PopMatters hereby presents a glorious cavalcade, a prestigious panorama, a scintillating smorgasbord of classic films (and one newbie) released on Blu-ray or DVD during 2024. Many titles are on Blu-ray only, while others offer the regular DVD format before it officially goes dinosaur. Some titles are also offered on the newest and more expensive 4K UHD.
As in previous years, we lean toward outliers, those titles that depart the standard menu in favor of a bracing and curious counterpoint to the glut of fast-food cine snacks issued by flavorless committees. Our feast offers master chefs like Chantal Akerman and Satyajit Ray, sizzling thrillers such as Peeping Tom and The Hitcher, tangy and presumptuous noir from 1950s Hollywood and Argentina, generous box meals celebrating Alfred Hitchcock and international folk horror, and succulent treats from the silent era.
Who deserves thanks for the tasty treasures that cinephiles here receive? You’ll notice that these releases come from small, independent, “boutique” labels. We don’t mean to imply that the mainstream studios haven’t been doing their share of resurrecting classic films. We mean to state it outright.
Warner Archive is the studio label that’s done the most to release oldies, and that’s really a boutique label. Otherwise, the most important labels continue to be those that dig up and license films from diverse sources, such as Criterion, Kino Lorber, Severin Films, Arrow Films, Vinegar Syndrome, Radiance, Shout! Factory, Mondo Macabro, Milestone Films, Flicker Alley, Icarus Films, VCI, Impulse, and other hardworking labels in the US and abroad. Long may they wave.
Why all these mylar discs? Why the packaging? Don’t we live in a new promised land of streaming? We’re glad you asked. The answer is: Ha! Just as so many important films aren’t on disc, so it’s also true that many aren’t streaming, or only for a limited time, or in the wrong format, or without enlightening extras and bonus content.
These essential video labels, which undertake to restore and curate some of the most seemingly non-commercial gems, are the engine providing classic cinema in an age demented by streaming. If you don’t believe it, ask one question: where do you suppose all those streaming services get their product? – Michael Barrett and Imran Khan
Enjoy PopMatters 30 Best DVDs of 2024, presented alphabetically by title.
About Dry Grasses – Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Criterion)
A Turkish filmmaker whose star began rising with his masterful Winter Sleep (2014), Nuri Bilge Ceylan expands his esoteric cinema with this stark, naval-gazing effort. About Dry Grasses, released in 2023, continues his tradition of chamber drama, in which a dilemma of family, love, or community disrupts the ordered lives of a group of people. About Dry Grasses, a film about personal politics in both the work environment and the public sphere deals with a quartet of unfortunate souls who fight, betray, and love one another while always trying to surreptitiously turn the tables on one another in the struggle for emotional dominion.
Teachers Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) and Kenan (Musab Ekici) soon find their wills tested when they are both accused of misconduct by two female students, an action that sends the already bitter Samet into an even more hostile state that has him openly lashing out at his students. Emotions are further complicated by the introduction of Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a teacher whom both men take a liking to. When Nuray expresses more interest in Kenan than she does in Samet, Samet sinks further into his existentialist despair.
If this sounds like the offhanded setup of an Edward Albee play, director Ceylan (who also wrote the script) one-ups Albee with some darkly fascinating dialogue that deep-dives into the murkiest recesses of human behavior. Like many of Ceylan’s films, About Dry Grasses is a talky, intellectual exercise in filmmaking. Ceylan gives new light to the chamber drama and backdrops his troubled, talking quartet with the gorgeous panoramas of the Anatolian countryside and the quaint, muted colorings of the Turkish homesteads. The sounds of nature are pointedly expressed: the crunch of alpine stones under feet and the glide of air around a mountainous incline circle in the atmosphere. A film of both aural and visual pleasures, Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses is given its due justice with Criterion’s terrific Blu-ray transfer that presents these images like a sumptuous feast for the eyes and ears. – Imran Khan
Alfred Hitchcock: The Iconic Film Collection Limited-Edition 4K Ultra HD Release Set (Grindhouse)
Alfred Hitchcock: The Iconic Film Collection delivers a delectable sampling of the director in the late bloom of his career. These six films—Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963)—provide everything from spiffy and urbane romantic crime melodramas to a road-trip espionage thriller, an eerie take on the apocalypse, a chilly study in obsession, and a proto-slasher film. It’s a staggering collection. No other mainstream director ever took on so many genres so successfully and in such a short time.
