Here are only some of the 4K UHD tiles that came out in 2018:

2 Fast 2 Furious [ 4K UHD Blu-ray ] (John Singleton, 2003) Universal

3:10 to Yuma [ 4K UHD Blu-ray ] (James Mangold, 2007) Region Free UK Lionsgate

10 Cloverfield Lane [4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Dan Trachtenberg, 2016) Paramount

2001: A Space Odyssey [4k UHD Blu-ray ] (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) Warner Bros ( BEAVER REVIEW )

American Psycho [4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Mary Harron, 2000) Region Free UK Lionsgate

Ant-Man and the Wasp [ 4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Peyton Reed, 2018) Region Free UK Disne

Arrival [4K UHD Blu-ray] (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) UK eOne

Avengers Assemble [ 4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Joss Whedon, 2012) UK Walt Disney Avengers: Age of Ultron [ 4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Joss Whedon, 2015) UK Walt Disney Avengers: Infinity War [ 4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, 2018) Region Free UK Disney

Bad Boys [ 4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Michael Bay, 1995) Region Free UK Sony Bad Boys II [ 4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Michael Bay, 2003) Region Free UK Sony

Batman: Gotham by Gaslight [4k UHD Blu-ray ] (Sam Liu, 2018) Warner Bros.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice [ 4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Zack Snyder, 2016) Warner Bros.

Black Panther [4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Ryan Coogler, 2018) Walt Disney

Blue Planet II - TV Mini-Series [4K UHD Blu-ray ] (David Attenborough,2017–2018) BBC

Braveheart [4k UHD Blu-ray ] (Mel Gibson, 1995) Paramount

Cliffhanger [ 4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Renny Harlin, 1993) Region Free UK Studiocanal

The Commuter [4k UHD Blu-ray ] (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2018) Lionsgate

Constantine: City of Demons [4k UHD Blu-ray ] - Warner

The Dark Crystal [4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Jim Henson, Frank Oz, 1982) Sony Pictures

The Dark Knight [4K UHD Blu-ray] (Christopher Nolan, 2008) Region Free UK Warner Bros.

[4K UHD Blu-ray] (Christopher Nolan, 2012) Region Free UK Warner Bros

Darkest Hour [4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Joe Wright, 2017) Universal Pictures

Deadpool 2 [ 4K UHD Blu-ray ] (David Leitch, 2018) 20th Century Fox

The Deer Hunter - 40th Anniversary Edition [ 4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Michael Cimino, 1978) UK Studiocanal

Die Hard 30th Anniversary [4K UHD Blu-ray ] (John McTiernan, 1988) 20th Century Fox

Downsizing [4k UHD Blu-ray ] (Alexander Payne, 2017) Paramount

[4K UHD

Blu-ray ] (Antoine Fuqua, 2014) Sony Pictures

The Equalizer 2 [ 4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Antoine Fuqua, 2018) Region Free Sony

Escape from New York [4K UHD Blu-ray ] (John Carpenter, 1981) Region Free UK Studiocanal

The Fast and the Furious [4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Rob Cohen, 2001) Universa l

The Fog - Collector's Edition [4K UHD Blu-ray ] (John Carpenter, 1980) Region Free UK Studiocanal

Forrest Gump [ 4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) Region Free UK Paramount

Fury [4K UHD Blu-ray ] (David Ayer, 2014) Sony

Game of Thrones - The Complete 1st Season [4K UHD Blu-ray ] (Various, 2011) DE Warner Home Video

Gladiator [4K UHD Blu-ray] (Ridley Scott, 2000) UK Universal

Notable Rants and Praise

DVDBeaver-ites have a significant voice both with our requests for films to Blu-ray and our complaints of transfer and authoring errors . Here are short comments from a variety of balloters, in no order:

Frequent comments:

Far less complaints this year - there are more Region FREE Blu-ray releases (thanks Indicator, Twilight Time etc.), more Criterion in the UK, interlaced transfers are the rarity, astute collectors are aware that European TV broadcast films should be in 25 fps to adhere to their original presentation speed, commentaries are way up (thank you Kino!), as are dual-layering and high bitrates - we continue to like white font with slim black border subtitles (can be seen in any background), we don't like the 'shouting' uppercase-letter (and sometimes bright yellow and located higher than usual) subtitles remain a constant frustration for many.

Overwhelming kudos to Kat Ellinger, Tim Lucas, Lee Gambin etc. for their excellent commentaries and analysis. NOTE: All three are also members of DVDBeaver's Facebook group! Come join us!

Teal-leaning Blu-ray colors still surface although with less frequency than in previous years. They are glaringly obvious when they do crop up.

Bests, 1 Worst & A Wishlist



1. Most attractive slipcover: the see-through plastic O-sleeve for Criterion’s sex, lies, and videotape.



2. Best-designed booklets: the stapled faux shooting script of Criterion”s The Magnificent Ambersons; the clothbound digibook of Criterion’s The Princess Bride.



