Here we are again! In 2024 so many horrible, tragic and cosmically idiotic things have happened around the globe, especially in the US and South Korea. I have little reason to believe that 2025 would somehow be a complete turnaround. Most likely, we will be forced to bear witness to some devastating, or if we are lucky enough, merely ridiculous and frustrating consequences of the “democratic decisions” by the complacent (especially American) people made in the last year. And yet the fact remains that 2024 was incontrovertibly one of the most bountiful years I have ever experienced as a collector of films presented in physical media.
I am not willing to disclose actual numbers, but the amount of Blu Rays and 4K UHD discs (I did acquire about a score of DVDs as well, most of them donations, gifts and merchandise samples from the Korean Film Archive, Korean filmmakers, production companies and friends) purchased and otherwise procured in 2024 exceeded that from 2023 by some forty percent. My guess is that this is a one-shot happenstance, unlikely to be repeated in this or subsequent years, but who knows? It goes without saying that it was exponentially more difficult to select twenty titles out of last year’s amazing roster.
Why so many titles for 2024 in particular is not a question easy to answer, either. It might be that I have finished writing (at least the first draft, although still some ways to go before I see it published as a physical entity) my second book and was gearing up for watching more movies in the coming months, but I doubt it. Watching cinema has never been affected by how “busy” I am with other things. Nor it has really affected the performance of my day job. If anything, the data shows that academic productivity in terms of my quarter-century-spanning career had always been enhanced, rather than negatively impacted, by intensification of my movie-watching activities. Motion pictures, or K-pop music or manga for that matter, have never been “distractions” in my life. Endless bureaucratic works we have to do as (American) “academics” are far greater “distractions” from my job as a researcher and a teacher than movie-watching could ever be.
For those who stumble onto my blog for the first time somehow, this list is exactly what it says it is, My Favorite Blu Rays and 4K UHD Blu Rays of 2024, and the selection process is fundamentally, aggressively subjective, one might say self-centered. The list is not beholden to “objective” assessments of the archival values of the items discussed herein, although the latter are certainly factors for consideration. Nor is it beholden to the critical consensus for “greatness” or “excellence” of the films found in these discs.
There is no rule as to how “old” a motion picture represented here should be. Still, as anyone who reads my blog would immediately grasp, the majority of what I do here is examination, collection and appreciation of “classic” cinema, or just plain old movies. As Djuna put it memorably and succinctly, all movies are old movies. The moment you have watched a pristine 2025 film it has become an “old” movie for you. So technically a film released in 2024 could be included in the list, but only when it fits the most important criterion for selection in this list, that is, giving me the sense of (re)discovery, surprise or confirmation (of what I had suspected or anticipated). There are no etched-on-the-stone rules here, other than the ones I make up as I please.
I should add, too, that this is also a collector’s list, not a movie-watcher’s list. The production quality, the design, the packaging, the commentaries, the supplements, the letterings and signages of the discs all matter, perhaps not as much as the movies themselves, but they play non-trivial roles in my appreciation of these titles. In short, please do not consider this list as “the best Blu Rays” or “the best films” of 2023, however you construe the term “best.” I am thoroughly not interested in that kind of list.
I am delving into the list now. There will be a Korean-language list, which mostly but not exactly replicates the English one, uploaded at M’s Desk perhaps a week or two later. By the way, I have actually come to wonder about why I keep Q Branch strictly English-only, so I might experiment by uploading a Korean-language version here as well. What I am not going to do is posting a bilingual version, since I never directly translate my Korean-language writings into English or vice versa.
21. Sleep (2023, Curzon, Region B)
OK, right off the bat I am here including a contemporary film, theatrically released just two years ago. Sleep seems to be discussed in its country of origin as the last film featuring great performances of the late actor Lee Sun-Kyun (best known to the foreign viewers as the father of the wealthy family in Parasite). Directed by Jason Yu (Yu Jae-seon), a protégé of Bong Joon-ho, Sleep is, on the most obvious level, a top-notch psychological thriller sympathetically focused on a pregnant, young wife played with gusto and knife-sharp tensions by Jung Yu-Mi (Kim Ji Young Born in 1982, Train to Busan), one of the most interesting and talented actresses working in South Korea today. The Curzon Blu Ray of Sleep, along with Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (also released in the UK in a deluxe boxset from Third Window Films), is a strong testament that high-quality Korean horror/psychological thrillers now constitute a mainstay of the global genre-oriented viewership, if anyone still need any such reminder. It comes with the two award-winning short films directed by Jason Yu, Video Message (2015) and The Favor (2018).