Though his career dated to when German Expressionists were cutting edge, he was determined to keep up with current trends, being inspired in the 1960s by directors like Michaelangelo Antonioni. That curiosity and dexterity kept Hitchcock in play for decades, working through the sound transition and the shift from black-and-white to color.
These six films show Hitchcock at the peak of his skill. They also show an artist changing with the times. The transition, as seen in these films, is fascinating to witness. Hitchcock was an artist who knew how to terrify, delight, and transport audiences. He could deliver romance, thrills, nightmares, daymares, and cutting psychological insight because he didn’t place one above the other. The filmmaker who stunned audiences with the shrieking violins of Psycho also inspired them to dream of vacationing on the French Riviera.
Terror, voyeurism, or escapism – it was all cinema to Alfred Hitchcock. – Chris Barsanti
All the Haunts Be Ours: Volume Two (Grindehouse)
All the Haunts Be Ours: Volume Two is 2024’s most stupendous box set, based on crafty curatorship and meticulous rescue and restoration of forgotten and obscure films deserving discovery. It’s the sequel to 2021’s set of the same name, an unlikely labor of love that became Severin Films’ bestselling box. The 13 discs promise “24 international folk horror classics” with over 55 hours of special features (bonus shorts, commentaries, making-of, etc.) and, saying yes to another excess, a hardcover book of new stories by respected authors like Ramsey Campbell, Cassandra Khaw, Kim Newman, and Eden Royce.
I love horror movies, but I’m no fan of blood and guts. So, at the risk of annoying some horror buffs, I wish to advise potential viewers that while the movies gathered in All the Haunts Be Ours: Volume Two may fall loosely into “folk horror”, I find them more along the lines of weird, uncanny fairy tales of dreamy surrealism and beauty. I love them for that, too.
So don’t feel that these items from Spain, Japan, Czechoslovakia, Poland, England, Canada, Wales, South Korea, France, Thailand, Argentina, Estonia, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Finland, and the US of A will gross you out. Yes, there will be blood (as they say), but mostly, these are works of atmosphere and unease to give you the creeping heebie-jeebies. Perhaps their most common theme is the persistence of atavistic beliefs that break through the veneer of the modern world and teach us not to be so snotty. You’ll find many villages, witches, and ghosts, with great cultural variety.
For example, John Newland‘s Who Fears the Devil, aka The Legend of Hillbilly John (1975) is Appalachian folklore from Manly Wade Wellman‘s stories. Erik Blomberg’s Finnish The White Reindeer (1952) is a welcome revival of an award-winning drama of indigenous witchcraft. Rainer Sarnet’s November (2017) is a gorgeous black-and-white tale of ominous love in the Estonian backwoods. We get two unsettling Czech fairy tales from Juraj Herz, including his take on Beauty and the Beast (1978). John Llewellyn Moxey‘s lovely, spooky The City of the Dead (1960), with Christopher Lee, is probably the most widely seen film here.
Many of these films are low-budget, handmade, artistic labors of love and personal vision, not works aimed at wide commercial success, and All the Haunts Be Ours: Volume Two is redolent of the same spirit. – Michael Barrett
American Gigolo – Director: Paul Schrader (Arrow)
Dismissed in many quarters upon its release as merely the glamorous sleaze that layers the bottoms of barrels, American Gigolo (1980) now offers a curious comment on Los Angeles’ post-disco era of the early ‘80s. Courting the trials and dangers that lie at the cross-sections of prostitution, murder, and pop culture, Paul Schrader’s moody neo-noir catapulted a greenhorn, Richard Gere, just out of his 20s, into stardom. A story about a male escort who gets caught up in a frame-up while living a charmed Westwood fast-life, American Gigolo outlines both the allure and disillusionment of the alpha-male archetype.
