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Kaleidescape | The Godfather

The 4K treatment of this cinematic landmark can seem stunning—until you watch the new transfer of Part II

by Michael Gaughn
April 1, 2022

I was all prepared to write a review that boiled down to: Yes, there are problems—maybe a lot of problems—with The Godfather in 4K, but it’s ultimately worth watching because it wipes away the memory of all previous home releases, allowing you to reconnect with the film anew. But then I watched The Godfather Part II in 4K. And I realized I’d been had. I’m a little ashamed to admit that had I not watched the sequel before I wrote this, you would be reading a completely different review—one I would have had to repent for later.*

I’m going to be stepping onto Dennis Burger’s turf a little here, but that’s unavoidable. And, unlike with most any other two movies out there, I don’t think it’s unfair to review the first Godfather film in the context of Part II because it’s extremely likely vast numbers of people will watch both of these films in 4K, possibly back to back, and will end up having an experience somewhat similar to mine, although they might not reach the same conclusions.

It all comes down to this: The Godfather Part II looks like the film Gordon Willis shot and that Paramount presented in 1974. The transfer is visually consistent throughout, whatever tweaks were made to the images are judiciously subtle, and there’s a constant flow of organic grain that gives it an appropriate analog energy and warmth. The first Godfather, though, is all over the map visually, with HDR accentuating the flaws of the not infrequent patches of compromised footage and with a lot of heavy-handed digital manipulation scrubbing away far too much of that gorgeous, essential grain. Yes, it does sometimes feel like you can reach into the frame, but that’s not the movie Willis lensed. The 4K transfer can be dazzling when you first experience it—I readily admit I fell for it like a brick—but it’s ultimately just a kind of gimmick that couldn’t run more counter to the gritty elegance that helped define the original film.

Reviewers rarely find themselves in this position—a double-edged one that puts their necks way out there because it allows them to be held so easily accountable—but feel free to take any of the examples below from the first film and compare them to how similar material was handled in the transfer of the second. I just don’t see how anyone could argue that The Godfather transfer is the more faithful presentation of the two. And, beyond that, I don’t see how anyone could find the overall experience of The Godfather in 4K superior to the experience of Part II in the same format—unless, of course, you just never much liked Part II.

Let me cite a few things, then try to pull the threads together.

The first moment that got my attention and that, in retrospect, felt off, was early in the opening scene when it cuts to a medium shot of The Godfather sitting behind his desk. Everything until then had looked OK, but that shot had the video-like sheen that always sends my antennae shooting out a mile whenever I’m watching something in HDR. Fortunately, there are few instances that egregious in the rest of the transfer, but it was the first strong signal that this presentation might not adhere closely to either the letter or the spirit of the movie.

A more frequent problem was that, once you decide to start cleaning and enhancing shots, you inevitably expose and accentuate the flaws in the most compromised footage, which can seriously disrupt the experience of watching the film. It’s not news that many of the outdoor shots during the wedding sequence have never synced up well visually. All of that is only hammered home here. Similarly, the reliance on stock footage was beginning to die off at the time The Godfather was released, but audiences were still willing to buy into the illusion. But all of the too crisp, too vivid original footage to either side of the stock stuff here makes the use of the latter seem inept. The shot under the el, which has always been borderline, goes full-bore late-period Monet in this transfer, in a way that would make an uninitiated viewer question the filmmakers’ competence.

Then there are the seriously crushed blacks—not consistently but often enough to stick out sorely. All of which is ironic for a film that’s legendary for its chiaroscuro style. Two easy-to-spot examples: When the Don is getting ready to leave the Genco offices with Fredo, right before he’s gunned down in the street, and the tighter shot on the black car that stops in front of the hospital while Michael and Enzo stand at the foot of the stairs. Instead of having the sense of someone lurking in the back seat, you get a glimpse into an impenetrable void.

My biggest slice of beef, though, is reserved exactly for the shots that look most stunning. With almost all trace of the grain banished, they’re pristine, vivid, and yes, like you can reach into them—but that’s not the movie that captured the public imagination back in 1972 and influenced practically every film made since. You won’t find anything like that in Part II—not because some of the footage couldn’t have been distorted that way but because whoever handled that transfer decided not to go there. The scene in the first film where Michael finds out his father has been left unprotected at the hospital loses much of its tension because, without the constant low simmer grain provides, the shots of the empty corridors just look impressive, not menacing.

I doubt any of my arguments will sway anyone in the “Look—pretty!” crowd that sees anything that’s been given an HDR buff and shine as an improvement, but chances are they’re just watching Godfather the conformist shibboleth—the something-to-have-on-in-the-background that cable’s AMC has managed to marathon into the ground—rather than the movie itself. All I can say is that they don’t know what they’re seeing, therefore, they can’t know what they’re missing.

Look: 4K will always be a very mixed blessing. When done right, it can result in transfers like The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, and The Godfather Part II that honor the films they’re meant to serve. But then there are Jabberwocks like Citizen Kane and The Godfather, disjointed experiences that take you someplace other than where the filmmakers wanted you to go. Watching The Godfather in 4K HDR can be an enjoyable, even edifying, experience, but you have to understand and make allowances for what’s feeding what you’re seeing. The Godfather Part II, though, is pure viewing pleasure, something you can surrender to utterly without ever once having your critical brain get in the way.

*This is, for me, a very unorthodox review because it focuses, from start to finish, on the transfer of the film. Traditionally there would also be some commentary on the film itself, its cultural or historical context, etc.—which, in most reviews, adds up to little more than obligatory throat-clearing. Here, it’s actually important—but not as important as telling the tale of two transfers. Which is why I’ve shuttled my comments on the movie itself to a separate column.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | Crisp and bright and visually dazzling, with blacks frequently taken deep into the netherworld—but that’s not the movie that changed filmmaking forever

SOUND | It was originally mixed in mono so it should be listened to in mono. Unfortunately—and inexcusably—that’s not an option here.