20. Lips of Blood (1975, Powerhouse Indicator, 4K UHD Blu Ray)
I think I had to include at least one title from a plethora of 4K remastered erotic Euro-horror titles of Jean Rollin issued last year from Indicator. As per usual with a Rollin opus, Lips of Blood feature soft-lensed vistas of medieval and early modern European ruins, many shots of nude women, skulking around draped in see-through blue and red sheer scarfs, often sporting pointy canines ready to be sunk into the necks of their (male) prey. Technically a vampire-themed horror film (By the way, Rollin was perfectly capable of making a more conventional horror, a good example of which is The Grapes of Death: yes, the movie in which a couple of French beer-drinkers survive a wine-induced zombie epidemic because they hate wine), Lips of Blood evokes a sense of wistful nostalgia, surprisingly affective and melancholy. It reminds one of later films dealing with vampirical preservation of eternal youth such as Let the Right One In, but its strikingly poetic and, some might say, somnambulist stylization is impossible to mimic by anybody else.
Indicator’s package includes a 77-page booklet with critical essays by Maitland McDough and Jeff Billington, a text interview with Annie Brilland (also known as Annie Belle, who had passed away just last year, R. I. P.) and other archival source materials. The 4K UHD itself is also stacked with hours of staff and cast interviews, and an audio commentary with the ubiquitous Stephen Jones and Kim Newman.
19. Curse of the Dog God (1977, Mondo Macabro, Region A).
A “dog god” (inugami) has been a source of more than a few folk horror films hailing from Japan. This late-‘70s entry from director Ito Shunya, a Toei genre film veteran, best known to English-speaking viewers as the mastermind behind The Female Convict 701: Scorpion series, is a crazy melange of wildly diverse elements of the Japanese genre cinema, from the ages-old trope of an angry local god’s curse whose shrine was sullied by clueless city residents, a weirdly sincere environmentalist message, blatant sleaze assaulting the viewers with permed-hairdo, disco pants and other features of ‘70s fashion, economical but never-cheap-looking special effects, and capped with one of the wackiest variations on The Exorcist-influenced possessed child plot device. All this is filmed in a jaw-droppingly majestic widescreen cinematography incorporating extensive location shooting in Mie and Nara Prefectures.
Among numerous BD & 4K releases of lesser-known Japanese genre films I have collected in 2024, Dog God was the most amazing discovery, partly due to its utterly illogical amalgamation of seemingly incompatible genre tropes, and possibly the most entertaining.
18. Over the Edge (1979, Shout! Factory, Region A).
One of those ‘70s socially critical genre films that I had somehow missed out, I was finally able to catch up with Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge, issued from the Shout Select line. Now famous for the debut film for Matt Dillon, the film is totally unlike its more glamorous, Hollywood-ish poster prominently featuring the eventual star. Shout! Factory’s borderline-scary Blu Ray cover more accurately captures its tone, almost a dystopian science fiction in its sharp focus on the barrenness of culture and breakdown of American suburban communities, in which teens are bored to the point of psychosis, living out their lives in a fictional but familiar Western American town, New Granada.
The Blu Ray title is a bona fide special edition with active participations from Kaplan, screenwriters Charlie Haas (Matinee) and Tim Hunter (River’s Edge) and actors Michael Kramer, and a long-form documentary on the making and meaning of the film, “Wild Streets + Narrow Minds.” This release is a very welcome piece in the puzzle for me in reconstructing the evolution of New American Cinema into ‘80s from its most experimental and socially critical phase of early to mid-‘70s.
I happened upon this title many decades ago, largely due to the description of its big, hunkering tin-toy robot towering over its befuddled-looking cast members. As far as I could tell from the synopses available, it appeared to be a camp-fest of the lowest order, a crummy British equivalent of, say, Mesa of Lost Women, made around the same time. What I actually got in a restored HD presentation from Studio Canal, turned out to be another example of the British pulp sci-fi, professionally put together and pulsating with the gender-conflict tensions, its alien antagonist Nyah essayed with a surprising level of menace and dignity by Patricia Laffan (Quo Vadis). It is not a rediscovered masterpiece of course, and it is blatantly pulpish if not juvenile compared to, say, It Came from Outer Space (another potential candidate for this list), but I was pleasantly taken aback by its quality as a low-rent sci-fi that nonetheless do not condescend to its viewers. The ubiquitous Kim Newman must be a huge fan of this film, as he contributes an enthusiastic defense of Devil Girl as well as a commentary along with Barry Forshaw.