Fingered for the murder of a client he didn’t commit, Julian (Gere) races through the city to clear his name. The ordeal is complicated by an uncooperative love interest (Lauren Hutton) who can provide him an alibi but fears the act will expose her infidelity and end her marriage to a state senator. As the jaded but always on-the-move Julian, Gere evinces a credible sense of ennui that seems part and parcel of Westwood’s trendy, lackadaisical lifestyle.
Slick and polished in its exterior, the rot of cynicism beneath the pastels and neon soon bleeds through, making American Gigolo an especial paragon of the false-flag elitism of Reagon-era California. The Go-Gos wrote songs about stuff like this, and if life in the fast lane didn’t kill them first, few people lived to talk about it. Arrow Video’s lavish package offers a 4K remaster that puts all those pastels and neon in check and includes seven in-depth features on making the film. – Imran Khan
The Apu Trilogy – Director: Satyajit Ray (Criterion)
Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray announced himself on the stage of world cinema with this quietly monumental trilogy of humanist expression, presenting life as a panorama of heart-tugging lyricism. Based on two classic Bengali novels, the subject is the maturation of an ordinary citizen from his boyhood to young fatherhood. His journey is marked by poverty, deaths, struggles, loves, and hopes, with thematic and visual elements such as birds and trains resonating across the three installments. Ravi Shankar‘s score and Subrata Mitra’s black-and-white photography are active collaborators.
Criterion’s box contains 4K UHD discs as well as standard Blu-rays. Of course, the discs are loaded with the company’s typical extra interviews, essays, and Making-Of videos, but these are lovely but mere garnishes upon the satisfaction of the main meal. – Michael Barrett
Bandits of Orgosolo – Director: Vittorio De Seta (Radiance)
A lost film of Italian Neorealism, Bandits of Orgosolo (1961) surveys the rural life of Sardinian peasants of Orgosolo, who make a living farming illegally obtained livestock. Within this insular community of families is Michele, who, along with his younger brother, is investigated by the police for a series of pig rustlings that have taken place in the village. Ruling the municipalities with a fascist hand, the authorities wrongfully pin the murder of a policeman on Michele when his rural commune is raided. Now on the run with his brother and their livestock in tow, Michele must make the breathless trek over the mountainous region to avoid imprisonment.
Bandits of Orgosolo‘s story is slight, but the emotions are quietly devastating, and director Vittorio de Seta (whose 1966 entry, Un uomo a metà, probed a more modern mode of existentialism) finds an intermediate ground between the philosophical designs of rural life and the gritty realities of the disenfranchised. The soul of this narrative is handsomely backdropped against the sun-dappled scenes of the bucolic landscapes (perfectly realized here with Radiance Films’ beautiful remastering of the film); Bandits of Orgosolo captures the solitudes of an untouched nature, which becomes the battleground for so much human discord. An unexpectedly eerie yet fitting twist upends the story and frames the relationship between crime and human nature. Pointedly intimate and sensitively drawn, this is cinema at its gentlest, its most refined. – Imran Khan
Chantal Akerman Masterpieces 1968-1978 (Criterion)
Over a few days, a woman’s life consists of fixing and eating meals (in real-time), shopping, and receiving clients for prostitution. Such is the scenario of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Chantal Akerman‘s towering “kitchen epic”. That film has become so famous and revered that it even topped the algorithm in the 2022 incarnation of Sight and Sound magazine’s survey of best films of all time. PopMatters wrote: “While Chantal Akerman had been struggling at the margins of the film industry, essentially making films privately, Jeanne Dielman’s success dropped her smack into the mainstream of European art cinema, where she maintained an uneasy, idiosyncratic relationship for the rest of her career.”