Review: The Godfather Part II

review | The Godfather Part II

related review

also on Cineluxe

Vudu | Spencer

This release sets a new standard for how an older 35mm film should be transferred to 4K HDR—unlike the new release of the original Godfather

by Dennis Burger
April 1, 2022

As I write this, Mike Gaughn and I have been frantically calling each other at odd hours for the better part of a week, trading notes on the 4K HDR releases of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II and trying to make sense of them both. He, unfortunately, drew the short straw on purpose and has to wrap his mind around the new restoration work done for the original film, which is an order of magnitude better than any previous home video release but suffers from some glaring (and, I would argue, at times unavoidable) issues that will be irksome to cinephiles and subliminally jarring to the uninitiated.

Just because he has the harder task doesn’t make me the lucky one, though, because I’m saddled with the challenge of explaining why the image for Part II—which is less obviously restored, obviously less manipulated, not as sharp, more consistently grainy, and less pronounced in its contrasts—is not merely the superior transfer but one of the finest film restoration and preservation projects I’ve ever seen of a 35mm film of this vintage.

The differences between the new UHD HDR releases of these two films are plain to see from almost the first frame of each. With Part II, blacks aren’t overly crushed, grain is consistent throughout, and although the image may appear softer, a closer look reveals that it genuinely contains more meaningful detail, not to mention much more organic textures.

Why does this matter? Let’s take the early scene in which Senator Geary meets with Michael Corleone in his office. Compare it to the opening scene of the first film and you’ll see that blacks aren’t as black, contrasts aren’t as stark, and the image doesn’t pop as much.

On a superficial level, the second film might not quite measure up to the first by videophile standards. But look closer and you’ll see that the image has more depth, nuance, and delineation in its darkest regions. Geary’s pinstripe suit, for example—nearly as lost in the shadows as it is—still reads as fabric photographed in low-light conditions. The subtle gradations come through.

Fast-forward to the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Michael and you’ll see a similar effect. As Corleone’s men scramble through darkness punctuated by spotlights, there are times in which characters are backlit, mostly rendered in silhouette, especially right around the 36-minute mark. Judged by the criteria we normally apply to home video transfers, the image here might seem a little gray and washed out, with blacks that aren’t fully black.

But ignore the standards by which you think you’re supposed to judge a video transfer and just take the image on its own terms, and you’ll see that there’s real shape to these figures—that even in near-total darkness they still have form. Try to bring the darkest parts of this image down to true, 0 IRE black and these figures would be reduced to construction-paper cutouts. Meaningful shadow detail would be lost.

I could give a million other examples (perhaps more, given the length of the film), but most would boil down to the same conclusion: Unlike the new restoration of The Godfather, the work done to Part II this time around is less obvious, manipulative, and transformative . . . but in almost every respect more revelatory.

And some of that is a consequence of the increased resolution of UHD, which allows the fine film grain and the detail inextricably intertwined within it to shine through. But much of it also has to do with the new HDR grade, which highlights the different shooting techniques used by Gordon Willis to delineate the prequel and sequel portions of the film in a way no previous home video transfer could.

The flashbacks in particular will now be my go-to demo material for illustrating the difference between contrast and dynamic range, two fundamental aspects of image reproduction that are far too often conflated in our discussions of picture quality. Watching the movie in HDR for the first time, I couldn’t shake the notion that Willis must have shot much of the film with low-contrast filters, something that has never been quite as blatantly obvious in older home video transfers. A quick internet search confirmed this.

But the relative lack of contrast is balanced by the fact that there’s a ton of subtlety in the value scale—subtlety that couldn’t be properly captured by older home video standards. In short, this new effort proves once and for all that HDR isn’t simply about blacker blacks and whiter whites but rather the number of steps between the darkest and lightest portions of the image.

The new HDR grade also allows for a color palette that is still pushed toward the warm end of the spectrum, especially in the flashbacks, but one that lacks the bad-spray-on-tan effect that plagued previous releases. And mind you, I don’t mean to imply that the skin tones are true to life. But they certainly seem to be truer to what Willis was trying to render.

There’s one other aspect of this new release I’m grateful for: That all this necessary scrutiny prompted me to go back and listen to the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix again. It sounds like exactly the same mix that was included with the 2008 Blu-ray release, but it’s been a while since I listened to that one because the 5.1 remix of the first film is so distracting I got into the habit of watching both films in mono just for the sake of consistency.

The 5.1 remix for Part II deserves reevaluation, though. It’s very well done, and suffers from none of the odd soundstaging of diegetic music and tonal inconsistencies that make the first film so hard to digest in anything other than mono. The remix for Part II is more aggressive, more adventurous, more of a departure in many ways from the original sound experience. But it has to be admitted that it simply works.

The one disappointment with Kaleidescape’s release of Part II is that Paramount has, for whatever reason, withheld the bonus features accompanying the UHD Blu-ray boxset, some of them created for this release. As such, I decided to also snag the films on iTunes, just to enjoy the bonuses.

Given what a proponent of streaming I am, I also couldn’t resist the urge to compare the image quality of the Apple and Kaleidescape releases, with the expectation of no significant differences. Boy howdy was I wrong. Even when viewing the iTunes release on Roku Ultra (a superior streamer to the Apple TV in almost every sense) via the Apple TV+ app, I was struck by how inferior it was to the Kaleidescape experience in every way except for the wider color gamut and expanded value scale. In streaming, the fine grain structure is almost entirely lost. And as such, much of the textural impact of the film is lost with it.

I’m not sure I can entirely explain this. After all, I’ve seen some seriously grainy films on Apple TV+ that stood toe-to-toe with their UHD Blu-ray or equivalent releases. My best guess is that rendering grain of this sort at streaming bitrates normally forces the encoder to lean hard on the mode-dependent coefﬁcient scanning capabilities of HEVC to prioritize higher frequencies. But for The Godfather and The Godfather Part II especially, the image requires smaller coefficients across the board to faithfully capture both high- and low-frequency image data, and that necessitates much higher bitrates.