16. Beijing Watermelon (1989, Kani Releasing, Region A).
A surprise release as well, from the East Asian art film specialty label Kani (“crab” in Japanese) Releasing, is another deeply humanistic and liberal-minded Japanese comedy-drama from Obayashi Nobuhiko (House, Sada). A Japanese vegetable shop owner becomes a den father to a group of PRC students living in late ‘80s Japan. The film traces his relationship with these young Chinese men and women, and climaxes with his and his wife’s trip to China. Obayashi turned a real-life tragedy that prevented him from location-shooting in Beijing, i.e. the Tiananmen Square incident, into an expressionistic set piece, breaking the fourth wall and the lead actor Bengal directly addressing the viewers. Gentle, clear-eyed and grounded in the life rhythms of ordinary middle-class Japanese citizens, Beijing Watermelon is an ode to the cinema of possibility, the power of motion pictures to dream a better world, a world in which compassion and small gestures of friendship ultimately triumph.
The Kani Blu Ray includes an interview with Obayashi’s daughter Chigumi, and a booklet led by Aaron Gerow’s critical analysis coupled with a fascinating reproduction of the sequence meant to unfold in China in the original screenplay.
15. Lone Star (1996, Criterion Collection, 4K UHD Blu Ray).
This title hails from my old memories of being moved to tears in a theater watching Elizabeth Pena and Chris Cooper’s bittersweet yet hopeful interaction at the end of the film. Can a film like this be made today? Possibly, but it would then presumably take the form of a multigenerational Netflix series, which has its advantages but is not a panacea to the problems of having to tell “big stories” in a limited time frame. Great theatrical feature films did the job just fine. I am loathe to see screenwriters abandoning the format of shorter films taking on large, multicharacter narratives in a tightly orchestrated format without losing the scale of the perspective. John Sales is just the man to do this properly, navigating the intertwined lives of Mexicans, Mexican Americans and White Texans, with particularly memorable turns by Pena, Cooper and superbly villainous Kris Kristofferson, a frighteningly racist cop whose smirk donned during the acts of casual murder and violence seems so self-satisfied it appears almost serene.
Criterion’s 4K UHD presentation does not gobsmack us the way some of its 4K titles have done, but all the same its curation is impeccably respectful. The most important supplement is a John Sales-Gregory Nava interview that, at 40 minutes, provides an excellent overview of the position of Lone Star as a “borderland” film that engages with the “Hispanic” side of the screenwriter’s fascinating career.
13-14. Godzilla (1954, Criterion Collection, 4K UHD Blu Ray)/Godzilla Minus One (2023, Toho Pictures, 4K UHD Blu Ray).
This year’s “cheat” is the pairing of these two films, the one and only original Godzilla (Gojira), still occasionally assigned to my undergraduates as an exemplary filmic representation of the atomic bomb experience as well as of the socio-political milieu of the immediate postwar Japan, and the 2023 Toho reincarnation of Godzilla, not the Americanized, slightly anthropomorphic beastie deprived of its historical context, but a faithful return to its source, resituating the narrative in the alternative-universe postwar Japan where abject despair and cautious hope for the future vied for dominance of the Zeitgeist. The latter film went on to win the special effects for Oscar, but its true merit can be appreciated, I would argue, only when it is properly positioned in dialogue with the 1954 originator of the Big Godz mythology.
I have seen Gojira so many times that I lost the count, but it was utterly worth it to purchase yet another iteration of the classic film, this time Toho-supplied 4K UHD remaster, which does not change its overall impression but adds tremendously to the viewing experience, bringing as close as yet possible to watching it in a film theater projected from a pristine print unmarred by passages of time. As a practicing historian of modern Japan as well as a fan of Japanese kaiju (a term, thanks to Guillermo Del Toro, bendito sea tu corazon, no longer consigned to a generic English translation “monster”) -tokusatsu (special effects) media products, no real justification was there for not including these titles.