Akerman made many other films, and Chantal Akerman Masterpieces 1968-1978 covers the nine items of her first decade in cinema. These include Je Tu Il Elle (1974), News from Home (1976), and Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), all of which add up to a highly personal and distinctive oeuvre of displaced quasi-autobiography. – Michael Barrett
Daiei Gothic – Directors: Kenji Misumi, Tokuzō Tanaka, Satsuo Yamamoto (Radiance)
The Daiei Gothic collection by Radiance Films is a triple threat that combines gothic romance, horror, and the Japanese ghost story. These three works are based on traditional Japanese ghost stories. Straddling a line between shock cinema and an Antonioni-esque sense of melodrama, these three films make an artful gesture of pop-commercialism and traditional craft. The box set features The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959), The Snow Woman (1968), and The Bride from Hades (1968), each film exploring the many variations of the horror film and turning up some interesting elements that help to upend genre conventions.
In The Ghost of Yotsuya, a dead woman seeks retribution on her husband who murdered her. Based on the 19th-century Japanese kabuki play Yotsuya Kaidan, director Nobuo Nakagawa offers a mixture of slick Euro-film-inspired visuals and Night of the Living Dead creature-feature effects to deliver an unnerving tale of revenge. The Snow Woman, perhaps the set’s most visually-minded film, heightens drama and atmosphere in the winter blizzard of its demoniac horror. A story about a sculptor and his student tormented by a mysterious witch during a snowstorm, filmmaker Tokuzō Tanaka opts to whip up an ambiance of chalky air and floral visuals that offset the menacing chills of the film. Lastly, The Bride from Hades merges the samurai film with a noirishly romantic horror, relating the story of a young man’s love for a mysterious woman who is not of this world. Of the three films, The Bride from Hades proves the more contemplative, a brooding and wistful fairytale that pushes its Art quotient a little beyond its horror margins.
In any case, this lavishly indulgent package features beautiful 4K restorations and an extensive booklet that essays the historical impact of these films on Japanese cinema. For lovers of both Japanese film and “weird cinema”. – Imran Khan
Dario Argento’s Deep Cuts (Severin)
We’re getting well into the weeds here, and we don’t regret it. If you know anything about horror cinema, you know the name Dario Argento makes fanboys and fangirls salivate over his bravura visual style laced with spasms of violence. You also know that video labels have frequently reissued his well-worn titles, the better to encourage fans to spend more money on what they’ve already seen.
Well, not this time. If All the Haunts Be Ours, Volume Two is the year’s most accomplished and important box for fans of all things unnatural, Dario Argento’s Deep Cuts offers the most astonishing surprise that such a thing should exist. Four discs of material made for Italian television showcase an anthology called Door Into Darkness (La porta sul buio). Argento produced the four-episode series in 1973 and directed one of the stories.
In 1987, he worked on Giallo, which is described as a horror-variety series! For this show, he produced brief mysteries about cab drivers stumbling on murders, and he made another series of skits illustrating his nightmares. These are surprisingly graphic for television. All that material is here, along with TV docs about his career and other Giallo segments, such as an interview with Anthony Perkins. This set truly feels dropped in from an alternate dimension. If you don’t know Argento, beware starting here. If you belong to the cult, nothing will keep you from this Kool-Aid. – Michael Barrett
The Dragon Painter – Director: William Worthington (Milestone)
Milestone’s package contains three silent films produced by and starring Sessue Hayakawa, Hollywood’s first Asian male star and an early sex symbol. William Worthington‘s The Dragon Painter has been meticulously reconstructed from the only two existing prints to its most complete form, and the result is a portrait of romantic obsession and artistic mania set in an exotic, never-never-land Japan.
As PopMatters wrote, “Hayakawa plays Tatsu, a rambunctious, somewhat demented wild man of the mountains who lives under the mania that his lost love has been stolen by the gods and turned into a dragon. He claims that he only paints pictures of dragons. When someone asks where the dragon is in his painting of a mountain lake, he answers, ‘The dragon is sleeping at the bottom of the lake.’ In other words, Tatsu is an archetype of the unruly visionary genius.”
The rediscovery of The Dragon Painter in the late 1980s caused a rewriting of film history, as scholars had largely forgotten the Japanese actor’s independent star power. The other two films on the Blu-ray, His Birthright (1918) and The Man Beneath (1919), are melodramas in which Hayakawa’s hero triumphs over villainy. – Michael Barrett