All of which is a mouthful of a way to say that streaming just doesn’t cut it for this one. You need to experience The Godfather Part II at the highest bitrates possible to truly appreciate the work done on this restoration.

Until something better comes along, which hardly seems likely any time soon, this will be my new reference standard for how older 35mm films should be restored, remastered, and encoded for UHD HDR.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | The increased resolution of UHD allows the fine film grain and the detail inextricably intertwined within it to shine through, while the HDR grade displays a ton of subtlety in the value scale, showing that HDR isn’t just about blacker blacks and whiter whites

SOUND | The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is more aggressive and adventurous than the original mono but is very well done overall

Oscar Winners 2022

reviews | Oscar Winners 2022

Belfast

Original Screenplay

“Kenneth Branagh has had an up-and-down filmography but this is clearly among his strongest films. He garners fantastic performances from novices and veterans alike, yet centers the movie on the performance of young Jude Hill.” read more

Drive My Car

International Feature

“I wish Drive My Car was an hour shorter, a little less repetitive, a lot less austere, and had more faith in its audience to connect with its themes without belaboring them half to death. Looking back on the experience of the film as a whole, I have to say I appreciate the hell out of it. But I just can’t bring myself to love it.” read more

King Richard

Actor

“King Richard is entertaining, well-made, and well-acted, and with Rotten Tomatoes critics’ and audience scores of 91 and 98% respectively, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Will Smith up for his third Best Actor nomination. Other than a few uses of the n-word, it’s definitely family friendly and kept my 15 year old—who has no interest in tennis—engaged. It’s certainly worth giving a watch.” read more

Summer of Soul

Documentary Feature

“You owe it to yourself to watch this film at your earliest convenience. I’ve barely nicked the paint on this incredible experience, which centers on a wonderful but forgotten music festival but also touches on everything from the moon landing to the repercussions of the assassinations of MLK and JFK to the power of music and the purpose and nature of art. The fact that it does all of that elegantly and with a cohesive narrative thread is itself something of a minor miracle.” read more

Some worthy winners, some surprises, but nothing that moved the needle in a big way

by the Cineluxe staff
March 28, 2022

Any time the Academy decides to spread the wealth around, you know you’re into a pretty mediocre year. There were some intriguing films among the winners—debatably, no truly great ones. (Read what you will into the members treating Dune as mainly a technical exercise.) And it was interesting to see the streaming services continuing to claim more ground against the traditional studio system. The most generous view would be to say that the film industry is still regaining its footing as it adjusts to the curves thrown by the pandemic. A guess, somewhat wild, is that, because of all the forms of distribution now in play, we can expect this year to look not all that different from last.

CODA

Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actor

“CODA is irreverent without going for cheap shocks, adorable without being cloying, sentimental without being schmaltzy, awkward without being affected, and fits firmly into the tradition of feel-good cinema without being overly manipulative emotionally. My only criticism is that it plays it safe in terms of broader story structure. Let’s call it what it is—the Hero’s Journey. As a result, by the end of the first act you’ll probably have an accurate sense of how it ends.” read more

Dune (2021)

Cinematography, Production Design, Original Score, Film Editing, Sound, Visual Effects

“Let’s set aside for a moment the question of whether Denis Villeneuve’s Dune works as a partial adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic science-fiction novel. A much more relevant question is whether or not it works as cinema on its own terms. And thankfully that ends up being the much easier question to answer. Yes—a thousand times, yes. As if he hadn’t proven it already with films like Arrival, Prisoners, and Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve demonstrates with Dune that he understands cinema as an art form in a way few other modern directors do.” read more

No Time to Die

Original Song

“No Time to Die is a fantastic experience at home, visually and sonically, and with its lengthy run-time, you’re able to pause if need be for a bathroom or snack break to ensure you don’t miss a moment of action” read more

West Side Story

Supporting Actress

“It isn’t really fair to compare West Side Story to modern Broadway musicals, and the songs here might not be as catchy for some contemporary listeners as what they’d hear in Hamilton, Phantom, Les Miserables, or Jonathan Larson’s pop-rock fueled numbers. But if you typically shy away from musicals, Spielberg’s cinematic touch should be enough to tempt you to give this one a try.” read more

Cruella

Costume Design

“Cruella is one of the most original live-action films to come out of Disney in recent years, and if it didn’t grab your attention in the theaters or on Disney+, now is the perfect opportunity to enjoy it in highest-resolution at home!” read more

Encanto

Animated Feature

“This film offers a wonderful opportunity to round everyone up in your home theater and share an experience. With a message that speaks to the strength of family, gorgeous images that will highlight your video display, and a catchy soundtrack, Encanto offers tantos razones to give it a watch.” read more

The Power of the Dog

Director

“The Power of the Dog is both a period piece and a psychological drama, as well as a finely crafted character study of complex individuals. If you’re a fan of Jane Campion’s work, her return to the big screen is beautiful to look at and an absolutely compelling film.” read more

Review: Writing with Fire

review | Writing with Fire

recent reviews

Netflix | The Power of the Dog

Apple TV+ | The Tragedy of Macbeth

Shot mostly with cellphones and inexpensive cameras, this documentary is an engrossing examination of journalism and new technology in lower-class Indian society

by Dennis Burger
March 25, 2022

Writing with Fire, the Oscar-nomianted feature-length debut by filmmakers Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas, is as prime an example as I’ve seen lately of a documentary that serves as both window and mirror. On the surface, it follows the journalists of Khabar Lahariya, a newspaper run by Dalit women—the lowest of the lowest-class citizens of India—as they transition from operating as a small weekly paper to creating a digital enterprise that functions primarily in the new-media space.

Brewing just beneath the surface, though, is a sweeping indictment of corporate news; a discussion about finding the balance between journalism as a responsibility and media as an industry; a rumination on the critical distinction between neutrality and objectivity; and perhaps most importantly, a meditation on all the topics dissected by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their seminal 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.