12. The Roaring Twenties (1939, Criterion Collection, 4K UHD Blu Ray).
Earlier in the last year, I had anticipated the new 4K restoration of Howard Hawk’s Scarface, also from Criterion, to easily win one of the top slots in this list. When the lid was open, though, I was less impressed by it, even though it could still have made its way into the My Favorite Thirty Blu Ray list. Instead, I was thoroughly galvanized by Raoul Walsh’s unabashedly “pop” take on the Prohibition, the Great Depression and the crime spree they inspired. The film’s take is aggressively anti-Prohibitionist, almost celebrating the derring-dos of the First World War-veteran gangsters played by James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. Outrageously entertaining, with the dialogue so snazzy that you could cut papers with it and superbly aggressive, witty and economical montage sequences, The Roaring Twenties is a beauty to behold in Criterion’s 4K UHD presentation.
11. The Outcasts (1982, British Film Institute, Region B).
Why this film was not included in the second volume of All The Haunts be Ours (see below), I am not sure, although after having seen it, I could see that it does not snugly fit in with the usual definition of “folk horror” either. Robert-Wynn Simmon’s Ireland-lensed Outcasts defies being pigeonholed into a box. On one level, it is a rough-hewn dark folk tale about a bogeyman character Scarf Michael, and an ostracized young woman Maura’s ability to communicate with him, exploring her psychological isolation and sexuality (without being explicit about it). On another level, The Outcasts is strikingly experimental, seemingly letting the natural environment assert its organic authority over the narrative development or characterization we would expect from a commercial film, culminating in its haunting, unexpectedly bleak denouement.
The BFI Blu Ray presentation, while not exactly remastered to a pristine quality as some of the titles here have been, is highly respectful and comes with a new scholarly commentary by Diane Rodgers, a new interview with Wynne-Simmons and his early (1964) short film
The Fugitive.10. El Vampiro: Two Bloodsucking Films from Mexico (1957-1958, Powerhouse Indicator, Region Free).
Following on the footsteps of Powerhouse Indicator’s series of classic Mexican genre films (some of which used to be available as DVDs released through the now regrettably defunct Casa Negra label), this pair of films, starring vehicles for the now-familiar Abel Salazar (Brainiac) but also featuring the striking, chiseled-statue-like German Robles as the caped and tall vampire Count Lavud and uber-attractive Adriane Welter (also in the almost-made-it-into-the-list Untouched with the great Ricardo Montalban). Drawing upon the ‘30s Universal Dracula films and paving way toward the more sensual, charismatic Christopher Lee’s iteration in England, the two El Vampiro films are fascinating slices of Gotica mexicana, beautifully photographed and staged.
I cannot think of any other label than Indicator to do justice to the classic Mexican genre films at this point. Could I entreat them to remaster and release Arturo Ripstein’s Tiempo de morir (1966) and El castillo de la pureza (1972) at some point?
9. Pharaoh (1966, Second Sight, Region Free)
An amazing example of cultural mediation and artistic innovation that literally span the globe, Pharaoh (Faraon) is a 1966 Polish cinematic adaptation of one of the nation’s classic 19th century novels by Boleslaw Prus, set under the reign of the fictional Pharaoh Ramses XIII. Like perhaps a Vietnamese or Korean modern writer making use out of the ancient histories of Chinese dynasties, Prus’s novel reimagined the ancient Egypt into an almost abstract canvas on which an archetypal narrative of the deterioration of a state, amid its contestations with religious (ideological) authorities, forces of economic transaction and appropriation as well as clashes of the personal ambitions and frustrations of major political actors, men and women, could be writ large. The adaptation by Jerzy Kawalerowicz retains this basic orientation, although I would not read too much into the parallel between the Egypt depicted herein and the Eastern European political situations of ‘60s. The film’s power overwhelmingly comes from its distinctive visuals, isolated pools of darkness inside the pyramids and palaces against the pale beige of the endless vistas of sand dunes (many sequences were filmed in location at the actual Egyptian sites), counterpointed by insidiously glossy golds, powerfully suggesting a world both familiar and forbiddingly alien.
It is borderline surreal that Pharaoh was made only three years after the Hollywood extravaganza Cleopatra (which, by the way, is not a terrible film by all means). Second Sight’s Region B Eastern European cinema releases are another staple that perennially occupy a position in my year’s end list, and this time Pharaoh takes the expected slot.
