Friday, January 21, 2011

Veronique, attempt no. 2

2:56 PM / Blu-ray / Comments3 Comments

Blu-ray

About a year ago, I reviewed Artificial Eye's UK BD release of THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE and came down quite hard on the image quality, describing it as "a bit of a disappointment" and "blasted with heavy noise reduction, rendering the grain static and unnatural and giving many shots a soft, rather smudgy quality." At the time, my thoughts on this disc were out of step with those of the majority. Now, however, the film has been released in the US as part of the Criterion Collection, derived from the same master.

And, as the screen captures accompanying DVD Beaver's review demonstrate, the master may be no stunner but it certainly looked a good deal more film-like before Artificial Eye added grain reduction to it. Criterion, it seems, have done a much better job of retaining the filmic look with their release, rendering their version far superior. It's not a film I'm madly in love with (I prefer Kieslowski's THREE COLOURS trilogy) so I won't be rushing out to replace my Artificial Eye disc immediately, but for those yet to decide which to pick up, it seems the choice is simple. Or at least it would be if the Criterion wasn't region coded.

 
3 Comments

1. FoxyMulder said:

Criterion's release of The Third Man ( now out of print ) was also superior to last years Canal Plus edition which also suffered from grain reduction and other issues probably related to that.

(Posted on Friday, January 21, 2011 at 3:40 PM)

2. bosque said:

I have the Criterion DVD, from the Beaver site you can see the Blu-Ray has much better resolution (naturally !)but like Michael I won't be in a hurry to up-grade. The features on the Criterion are very good, especially the commentary from Annette Insdorf who has commentaries for the three colours movies as well. Ms Insdorf could make paint-drying sound "interesting".

(Posted on Friday, January 21, 2011 at 9:09 PM)

3. Matthew McKinnon said:

On a similar note, I'm very curious to see how the Criterion of "Le Circle Rouge" looks. The Canal disc is very good indeed, and Criterion don't seem to be claiming it's a new transfer of their own on the site.

(Posted on Saturday, January 22, 2011 at 10:26 AM)

 
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