How much of that is intentional I can’t know, of course. Probably very little. It seems as if Ghosh and Thomas set out to tell the story of these women in the midst of a transformational moment and deeper truths simply rose to the top. But it hardly matters. Intentional or not, they’ve created a film that contains not only resonant universal truths but also insights into a culture most Westerners can’t begin to pretend to fully comprehend.

To give just one example: Early on, as the paper’s chief reporter, Meera Devi, discusses with her staff the importance—and dangers—of having a larger social-media presence, one of the young writers reveals that she has never even touched a smartphone. Her family only owns one between them but she has never used it out of fear of damaging it. And now she’s being told that this is an essential tool of her job.

There’s another scene toward the middle, which will no doubt keep me awake tonight, that I wish I could put in front of everyone I know and beg them to absorb it and reflect on it. One of the three main journalists at the heart of the documentary is attending a press conference, sitting across the desk from a high-ranking police official. As she refuses to accept canned answers from him and continues to press him for the truth, a mainstream correspondent sitting behind her berates her for her dogged approach. Later, outside, he lectures her about the importance of playing nice with authority figures, of maintaining access, of offering praise before criticism.

The film doesn’t bother spoon-feeding this to the viewer, opting instead for a show-don’t-tell approach, but this small scene serves as an especially impactful commentary on how the people for whom our institutions function at all, no matter how inefficiently, are always the first to silence those who are completely failed by those same institutions when they dare speak out.

There are numerous other examples but they ultimately all boil down to one point: This is a study in contrasts and commonalities, of the universal juxtaposed against the deeply personal, of the unique dangers these women face placed on equal footing with the shared truths we should and would be discussing out in the open if only more of us cared.

I wish Writing with Fire were more readily available but, best I can tell, right now it’s only available in the U.S. to rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video. A physical media release is slated for late April 2022, but only on DVD.

That old SD format is probably more than sufficient, although Prime delivers the film in HD with Dolby Digital+ 5.1 audio. There isn’t much to say about the picture, given that it was shot on, as best I can tell, a mix of cellphones and consumer-grade mirrorless cameras with a run-and-gun approach. As such, the quality of Amazon’s streaming presentation varies from shot to shot, although when conditions are right, lighting is sufficient, and the resolution is there, the picture quality is about as good as HD gets. More often than not, the source material is a bottleneck in terms of quality, though. It is what it is.

The audio, on the other hand, was a tough nut for me to crack. For about the first hour, I was distracted by some seriously weird idiosyncrasies in the mix. Ambient and environmental sounds were well placed in the surround soundfield, but voices tended to hover a few feet in front of me in the form of an amorphous and indistinct blob of ethereal audio. They even followed me as I moved from one side of my sofa to the other. Granted, I don’t understand Hindi, so intelligibility wasn’t the problem. But it was still unnerving.

I eventually figured out that the issue was that I had my system’s Dolby Atmos up-mixing capabilities turned on, which isn’t usually a problem with films of this sort since there isn’t much to up-mix. But for whatever reason, voices are placed in both the front left and right channels here—not the center—and, worse, they’re slightly out of phase. Because of that, Dolby Surround doesn’t recognize the split vocal tracks as a common signal that should be combined and routed to the center and instead spreads them out into the surrounds and overhead speakers. When I changed my system to the Pure Direct setting—which bypasses all DSP and turns the preamp into a straight decoder, not a processor—voices took their rightful place toward the front of the room but still nowhere near the middle of the screen.

If any of the above seems critical or needlessly technical, that’s not my intention. It’s simply that I encourage you to watch and appreciate this film, and if you’re doing your watching in a home cinema environment, I want you to have the best experience possible.

That’s not to say that Writing with Fire is perfect, even ignoring the technical shortcomings. At 96 minutes, it positively whizzes by, and there are several story threads I wish we could have sat with for another 15 or 20 minutes here and there. But I’d far rather spend time with a film that leaves me wanting more than one that overstays its welcome, even when the subject matter is as important as this.

PICTURE | Because of the quality of the source material, Amazon’s streaming presentation varies from shot to shot, but when conditions are right, lighting is sufficient, and the resolution is there, the quality is about as good as HD gets

SOUND | Ambient and environmental sounds are well placed in the surround soundfield of the 5.1 mix, but voices can be indistinct and badly positioned if any kind of upmixing is employed

Review: Drive My Car

review | Drive My Car

recent reviews

Vudu | Spencer

This Oscar-nominated Japanese film is aloof, detached, chilly, and pretentious—and more than worth it in the end

by Dennis Burger
March 23, 2022

I’ve rarely felt as conflicted as I do right now, standing in front of my keyboard, trying to collect my thoughts about Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car. The film is, at three hours long, an exercise in not only delayed gratification but also delayed insight. It moves at the pace of a pitch drop experiment, and by the time its opening credits rolled at somewhere around the 40-minute mark, after a long and borderline impenetrable prologue, I found myself tempted to walk away from it and not look back. Indeed, I might have done so had I not been tasked with reviewing it.

The story doesn’t really start to congeal until somewhere near the 90-minute mark, at which point it stingily begins to dole out keys to locks it’s been forcing the viewer to fiddle and fumble with in frustration to that point. By the third act, its various thematic threads start to come together to form an incredibly impactful and moving meditation on pain, grief, language, art, solipsism, forgiveness, and self-reflection. And there’s some part of me that wants to return to the beginning with insights gleaned from the ending. But I’m not sure I will, if only because Drive My Car asks—nay, demands—that you give it as much or more than it gives you in return.

The film follows a man’s attempts to stage a multi-lingual stage production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya two years after the sudden and unexpected death of his wife, while also being forced to submit to having a driver at the insistence of the theater. And while I appreciate the simplicity of its story, I think the bulk of my hesitance comes from the fact that for most of its runtime, it comes across as aloof, detached, chilly, and more than a little pretentious. Looking back on the work as a whole, that’s sort of a necessary conceit to make the journey work, but there’s simply no denying that from moment to moment, it can feel laborious.