8. I Walked with a Zombie/The Seventh Victim (1943, Criterion Collection, 4K UHD Blu Ray).
I must confess that, despite owning a complete DVD boxset of Val Lewton thrillers put out by Warner Brothers many years ago, I had not watched The Seventh Victim until Criterion released it as the other pair to the much better-known I Walked with a Zombie. Perhaps it was just as good that I had to experience it for the first time via the label’s sparkling 4K UHD presentation. This is one of those exceedingly rare films that completely defy description, demolish any effort to figure out their “points,” and leave an utterly vexing series of imprints in your brain: unforgettable and flummoxing. Needless to say, I Walked with a Zombie, which also renders itself to a multiplicity of interpretations in relation to colonialism, the “whiteness” and racial discourse, and gender dynamics, has never been seen, at least by me, in such a resolutely majestic form.
Masterpieces both, yet as elusive to define and categorize as trying to catch a catfish into a sake gourd, this pairing showcases the impeccable sensibility and taste with which Criterion still manages to grab the hearts (and purse-strings) of the classic movie lovers.
7. J-Horror Rising (1999-2007, Arrow Video, Region A).
A package that I somehow had anticipated from Arrow, given their commitment to the contemporary Japanese genre films such as Tsukamoto Shin’ya’s complete oeuvre and the “official” Ring (Ringu) trilogy, the J-Horror Rising collection is still a marvel to behold, given its fidelity to the turn-of-the-century J-horror titles and its expert and painstaking curation, with a 79-page booklet chock full of essays by Jasper Sharp, Amber T, Eugene Thacker, Jim Harper, among others. It should not be an exaggeration to say that most of the titles included here, primarily familiar to the viewers around the world through the medium of VHS, have never been seen in these excellent conditions, with HD masters supplied by Kadokawa Pictures and additional remastering done by UK’s The Engine House and R3Store (with the exception of Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman, not surprisingly the only not-bad, just-ordinary-looking title in the bunch).
The collection, comprehensive as it is, of course does not exhaust the J-horror titles from late ‘90s/early aughts. I have my hopes up that Arrow would release the second volume sooner than later, with such titles as Exte: Hair Extensions, Marebito, Hypnosis, Infection, Black House and of course, the cruel cinematic adventures of Tomie, the world’s most famous regenerative epimorph.
6. Seven Samurai (1954, British Film Institute, 4K UHD Blu Ray).
It might be somewhat ridiculous that Seven Samurai, my choice for the greatest film ever made, has to sit at No. 6, but as I have indicated above, this list is not about the historical significance or artistic qualities of a particular film. Even more so than Godzilla, I honestly did not expect Seven Samurai’s 4K UHD remaster would make a difference in my approach to this eternal masterpiece, a motion picture that I ritually return to, several times every year, like a pilgrimage to a very personal spiritual site. Well, I am very happy to report that I was wrong. Like other noteworthy top-tier 4K UHD presentations of classical cinema, the BFI release let a watcher come close to re-experiencing the dazzle and immersive power of a theatrical viewing experience, well beyond catching some hitherto unnoticed details thanks to higher resolution.
The supplements are pretty much what we would have expected, both archival academic contributions from the likes of Tony Rayns, the “It is Wonderful to Create” docu and an audio commentary by Adrian Martin.
5. The Poetry of Lee Chang-dong: Four Films Collection (1997-2010, Film Movement, Region A).
Another big surprise this year was a bundle of four films by South Korea’s premier “literary” filmmaker Lee Chang-Dong, curated by Film Movement label: Lee’s debut feature Green Fish (1997), Peppermint Candy (1999), Oasis (2002) and Poetry (2010). While the latter three films are relatively well represented in the physical media market in South Korea (nearly all South Korean DVDs and Blu Rays are subtitled in English) but are hardly accessible in North America. In fact, Green Fish, presented in a jaw-droppingly resplendent remaster, is worth the price of purchase by itself. I disclose that Green Fish, along with Park Chan-wook’s early and nearly-forgotten film The Trio, is one of the several South Korean films from ‘90s that I still have stashed somewhere as VHS tapes (probably unplayable, given the conditions they have been stored). This geopolitically specific (set in the newly developed satellite city of Ilsan), beautifully acted and strikingly elegiac piece of film noir would be a revelation for many filmgoers, including but not limited to the connoisseurs of Korean cinema whose familiarity with the latter’s flagship titles might not chronologically extend back into ‘90s.
