The marital-breakdown drama The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby may be new in theaters, but it already stands as the third cut of a project by director Ned Benson that also includes two separate films, Him and Her, that look at the story from James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain's characters' perspectives. Reconfiguring movies has, over the past few decades, become a tried-and-true method of increasing DVD/Blu-ray sales via "unrated" versions and "director's cuts," most of which are just cheap gimmicks with lousy explicit material salvaged from the editing room floor and wedged into the feature so consumers can feel like they're getting something new. That said, there are also some rare instances in which revisiting, and reworking, films — both old and new — has led to marked improvements. In honor of The Disappearances of Eleanor Rigby's multiple-version nature, we present the ten movies most enhanced by alternate cuts.

Blade Runner

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Ridley Scott's sci-fi noir has gone through various incarnations since its original 1982 release, all of which can be found in the five-disc Blu-ray "Ultimate Collector's Edition." Nonetheless, it's the "Director's Cut" from 1992 that remains the finest version. Removing Harrison Ford's unnecessary narration and the studio-mandated upbeat ending, and inserting a key unicorn-centric dream sequence that implies that Ford's Deckard is, in fact, a cyborg "replicant," it's the only iteration of Blade Runner to watch.

Once Upon a Time in America

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Sergio Leone's final epic, a crime saga set in New York from the '20s to the '60s, originally ran nearly four-and-a-half hours before it made its way to American shores in a bastardized 139-minute atrocity that, among its many failings, reshaped the material's flashback-heavy, time-hopping narrative into clunky chronological order. A superior 229-minute version of the film that goes a long way toward restoring Leone's original vision has been around for more than a decade. However, those looking for a more definitive version will have to wait until September 30, when a 251-minute cut — first screened at Cannes in 2012 — will make its debut on Blu-ray.

Halloween II

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Rob Zombie's second take on John Carpenter's boogeyman Michael Myers was given an even bleaker update when it hit home video, featuring more bloodshed, a more screwed-up characterization of its heroine, and a more insanely hallucinatory vibe. As a black-metal-by-way-of-David-Lynch reimagining, the considerably more brutal and nightmarish director's cut of this 2009 sequel is the only trip back to Haddonfield one need make.

Touch of Evil

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Orson Welles's attempted big-studio comeback ended in disaster when Universal thoroughly chopped up his 1958 noir Touch of Evil. It wasn't until 1998 that it was properly restored courtesy of legendary editor Walter Murch, who followed a 58-page Welles memo in order to make a wide range of small and large changes (including the removal of the opening credits over Welles' legendary crane shot) that solidified the film as one of noir's greatest works.

Apocalypse Now

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Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now was such a tortured production that its making became the subject of its own documentary, 1991's Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. Coppola considered his 1979 version of Apocalypse Now to be his own, but in 2001, he nonetheless premiered a new Redux edition featuring both improved/tweaked aesthetics as well as a whopping 49 additional minutes of footage. While the most notable of that content is a long plantation sequence, all of it combines to form a far richer — if occasionally more sluggish — rendition of Coppola's Vietnam epic.

Brazil

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Terry Gilliam's dystopian sci-fi fantasy was butchered by studio execs, who trimmed it by 48 minutes to give it a thoroughly false happy ending. That "Love Conquers All" fiasco — replete with the removal of the revelation that the entire story takes place in its protagonist's head — can still be viewed as part of the Criterion Collection's Brazil box set. Still, the authoritative version continues to be the "European cut" of the film, which features the most material and which Gilliam himself still considers to be his true vision.

The Wild Bunch

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While Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid may have been the Sam Peckinpah film most improved by a post-release recut, it remains — in any version — far inferior to the "director's cut" of The Wild Bunch that first saw the light of day in 1995. Featuring ten minutes of material that was excised from its American release (but shown, from the get-go, in Europe), it now includes one key flashback at a brothel, as well as a series of reaction shots of children that help augment both the powerful viciousness and mournful tragedy of the story's violence.

The New World

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Terrence Malick's 2005 film about the romance between John Smith and Pocahontas was, from the outset, shown in various director-approved forms — one for its award-qualifying run, another for its proper theatrical release, and a third for its home-video debut. Of the three, it's the last of these (dubbed the "extended cut") that runs the longest (35 additional minutes) and proves the most satisfying, thanks to even longer passages, more ruminative voiceover, and chapter cards that, together, give the film a languorous, hypnotic splendor.

The Big Red One

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Re-released in 2004 as The Big Red One: The Reconstruction, the extended cut of Samuel Fuller's 1980 WWII epic (bolstered by 40 minutes of new scenes) brings even more immediacy and intimacy to the director's portrait of five gunmen making their way through various countries during the war. Enhancing the film's scope, this restored version also gets at the not-inconsiderable, and often bleakly amusing, sexual frustration that plagues those engaged in combat.

Aliens

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James Cameron reinstated 17 minutes of material to Aliens in his 1992 "special edition," which now stands as the accepted final cut of the film. The most vital of those additions is the revelation that Ripley's daughter has died while she was in hypersleep, thereby lending further surrogate-mother-daughter resonance to her subsequent relationship with abandoned child Newt. Like the best alternate cuts, it deepens an already great work.

Nick Schager Nick Schager is a NYC-area film critic and culture writer with twenty years of professional experience writing about all the movies you love, and countless others that you don’t.

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