And the look of the film does little to help you connect with its characters, environments, or quiet drama. Captured digitally in ArriRaw at 3.4K resolution and finished in a 2K digital intermediate, the imagery seems to have been processed to a degree after leaving the camera, although it’s not the typical film-look processing you might expect. Instead, it appears as if contrasts have been turned down and black levels elevated, which results in a flatness and apparent loss of saturation, all of which combines to give the picture a foggy quality.

As of this writing, Drive My Car is only available to view in the U.S. on HBO Max, which delivers a nearly perfect presentation in HD. Given the tonal flatness of the image and the overall lack of chromaticity—really, lead character Yūsuke Kafuku’s beloved red Saab and the occasional glare of brake lights contribute more color to the film than anything else—it’s hard to imagine the picture benefiting much for an HDR grade, and there are only two minor blink-and-you’ll-miss-them instances of aliasing in the background of the image that hint at the need for higher-than-HD resolution. But only briefly. Whether they’re a consequence of the down-sampled DI or HBO Max’s encoding of the master files, I have no way of knowing. But they’re so fleeting that it feels like nitpicking to bring them up.

The film makes its way to the streaming service with its original soundtrack intact—primarily Japanese with a heaping helping of Mandarin, Korean, and English thrown in—in Dolby Digital+ 5.1. Although the surround channels are rarely employed for anything other than music, it’s a nice front-heavy mix that does a wonderful job of capturing the ambience of its environments, as well as the occasional meteorological punctuation and the droning of wheels on asphalt. Dialogue clarity is top-notch and Eiko Ishibashi’s hauntingly beautiful score is delivered with excellent fidelity. If you hadn’t guessed already, it’s not exactly home cinema demo material but you could have just as easily gathered that from the trailer.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t watch Drive My Car. But nor can I heartily recommend that you do watch it. That would be like me telling you to go train for a marathon, assuming you’re physically capable. Would you find it rewarding in the end? Perhaps. Would you hate my guts for a solid 16 to 20 weeks in the leadup to the final event? Probably.

At least with Drive My Car, your loathing would last a few hours at most, although it might feel like much more than that. Ultimately, though, I think my biggest source of ambivalence is that I desperately long for more films of this sort to be made. I very much want it to succeed, because I borderline need more writers and directors to make slow, contemplative, introspective films, especially ones that pay such rewarding dividends in the end. I just wish this one were an hour shorter, a little less repetitive, a lot less austere, and had more faith in its audience to connect with its themes without belaboring them half to death. Looking back on the experience of the film as a whole, I have to say I appreciate the hell out of it. But I just can’t bring myself to love it.

PICTURE | HBO Max delivers a nearly perfect HD presentation with only two minor blink-and-you’ll-miss-them instances of aliasing in the background of the image

SOUND | The front-heavy Dolby Digital+ 5.1 mix does a wonderful job of capturing the ambience of the environments, exhibits top-notch dialogue clarity, and delivers the hauntingly beautiful score with excellent fidelity

Review: Parallel Mothers

review | Parallel Mothers

recent reviews

HBO Max | Dune (2021)

Netflix | The Power of the Dog

Almodóvar’s latest is melodrama as art, done with the flair of New Wave-era Godard

by Dennis Burger
March 22, 2022

I was recently chatting with a dear friend about a particularly awful movie I’d just finished watching. In the course of the conversation, I likened it in ways to a Rubik’s Cube that had been “solved” by someone who simply pulled off the stickers and reaffixed them, with no real understanding of the fundamentals of a standard 3×3 cube layout (e.g., red is always opposite orange, blue opposite green, etc., and the center squares of each side never move relative to one another). I won’t call that movie out, since it hardly matters. I only bring it up because Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers also reminds me in many ways of a distinctive solution to a Rubik’s Cube.

Rather than a ham-fisted, amateur attempt at lazy deception, this film brought to mind watching my favorite blindfolded cubers, who are forced to solve the puzzle in their heads before temporarily losing use of their eyes, and who rely on complicated mnemonic memory aids that I just barely understand. If they make a mistake somewhere in the middle of the solution, they usually don’t know until it’s too late. And if they do flub a turn and somehow catch themselves and course-correct, it’s almost more impressive than a perfect solve.

And in case it wasn’t obvious, I’m talking about Rubik’s Cubes because I don’t want to talk about Parallel Mothers on its own terms. There’s simply too much for one review to contain and far too many surprises I could spoil. But here’s the gist: The film follows two parallel storylines, both centered on Penélope Cruz’s character Janis. One follows her ongoing efforts to have a Spanish Civil War-era mass grave in her hometown excavated so her forebears and others can receive proper burials. The other involves two unplanned pregnancies and a hospital oversight that results in her newborn being swapped with another. And in weaving these stories together, Almodóvar manages to say something truly meaningful and resonant about generational differences, intergenerational trauma, and the idiosyncratic familial bonds that form between humans, related and unrelated alike.

That’s enough info to give you a sense that Parallel Mothers is ultimately melodrama. But it’s melodrama elevated to the level of art due to skillful and at times subtle scripting, meaningful character development, brilliant performances all the way around, and some cinematic techniques that occasionally reminded me of Godard’s best New Wave-period films. It’s a shame it’s not amongst this year’s Best Picture nominees since it belongs in the conversation alongside Dune and CODA as one of 2021’s better cinematic efforts.

As of this writing, Parallel Mothers is only available in the U.S. as a PVOD rental from most major digital retailers, and I point that out because I suspect the quality of its presentation might be affected by that. Even on Kaleidescape, the film is only available in SDR, although the resolution is UHD.

The former isn’t as impactful as you might suspect. Despite being shot digitally and recorded in Sony’s X-OCN (extended tonal range Original Camera Negative) format at 16 bits, and despite being an incredibly vibrant film with wonderful color design throughout, the image doesn’t seem to be constrained by its 8-bit presentation. I spotted a brief instance of what looked like white-clipping in one shot, but other than that, the delicious color palette and tonal scale seem to fit comfortably within the constricted gamut of SDR.