It is too bad that Film Movement could not fill this package to brim with supplementary materials, but the James Marsh-Pierce Conran commentary on Green Fish is most welcome.
4. Classic Tokusatsu Collection (Shout! Factory, 1956-1966, Region A).
This collection is a like a bubble bath of pleasure that I could wade into whenever I wish. The presentations are not the most pristine, with two movies paired into one disc (six titles on three discs, with the English-dubbed Terror Beneath the Sea [1966] getting its own), and the qualities of the films are, well, variable, to say the least. Yet this special collection of Toei-produced “special effects” (tokusatsu in Japanese) programmers puts me right into the heart of my nostalgic fandom of the juvenile SF-fantasy that traversed the whole gamut of visual media, from manga, animation, feature films to TV series.
The core title for me is The Golden Bat (a.k.a. Golden Ninja, although the superhero has absolutely zero, nada, nothing to do with “ninja” of any stripe), Sonny Chiba-starring feature adaptation of an old kami-shibai (“picture theater”) character, a thoroughly unlikely superhero, a skull-faced, gold-skinned, cape-draped Atlantean mummy (!) who employs a golden bat as his scout, and battling an apparently alien mad scientist Nazo, who comes with a pincered, detachable mechanical hand and four multi-colored eyes that shoot four different kinds of death rays. And of course, it comes with a brain-meltingly catchy pop tune that is etched forever on the cerebral cortex of many Korean kids growing up watching the Japan-Korea co-produced animated TV show version of The Golden Bat.
Added to this outrageous ’60 example of a bizarre but cool-beyond-belief Japanese superhero, we have other classics— a charming kaiju action-period piece hybrid Dragon Showdown (1966), another Sonny Chiba superhero vehicle, Invasion of the Neptune Men (1961) in which he flies around fighting alien invaders in a supercar, and the fantastically psychedelic, almost Willy Wonka-like swashbuckler Watari the Ninja Boy (1965) and so on—, all considered, an absolute joy from start to finish.
3. All the Haunts Be Ours: Volume 2 (Severin, 1954-2019, Region Free/A).
I mean, the first volume was already crazy enough, collecting the painstakingly remastered (for the most part) and curated nineteen films, distributed into twelve discs, from all over the world referenced in Kier-La Janisse’s documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021). Well okay, here is a sequel that truly punches through the concrete wall of complacent expectations as if it were a wet paper bag: the volume two, an even bigger and more comprehensive compendium of folk horror, twenty-four films from eighteen countries, spread out to thirteen (ooh, frisson!) discs with hours and hours of supplementary materials, and oh yeah, a 251-page “storybook,” glossily bound and gold-embossed like a turn-of-the-century pocketbook featuring contributions from the likes of Ramsay Campbell, Sarah Gailey, Chandra Mayor, Steve Duffy, (of course) Kim Newman, and more.
It would take weeks if not months for us to properly even “sample” the titles and supplementary materials included in this gargantuan collection. Truthfully, a few titles produced chuckles of recognition (most prominently the biker zombie romp Psychomania), but many have been simply unknown to me, or never been presented in such an accessible and respectfully curated manner as far as I could see. The highlights of the collection for me include Ishikawa Yoshihiro’s Bakeneko: A Vengeful Spirit (1968), one of the lesser known iterations of the vengeful cat demon subgenre: Poland’s Demon (2015), a great example of a horror trope being employed to explore a taboo historical subject (in this case, the Holocaust): Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf (1973), an Argentinian werewolf tale which, believe it or not, was a theatrical hit in South Korea (not to mention in its native country), partly due to the popularity of its hauntingly attractive music score: November (2017), based on an Estonian folk tale and essayed in sublime monochromatic palette: Scales (2019), a mermaid story hailing from Saudi Arabia: and the last but not the least, South Korea's Io Island [Iodo] (1977), a genuinely bonkers, indescribable classic from the maverick Korean genius Kim Ki-young (The Housemaid).
As far as boxset curation goes, I truly doubt that any label could best Severin’s incredible accomplishments, two years in a row.