3. Best feature-length profiles (as extras): 'Harry Stanton: Partly Fiction,' on Eureka!’s Lucky; 'Signed: Lino Brocka' on Criterion’s Manila in the Claws of Light; ‘Jimmy Murakami: Non-Alien,’ on BFI’s When the Wind Blows.



4. Commentaries: A nice trend is the feature-length vintage audio tracks by Powerhouse/Indicator (e.g. Fritz Lang on Ministry of Fear, Costa-Gavras on Missing) and BFI (e.g. Donald Sutherland on Eye of the Needle, Paul Schrader on The Comfort of Strangers, Michael Balcon on They Came to a City).



5. Best new documentary on film history: Rüdiger Suchsland’s Hitler’s Hollywood, along with his earlier doc From Caligari to Hitler, in the same Eureka! dual-format edition.



6. Best BD upgrades of old TV mini-series: Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (Second Sight), and Reitz’s Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany (Second Sight).



7. Music: Best vintage soundtracks: John Lewis’s on Olive Films’s Odds Against Tomorrow and the ‘40s and ‘50s tunes on Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives (BFI or Arrow Academy). Best new score: Anoushka Shankar’s for BFI’s Shiraz. Best re-recording: John Lanchbery’s reconstruction of Joseph Carl Briel’s original score for Twilight Time’s The Birth of a Nation.



8. Most illuminating short extras: an appreciation of Orry-Kelly’s costumes on Criterion's Some Like It Hot; a look at the art of subtitling on Criterion’s Panique; William Macy interviewed on Powerhouse/Indicator’s Oleanna.



9. Most promising new distributor: 101 Films (for its Black Label titles, e.g. The Grifters and Black Book). Most disappointing: Cult Films (poor transfers of Antonioni’s I Vitelloni and Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits).



10. Wishlist for 2019: A boxset of Marcel Ophuls' documentaries; a DVD of Billy Wilder’s final film, Buddy, Buddy; and a Blu-ray of Jules Dassin’s Never on Sunday. Still hoping and waiting for a BD of Philip Kaufmann’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and all 269 minutes of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America.

Raves: *Arrow once again threatens to beat Criterion as the best BD label in the world, with their curated box sets (SUZUKI, GUITRY, DE PALMA) and loving individual transfers (12 MONKEYS), without the penny-pinching on transfer size that sometimes hampers Criterion, despite their astonishing 2018 line-up (e.g. DIETRICH/VON STERNBERG).



*The Film Detective has been planning to release Rowland V. Lee/Charles Laughton’s CAPTAIN KIDD (1945) for over a year now!!! HOW ABOUT 100 FACEBOOK POSTS TO ENCOURAGE THEM???!!!



*BFI gave us the WOODFALL set this year (where is R-1???), but, even better, their 2019 promises some HD restored classics from the vast BBC archives such as Rogue Male (1976). Please keep up this good work!



*Second Run gave us several beguiling masterpieces (e.g. Vampir Cuadacuc)- all REGION FREE!



*The BBC deserves a #2 spot for their ‘controversial’ DOCTOR WHO: SEASON 12 aka TOM BAKER SEASON ONE, IF IN FACT they did the right thing by going back to the original video masters for a new high bit-rate transfer. I’m still trying to find out if they did.



Rants: Eagerly awaiting KUNDUN from KinoLorber. Any day, right?



- Somebody really needs to give the catalogs for Paramount and 20th Century Fox the kind if love we know they deserve. I'd kill for a blu of RAGTIME, but Paramount is barely functional as a studio.



-Disney, FFS, a bunch of us would love your catalog titles on the open market. We have money.



- Severin, still waiting for THE CHANGELING situation to sort itself out.



- I regret that I can give no honor to Film Movement or Vingear Syndrome. I only have ten slots! Forgive me!



- Lastly, lots of good stuff out there, I wish I had enough money for it all.

Rant



I know you have better things to do than listen to insane ramblings, so I'll keep this short.



I mentioned how bad it was that Paramount and 20th Century Fox were ignoring their catalog titles, but another prominent studio which is almost non-existent on the Blu-ray landscape is Miramax.

Between the departure from Disney and subsequent licensing of the Miramax library to LionsGate, the vast holdings which made up some of the most fascinating films of the 1990s are almost gone from the available landscape. While I've no love for either of the Weinsteins, they knew how to get good movies out there and now those movies are out of the cultural conversation. Sure there's plenty of attention to Tarantino, but other movies like SMOKE or MALENA have a very low profile.



Okay, can't wait for the final ballot results

Have a great 2019!

Biggest rave this year would be for Blue Underground. First, they put out the definitive release of Fulci’s Zombie, and then, they followed up with a restoration of Maniac that can only be described as beautiful (which I never thought I’d say about that particular movie). I also wanted to commend Koch Media for their release of Dead Ringers. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best I’ve seen so far on blu-ray. The framing is still slightly off compared to the director-approved Criterion DVD, but it’s much closer than either of the versions on the Shout Factory release. And they fixed the image stability issues that plagued those Shout Factory transfers. The year also brought a couple more favorites of mine in their best presentation so far on blu-ray. Criterion’s Female Trouble restoration looks fantastic, and Shout Factory’s Exorcist II: The Heretic easily beats the previous Warner’s release. I threw the Grease Collection on my list not because of Grease, which still has some issues, but because Grease 2 is finally on blu-ray and looking great. And a special mention for Arrow on their release of Scalpel, first of all because the bump up in picture quality compared to my old bootleg VHS transfer actually improved my overall opinion of the movie, but mostly because they provided two versions: one with the DP’s grading and one with a more traditional grading. Regardless of which you prefer, it’s always nice to have choices, so thanks, Arrow!