The cinematography is exceptional and detail is at times just lovely. But—and this is a big but—there are some issues with the presentation whose causes I can’t quite figure out. The image is pretty noisy, and I’m not sure if that noise was captured in the camera or involves some sort of film-look process including faux grain. What’s more, even on Kaleidescape, there are misplaced textures and glitches of the sort you might associate with extremely low streaming bitrates—far lower than those employed by better services like Disney+ and Apple TV+. But that hardly makes sense, given that this is a full-bandwidth download. So I strongly suspect the problems come from the files provided by Sony.

Mind you, these problems only really rear their heads at large cinematic proportions. Sitting 6.5 feet from my 75-inch display (~45.5 degrees field of view), I found the noise and the odd movement of textures distracting. When I moved back to around 7.5 feet, though (~40 degrees field of view, comparable to a 120-inch projection screen viewed from a distance of 12 feet), the image was consistently lovely, and the impact of the weird noise and apparent encoding issues all but disappeared. So if you’re viewing this in your home cinema and your preferred seat is in the first row, maybe move back to the second row.

Kaleidescape presents the film with its original Spanish mix, encoded in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, with forced English subtitles in yellow. For the most part, it’s an understandably front-focused mix, aside from the score music, which often dances out into the room. But the shape of the sound mix changes near the end, thanks to some artfully employed surround effects that pull you into the screen, seemingly placing you between the camera and its subjects. It’s a neat effect, and its judicious application makes it all the more effective.

Hopefully by the time Sony Pictures prepares the film for a proper North American home video release, the issues with the noise and funky textures will have been resolved, because this one is a keeper for me. It’s probably Almodóvar’s best film since 2006’s Volver, and it’s a damn sight better than most of this year’s Best Picture noms. Just know going in that if you rent the film during its PVOD window, you might find the somewhat flawed presentation of its lovely cinematography a little distracting—or maybe this is just what the film looks like. I honestly can’t know for sure.

PICTURE | The delicious color palette and tonal scale seem to fit comfortably within the constricted gamut of the rental’s UHD SDR presentation, but there are some issues with glitches, noise, and misplaced textures that seem to stem from Sony’s transfer files

SOUND | The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio mix is understandably front-focused, aside from the score music, which often dances out into the room

Review: The Adam Project

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This latest Ryan Reynolds/Shawn Levy collaboration might not be Free Guy but it makes for a family-friendly action comedy

by Roger Kanno
March 23, 2022

Netflix’ latest big-budget feature, The Adam Project, is brought to you by director Shawn Levy and star Ryan Reynolds, the same people who created Free Guy. In this family-friendly action-comedy, Reynolds plays Adam Reed, who travels back in time to save his wife and fellow time pilot while enlisting the help of his childhood self along the way. It’s not of the same caliber as Back to the Future—no time-travel film has yet come close to equaling that Robert Zemeckis classic—nor is it as much fun as Free Guy, but Reynolds is his usual engaging self and Levy’s direction and the overall production is polished and proficient.

The fast-talking, almost constant banter from Reynolds can become a bit much at times, but there are plenty of exhilarating action scenes to keep the film moving along at a nice clip. And although it is mostly family-friendly, it’s rated PG-13, so there is some cursing and it does get more serious and a little sentimental part way through. There is excellent support from Mark Ruffalo and Jennifer Garner as Adam’s parents. They don’t capture the chemistry they had in 13 Going on 30, but they too are their usual appealing selves. Netflix has produced some excellent dramas recently—The Irishman, Uncut Gems, and Roma among others come to mind—but their blockbuster action films have not yet been able to equal the success of those dramas. Nonetheless, The Adam Project is an amusing diversion even if it fails to break any new ground.

Contributing to the enjoyment is how wonderful it looks on a high-quality display. There are a few instances where the Dolby Vision picture streamed from Netflix broke up slightly, such as scenes with explosions and a lot of smoke and fire filling the screen, but these were infrequent. Much of the film takes place during overcast days or at night, but the lighting always remained consistent and natural with extremely dark black shadows and excellent HDR details. For instance, as the young Adam walks through a forest at night, objects directly in the beam of his flashlight are perfectly illuminated, while reflected light reveals a lot of detail in faces and background objects. So while the scene is very dark overall, there are still plenty of visual cues such as the dampness of the glistening undergrowth. Then when he stumbles upon the time jet’s crash site, the glowing embers gently falling from the tree tops really pop against the dimly lit, starry sky.

Many of the scenes exhibit a stylized blue-green tinge, and the picture has a somewhat soft character, giving the movie an almost film-like quality as opposed to the hyper-detailed look of a lot of films shot on digital. While the lighting is extremely natural and captures the languid beauty of cloudy skies and misty outdoor locations shot in the Pacific Northwest, the CGI time-jet scenes can be a little over the top and look cartoonish, although that suits the light-hearted nature of the film.

The sound design is also first-rate and presented in a satisfying and enveloping manner in Dolby Atmos with aggressively mixed action sequences often accompanied by great classic rock songs. This movie might not elicit the urge to create a mixtape as with Guardians of the Galaxy and its memorable soundtrack, but I couldn’t help but bob my head and tap my toes as Steve Winwood belted out the vocals from “Gimme Some Lovin’” during the time-jet dogfighting scenes. The final fight scene features hand-to-hand combat choreographed to Boston’s “Foreplay/Long Time” and judicious use of the surround and height channels, so the constant action is all around with some very deep bass effects to make your audio system really rumble.

I’m really looking forward to the more adult, upcoming R-rated collaboration between Levy and Reynolds in Deadpool 3. In the meantime, the extremely active Dolby Atmos surround mix and excellent visuals delivered in Dolby Vision, help make The Adam Project an entertaining movie to enjoy with the family.

Roger Kanno began his life-long interest in home cinema almost three decades ago with a collection of LaserDiscs and a Dolby Surround Pro Logic system. Since then, he has seen a lot of movies in his home theater but has an equal fascination with high-end stereo music systems. Roger writes for both Sound & Vision and the SoundStage! Network.

