apart from that single detail, it definitely feels like a fairly successful attempt to recapture the success of "All God's Chillun' Got Rhythm" in the best and the worst ways.  ...II suppose the gender politics of Florence Rice adopting the role of Kenny Baker's tamed horse in the big reprise is a little eyebrow raising as well.  Welcome to the 30s!

So Warner Bros first released At the Circus on DVD as a double-bill with 1938's Room Service in 2004, both by itself and as a part of their 5-disc Marx Brothers Collection boxed set.  If anybody ever releases Room Service in HD (hopefully, one of these days), I'll circle back around and give it fuller coverage.  But in brief, Room Service is the theatrical adaptation originally written without the Marx Brothers' personas in mind, though they reverted at the last minute.  It co-stars Lucille Ball and Ann Miller and has some funny bits, but is another of their generally weaker films.  It's a flipper disc, and the Room Service side features the fairly fuzzy 1.33:1 transfer you see above and optional English, French and Spanish subtitles.  Extras include the trailer and, as Warner often throws in with their films from this period, an unrelated Our Gang short called Party Fever and a short Looney Tunes cartoon called Daffy Doc.

2004 Warner Bros DVD top; 2025 Warner Archives BD bottom.

So, returning to At the Circus, we're starting with a 1.31:1 transfer, which the new 4k scan widens to 1.37:1, while pulling out to reveal a little more picture along all four sides.  The DVD just had very light, sporadic print damage, but that's been cleaned up on the BD - note the white spot above Groucho's head or the black spot in front of Chico's chin, both of which are only on the DVD.  The DVD is a little clearer than the Room Service transfer, but still soft compared to the new blu.  It also has minor edge enhancement, which has since been cleaned up.  Detail is crisper and film grain is visible, although a little faint compared to what would surely be possible on a proper UHD disc.  In short, it's a solid upgrade, with more noticeable improvement than some of the early Paramount ones.

Both discs offer the original mono audio in 2.0, but the blu bumps it up to DTS-HD.  Both discs also offer optional English subtitles, though only the DVD also offers French and Spanish.

Jitterbug Follies
2004 Warner Bros DVD top; 2025 Warner Archives BD bottom.

There's not a whole lot for special features.  Both disc include the trailer, the Our Gang short Dog Daze and the MGM Cartoon Jitterbug Follies, featuring Count Screwloose and JR the Wonder Dog.  For the record, the fullscreen shorts have not been remastered and seem to have been copied as-is from one disc to the other, as you can see above.  The blu-ray then goes one small step further, though, adding the vintage Leo Is On the Air radio promo, which highlights many of the film's songs.

So it might've been nice if they'd sprung for an expert commentary like they did for some of the other Marx Bros films.  But apart from being a little light on special features, this is a very satisfying upgrade, and my fingers are crossed for more.