So my biggest rant this year would have to be Revenge of the Creature from Universal’s Creature from the Black Lagoon – Complete Legacy Collection. I was really excited about this one because I finally got a 3D setup last year and really wanted to watch Revenge of the Creature in real 3D for the first time. But it turned out to be a botch job with the two images playing side by side on most people’s sets, mine included. After many complaints, Universal provided a replacement disc, but even though the 3D plays okay now, the 2D image looks very soft compared to The Creature Walks Among Us on the same disc (which alone was a poor decision – a 3D movie should really get its own disc). I initially thought to myself that this must just be how the movie is supposed to look, but when someone on another site stated that it was the version 3-D Film Archive wanted, Robert Furmanek replied, “No, it’s not. Sorry but that’s all I’m going to say at this time.” So it looks like Universal botched this release twice! Another big rant this year is Warner’s release of Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, which has a large oval of brighter image visible on many scenes. I’m not sure what happened there, but I returned my copy, as I found it too distracting. One last gripe – I really hope Criterion stops with the cardboard Digipaks. Night of the Living Dead and Silence of the Lambs are both great releases in terms of the discs, but the packaging is flimsy and I’m worried about longevity. I really prefer a plastic case for the protection it provides.





I did love the cover for Criterion's release of A Raisin in the Sun (1961). It encapsulated perfectly the subject matter for the film.

Rant : in 2018, it's absolutely incredible to stilk stumble on discs released incorrectly in 1080i50 (wrong speed), or using decade old DVD era HD masters, or encoded in a visibly problematic way. All these are known to the public : why can't professionals handle that then ? Putting back PSF 25fps masters to 1080p24 can be done in eac3to with 3 lines of code. Using DVD era masters just negates the premium performances of BD over DVD. Priorising the movie over extras in tthe encoding strategy is common sense. Yet, some labels and studios just seem like they don't care and too often, people and even reviewers let this pass.

This should end now.



Indicator has vaulted to first place in the field of specialty AV publishers, with most of their diversified range of titles being complemented by an impressive, sometimes staggering, number of extras; they can rely on a recurring team of very worthy contributors like Kim Newman, Jonathan Rigby, Kat Ellinger, Christopher Frayling, etc. We can only hope they can sustain this output of high quality material and that their more commercially successful titles will allow them to keep putting out such well conceived releases, some of which certainly are of niche appeal.

The past year was an intense learning experience for myself with regards to DVDBeaver. Gary is an absolute mensch with the patience of an angel. I finally think that I am getting the hang of it, well at least some of it. Also, 2018 was a wonderful year for cinema on physical media.

The best movie that I saw all year was Lucrecia Martel's "Zama". If I could recommend one film this year, this is the one (with the caveat that the Blu-ray(s) are bare bones affairs, though with a decent digital transfers). As far as transfers go, Blue Underground's fabulous 3-disc Blu-ray of Lucio Fulci's "Zombie" is a thing of beauty. Though not Casablanca by any means, Fulci's wildly bizarre gorefest gets the royal treatment with a transfer worthy of, say, Casablanca.

4K UHD Blu-ray discs, while still in their infancy, are showing more and more promise. Dolby Vision and HDR requires a capable set-up but, boy-oh-boy is it ever worth every penny. Dolby Atmos is also an increasingly interesting feature that achieves a more immersive sound than your typical surround sound, but of course, you will also need a setup that is Atmos-friendly.

Indicator released some lovely discs this year, including some wonderful boxsets. Criterion's Bergman release is a mammoth achievement, even when consumed over a relatively small amount of time. Arrow Video, Vinegar Syndrome Umbrella and 88 Films continue to amass a lovely collection of genre films. Vinegar Syndrome in particular has proven to be one of the most crucial curators of American cinema. Some highlights are the releases of Jamaa Fanaka's films, the weird psycho-sexual horror of Incubus, and the bizarre and delightful "The Killing Kind".

Sadly, there were a lot of films that I did not have time to get around to reviewing and my New Years Resolution is to quickly remedy that. (If you haven't seen Spike Lee's Blackkklansman, you have missed one of cinema's most powerful moments this year.)

I have learned to love commentary tracks again, thanks to some wonderful familar voices such as Kat Ellinger, Lee Gambin, and Tim Lucas. After many years of avoiding the damn things, I find myself enjoying them more than ever.

Lastly, I would like to thank Gary, the webmaster, editor, head Beaver, and most importantly friend. Looking forward to working with Gary as long as I possibly can. If only everyone could be this lucky.