PICTURE | The Dolby Vision image looks wonderful, with extremely black shadows and excellent HDR details, although scenes with smoke and fire can cause it to break up slightly

SOUND | The Atmos mix presents the first-rate sound design in a satisfying and enveloping manner, with aggressively mixed action sequences often accompanied by great classic rock songs

Review: Citizen Kane

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Perhaps the most innovative and audacious movie ever makes the move to 4K

by Michael Gaughn
March 21, 2022

No matter how you slice it, a 4K HDR release of Citizen Kane is a big deal. Whether or not you agree that it’s the greatest American film, it is undeniably a hugely important one, and its leap to UHD is inevitably to going draw more attention than it would for most other movies.

So let’s get this out of the way: If you come to this expecting an audio/video experience that’s significantly better than has been delivered on the earlier home releases of Kane, you’re going to be disappointed. If you’re approaching Kane for the first time and are expecting the 4K to help sell you on the film, it likely won’t. And if you’re skeptical of Kane and its reputation, this release could very well help shore up your biases.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t check it out—you should; but just don’t expect the picture or sound to be any kind of tremendously revelatory experience. Adjust your expectations accordingly. There are revelations here, but they’re mostly reserved for attentive viewers already familiar with the film who are willing to tolerate some pretty erratic fluctuations in the presentation. For them, it will be the first home release that even hints at what Kane was like when it was released in May 1941.

The good stuff first: There are certain shots—typically medium shots and closeups —that have a subtle gradation and a luminous quality that suggest what Kane looked like when the first prints were struck. Since the original negative is lost, it will never be possible to confirm that conjecture but, if true, it suggests that Orson Welles and cinematographer Greg Toland were going for a much more nuanced look than was usually found in Hollywood films. And, if true, it was likely a (successful) effort to give Kane a quiet emotional resonance, to help temper the often blind and sometimes brutal actions of its lead character.

Taking in those shots, and then imagining that look applied to the whole film, Kane becomes a different experience—one very similar to my recent encounter with the 4K HDR release of A Clockwork Orange, which had never felt right in any of its earlier home releases. Orange is a nasty film, but Kubrick never meant for it to be that relentlessly nasty, and seeing the cinematography finally done right gave it wit and verve, restoring the original aesthetic balance.

Certain shots in Kane have a startling depth and subtlety very much reminiscent of what Alfred Stieglitz was able to achieve with the platinum prints of his photos. (See, for instance, the shots listed in the “Reference Images” sidebar.) Little of the rest of Kane in this 4K release—and none of Kane in the earlier home releases—looks much like this, and it’s hard to know how many of those deviations in the look, sometimes extreme, are attributable to having to make up for the lost negative, for the elaborate compositing and optical printing used in many of the shots, or other factors.

All of the above might sound like esoterica—it’s not. If Kane was meant to have a look more toward those tighter shots I cited, then we’re talking about a different, and more profound, film. “Rosebud” has frequently been dismissed as just a gimmick, a way to keep the audience hooked during Welles’ elaborate time-jumping, but if the original photographic style was meant to give certain shots and scenes a subtle but sustained emotional subtext, then Rosebud becomes something much more than a sop for the masses.

It also goes beyond just being a gratuitous reference to Marion Davies’ pudenda. Famously, the film opens with Kane’s death and it effectively ends when he staggers across the terrace after Susan’s departure. That moment has never really carried its proper weight before, and I suspect that’s because Susan has never been properly presented before. You have to literally see how much Kane is projecting onto her to glimpse the core of the film and to fully understand what drives his character.

Like I said, this transfer is a bit of a mess and its visual inconsistency will likely throw the casual and uninitiated, who might be better off approaching the film through a lower-res presentation, where a lot of the unevenness would be smoothed over. But it’s a tantalizing opportunity for anyone who’s wondered whether Kane deserves its reputation. Yes, you have to work at it, but the dividends are huge.

Because it’s hard to nail down exactly what contributed to which flaws, there’s little point in listing all the various problems with the transfer. But I need to point to two things in particular. Many of the shots seem unnecessarily contrasty and harsh, abuzz with noise that doesn’t seem to be organic grain. And somebody needs to be slapped with a big penalty for consistently pushing the whites to 100 percent. That is not how this film was meant to look. The various white-on-black title cards all stick out jarringly—partly because of that extreme whiteness, partly because they look static, frozen. (Titles were created knowing they would be run through a film gate and reflected off a screen.)

Just as bad are the moments when certain whites are pumped so hard they make some of the scenes look artificially digital. One is the end of the scene in Bernstein’s chairman-of-the-board office where the flames in the fireplace are so distractingly bright they look matted in. Another is Kane’s dress shirt during the legendary low-angle confrontation between him and Leland, which is so white it occasionally seems to float in mid air, independent of Welles’ body.

One last little bit of carping on my way out the door: Why does this release, from the transfer to the extras to even the cover art, feel so half-hearted and perfunctory? It’s like all involved vaguely understood this is an important film but they weren’t really into it. The extras are the same stuff that’s been floating around for decades, presented in a somewhat slapdash way. Kane, of all films, cries out for some context and some new perspectives—there are none here. The cover art looks like it was thrown together in about 20 minutes in Photoshop by some office lackey. What gives?

Does Kane deserve its reputation? Hell, yeah—every square inch of it. And mainly not for the reasons that are usually trotted out. Welles, with this film, beat the studio system at its own game and reinvented filmmaking. The problem is that his innovations were so radical—and I’m talking about things, like thematic material, aesthetics, and the reflexive deployment of movies, that go well beyond technical considerations—that it took more than 50 years before even some of it, half-digested and mostly superficially, began to make its way into mainstream filmmaking. Eighty one years on, we have barely even begun to mine this particularly rich vein, and there are good reasons to think we never will.

PICTURE | The transfer’s visual inconsistency will likely throw the casual and uninitiated. But the upping in resolution creates a tantalizing opportunity for anyone who’s wondered whether Kane deserves its reputation.