2. Hitchcock The Beginning: From Silent to Sound (Studio Canal, 1927-1932, Region Free/B).
But, All the Haunts be Ours vol. 2 is not the overwhelming winner! How could that be?! What can I say? There were two more boxsets which could not beat it in terms of comprehensiveness or film-geekdom but won my heart nonetheless.
Hitchcock The Beginning is not the first time good ‘ol Alfred’s late ‘20s-early ‘30s silent films and early talkies were released on physical media, but Studio Canal’s new Blu Ray collection is simply staggering not only in its scope but also in terms of the impeccable quality of its presentation. The majority of silent films, including the boxing drama The Ring (1927), The Famer’s Wife (1928) and The Manxman (1928), had been restored by the BFI National Archive in 2012, but the blazing highlight here surely is the brand-new 4K restoration performed on both the silent and early talkie versions of Blackmail (1929), an absolutely stunning Cornell Woolrich-style psycho-thriller that features an astonishing incident of sexual violence, with all “Hitchcockian” elements fully formed extending its lineage to the director’s later films such as Frenzy. Even the only unrestored title in the whole mix, the aggressively pulpish Murder! (1930), its casually racist attitude (replicated in a few other films in the set such as Rich and Strange [1931]) notwithstanding, has a couple of unmistakable Hitchcockian sequences which are a marvel to behold, including its climax involving a trapeze artist captured from a precariously swinging camera.
More than any other title I laid my hands on in 2024, Hitchcock: The Beginning provided the sheer joy of discovering the cinematic gems previous unknown to me: and this from a filmmaker Tom Ryall in his essay in the inserted booklet (62 pages) rightly calls “probably the best-known film director in the history of cinema.”
1. Daiei Gothic Collection: Japanese Ghost Stories (Radiance Films, 1959-1968, Region Free/B).
So finally now to this year’s no. 1. The magnificent collection of supernatural films from Daiei Studio, all remastered in 4K to blinding resplendence by the current rights holder, Kadokawa Corporation. All are known to connoisseurs of Japanese cinema at least by their titles, but they have never been seen outside Japan in this form, elegantly colorful, beautifully composed by master cinematographers Makita Yukimasa and Makiura Chishi.
The only regret is that there are only three of these magnificent films included in this collection, all strikingly individualistic despite the familiarity of the tropes and subjects they tackle: The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959), one of the best known classic ghost tales in Japan and in this version directed by the swordfight genre maestro Misumi Kenji, puts the focus on the villain of the piece, Iemon, as an almost tragic anti-hero: Socially conscious helmer Yamamoto Satsuo’s The Bride from Hades (1966) is kabuki-inflected, with legless ghosts floating above the fences, with a biting film noir flavor sprinkled on a haunting tale of romantic yearning and despair: Finally, Tanaka Tokuzo’s The Snow Woman (1968) is stunningly modern in its sympathetic portrayal of a heartbreakingly beautiful titular demon, played by Fujimura Shiho whose love for her human spouse and child is pitted against the uncomprehending and judgmental humans.
Whew, another list somehow successfully completed! As usual, my enormous thanks to Cinesavant, Mondo Digital, DVDBeaver, Digital Bits and other reviewers who still keep the torches burning for the physical media collectors, and to a growing phalanx of labels who continue to excavate and supply these amazing titles: Radiance Films (especially this year!), Arrow Video, Severin Films, British Film Institute, Vinegar Syndrome, Powerhouse Indicator, Kani Releasing, Kino Lorber, Film Movement, Shout! Factory, Second Sight Films, Criterion Collection, Studio Canal, Mondo Macabro, Eureka! Masters of Cinema, Curzon/Artificial Eye, Korean Film Archive and many more!
Here are additional nine titles that could have made the final list: The Wages of Fear (1953, BFI, 4K UHD Blu Ray). Untouched (1954, Powerhouse Indicator, Region Free). Rolling Thunder (1977, Shout! Factory, 4K UHD Blu Ray). It Came from Outer Space (1953, Universal, 4K UHD Blu Ray). Panic in Year Zero (1962, Radiance Films, Region B). By A Man’s Face Shall You Know Him (1966, Radiance Films, Region B). Cruel Britannia: Three Thrillers from the UK (1971-1974, Vinegar Syndrome, Region Free). Death Machine (1994, Kino Lorber, Region A). Scarface (1932, Criterion Collection, Region A).