SOUND | The track exhibits an impressive dynamic range but, for Jiminy’s sake, opt for mono not stereo because that’s how it was meant to be heard

Reference Images

52:26 | medium closeup of Emily Kane
Chapter 15 | the closeups of Susan during her first meeting with Kane
1:01:33 | Emily Kane and her son at the political rally
1:30:54 & 1:30:59 | the alternating closeups of Kane and Susan during her opera performance

Review: Spider-Man: Far From Home

review | Spider-Man: Far From Home

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This second entry in the third franchise reboot helps firmly cement Spider-Man’s position in the MCU

by John Sciacca
September 20, 2019

Like James Bonds—and maybe even Batmans—people undoubtedly have a favorite Spider-Man between Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland, the latest webslinger to wear the red and blue. For me it has less to do with the man behind the mask—although, I’ll admit to being partial to Holland’s portrayal—and more to do with the storyline and relationships that makes the latest Spider-Man films the best of the bunch.

This third franchise reboot can trace its roots back to Captain America: Civil War, where Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) took young Spidey under his Iron wing, gave him a better suit, and helped him in his fight against Cap and the Avengers. That mentor relationship continued in Spider-Man: Homecoming, Holland’s first turn carrying a film as Peter Parker and Spidey and one that, thankfully, didn’t make us relive the entire “bit by a spider, hunted down my uncle’s killer” origin. Of course, Spider-Man’s relationship with Tony Stark played a role in both Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, and Far from Home picks up and continues that storyline.

There will be some major story spoilers if you’ve yet to see Endgame, as much of Far from Home’s first act revolves around the ramifications of both Infinity and Endgame. So I would strongly suggest watching both of those films first—plus, they’re just a ton of fun to watch.

Home picks up about 8 months after Endgame, and the world has come to call this time “the Blip.” We get a nice bit of exposition in an opening newscast from Peter’s high school, where we find how the kids are dealing with the ramifications of the Blip, where some have missed five years of their lives, while others who were previously much younger are now older. (If you’ve seen Endgame, you understand.) Peter is still personally reeling from Stark’s death, and he sees signs of Tony/Iron Man literally everywhere.

During a class trip to Europe, Peter is called on by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) to help a new superhero, Quentin Beck/Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), who comes from another earth in the Multiverse, battle giant Elementals bent on destroying the planet. Peter is reluctant to help, wanting to just have a chance to relax and be a kid and profess his love for MJ (Zendaya), but Fury rearranges the trip’s itinerary to continue putting Peter in a position to help. Of course, not all is as it seems, and Peter is forced to make some tough decisions while trying to win the girl, save his friends, and keep his identity secret.

As I mentioned, it’s the continued relationships developed over the years of the MCU that make these latest Spidey films so much more enjoyable and feel so much richer. In Home, we get Happy (Jon Favreau) trying to step in as a Stark mentor replacement, while also romancing Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), who looks terrific here. Fury is trying to restructure after losing so many Avengers, and trying to get Spider-Man to step up to fill a bigger role.

The relationship between Peter and man-in-the-chair Ned (Jacob Batalon) continues, but complicated by a new romantic interest, along with douchey Flash Thompson (Tony Revolori), who admires Spider-Man but loathes Parker. The humor is deftly handled, and there are several references to other Marvel characters. (Pay close attention to the movie options Peter browses for his in-flight film!)

Definitely stick around for both the mid-credits scene—which potentially alters Peter’s life forever—and the post-credits scene, which has a nice callback to another recent Marvel film. And, while it in no way impacts the movie, there is sadly no Stan Lee cameo here.

Far from Home looks fantastic. Filmed in a combination of 2.8 and 3.4K resolution, this transfer is taken from a 2K digital intermediate but it is never wanting for pop or detail. This is a marquee title and it absolutely looks it. Both closeup and long shots have great detail and texture and razor-sharp edge detail with incredible depth and dimension—things like the metallic texture of Spidey’s Iron Spider suit or the fine detail in Ned’s hat.

The film travels through three major European cities, which all have their own look. While in Venice, many of the scenes are outdoors during the day, and the city looks so beautiful you could be watching a travelogue. At night, interiors are lit by the soft glow of lamps, revealing warm and natural colors. In contrast, much of the scenes in Prague are at night, and we get the bright lights and color of fireworks at a carnival.

Home definitely benefits from the high dynamic range and wide color gamut of UltraHD, and both are used well throughout to push images to their best. From the vivid red of Spidey’s suit, to Mysterio’s green blasts, to the broiling red-orange of the Fire Elemental, images pop off the screen when they should. Also, HDR just lends an overall better sense of depth to the image. Black levels are also deep and clean, with clear differences between shades of black, such as Happy’s black suit, Peter’s black shirt and pants and Fury’s black leather trench coat and turtleneck. The images are all reference-quality and offer no room for criticism.

The Dolby Atmos track is also an absolute treat, with near constant and aggressive use of the surround and height speakers. There’s a scene in a hotel in Venice where you hear workers hammering overhead even with no visible construction happening on screen, which is a great audio moment letting you know exactly what’s going on even without seeing it.

The battles also offer a complete hemispherical experience, with things crashing and being destroyed all around or water splashing and raining down from the ceiling. Another scene where Spidey is inside the Illusion has voices swirling constantly overhead, moving from speaker to speaker all around and above you, creating a sonic illusion I don’t think I’ve heard in any other film.

Available now for download in 4K HDR from the Kaleidescape Store a full two weeks before the physical disc is released, Spider-Man: Far from Home is a fun and engaging movie that looks and sounds fantastic, making for a great home cinema selection.

Probably the most experienced writer on custom installation in the industry, John Sciacca is co-owner of Custom Theater & Audio in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, & is known for his writing for such publications as Residential Systems and Sound & Vision. Follow him on Twitter at @SciaccaTweets and at johnsciacca.com.

PICTURE | The transfer is taken from a 2K digital intermediate but is never wanting for pop or detail

SOUND | The Atmos track is an absolute treat, with near constant and aggressive use of the surround and height speakers

Review: Spider-Man: No Way Home

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