Before I left for Sundance, I gathered all of the Blu-rays I received in January into a pile and started popping them into my Blu-ray player to make this list. I knew Sundance would keep me busy until February 1 and I didn’t want to be late. January actually sees a lot of high profile titles from the end of 2014 coming home, and a few classic catalog titles.
I usually focus on how the Blu-ray looks, since that’s what we buy Blu-rays for. Most of the extras are the same across Blu-ray and DVD, although occasionally there is cause celebre for a certain bonus feature. This month only, I also included a movie released only on DVD, because it’s just so good I have to recommend it in any format.
The Top 9 Blu-rays (and 1 DVD) of 2015:
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
The Top 10 Blu-rays of January 2015
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10. The Zero Theorem
The clutter of Terry Gilliam’s aesthetic seems made for Blu-ray, where you can see every detail in the background. The Zero Theorem is as cluttered as any Gilliam classic, but a bit more technological. He’s also been in a more colorful phase since The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, so you’ve got frames full of cables and screens in multicolored pastels. But it’s still very Gilliam. The film’s 35mm format reveals itself in HD as some of the sequences have more grain than others.
Read our interview with Zero Theorem director Terry Gilliam.
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9. Fitzcarraldo
Shout! Factory did a good job with Werner Herzog’s classic, in which they essentially drag a boat across South America in real time. The print is clean and you can see the film grain. There is a jungle fog over most of the scenes too, kind of like in Apocalypse Now. Occasionally, a rough scene or two has digital noise but it’s not worth complaining about. I’ve never seen Fitzcarraldo look this good. Herzog does a commentary in English and in German with subtitles, but I didn’t have time to compare them to see how much overlap there is.
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8. Boyhood
I reviewed the Boyhood Blu-ray in full, but to recap, the twelve years of Richard Linklater’s film look lush and colorful in HD. Since he began the project on film and maintained a consistent aesthetic for twelve years, film is no longer the most common format transferred to home video. As such, you see digital noise in the nighttime and interior scenes, something I don’t think was a problem when every Blu-ray authoring service worked with film consistently. It looks good though. The extras are scant, but I think it’s monumental that they shot bonus features all twelve years so that there’s a twenty minute time capsule, and the extended Q&A with Linklater and the cast is as informative as any commentary.
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7. Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh
The sequel to Candyman was directed by Bill Condon, and while it’s no Dreamgirls, the Scream Factory Blu-ray looks pretty great. You can tell it was shot on film in the ‘90s with an overcast color scheme to all the New Orleans locations. So it is still possible to transfer 35mm footage into a Blu-ray consistently. The picture remains clear, and the texture of New Orleans is evident in the detail on the streets and the chipped fences lining the neighborhoods. Even the early digital effects look fairly striking in HD.
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6. The Boxtrolls
Oscar-nominated for Best Animated Feature, The Boxtrolls looks extraordinary on Blu-ray. Even in 2D, the textured backgrounds and character figures come to life, and they move with such smoothness that you can only imagine the animators going crazy over every individual frame. Since stop-motion is done frame by frame, the Blu-ray makes this illusion of life even more convincing.
Watch our video interview with Sir Ben Kingsley about The Boxtrolls.
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5. Fury
David Ayer’s WWII tank epic looks great on Blu-ray. The battlefield is stark and all the grime and gore is shown in full detail. 56 minutes of deleted and extended scenes are not nothing, although extended is the key word. Maybe half of this is new material, and one scene is shown twice with two alternates. Oddly, the breakfast scene has an alternate version that’s two minutes shorter than the one in the film. There are interesting character moments, including some wartime hazing of the new recruits, and a little sensitivity for Jon Bernthal’s abrasive character.
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4. Rudderless (DVD)
I championed Rudderless from Sundance to its theatrical/VOD release. I’m glad it got out there and I understand it may not have a big enough audience for a Blu-ray. Although does it really cost that much more to master the disc on Blu-ray? The movie holds up on DVD though, and the music sounds as good as it would on a Blu-ray. This movie is such about the healing power of music, you can listen to the songs and feel more than if you were looking at an HD picture. But the digital versions are HD so if you’re really into hi-def, VOD should do you just as good.
Read our exclusive, spoiler-filled interview with Rudderless director William H. Macy.
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3. A Walk Among the Tombstones
New York is gritty in this mystery and that grit is presented in stark clarity on Blu-ray. The streets can be wet with rain or littered with dry scattered debris, but the filmmakers did a good job of making 1990s New York look a little more dangerous than it may seem now. The picture is consistent throughout the film, so it feels like an intentional world of Matthew Scutter. It’s based in our reality, but carefully constructed so that everywhere Scudder walks, among tombstones and otherwise, feels like a dangerous place with violence potentially around any corner.
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2. Lucy
Lucy is Luc Besson’s 2001, but it’s the last 10 minutes of 2001, the abstract montage that has been open to interpretation for decades. You’ve got Scarlett Johannson killing bad guys with martial arts and telekinetic effects, but throughout the movie everything is intercut with nature footage. There’s presumably a plot about a powerful drug and Lucy (Johansson) developing her brain powers, but that’s just something on which to hang the imagery. Lucy is practically nothing but abstract imagery and that is awesome. It looks fantastic on Blu-ray, as the action scenes and visual effects are slick and vibrant. You see all the detail in the “National Geographic meets Koyaanisqatsi” cutaways and the smooth car chases look more like art than action. I loved Lucy!
Watch an exclusive behind the scenes clip from the Lucy Blu-ray.
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1. Gone Girl
I ranked Gone Girl even higher than Boyhood on my Top 15 Movies of the Year, and since its Blu-ray looks even better, now it is the best Blu-ray of the month. David Fincher knows how to shoot a movie, so bringing out his best qualities on HD is a special achievement. Gone Girl has a lot of that green hue you’ll recognize from Fight Club, but a lot of picaresque suburbia too. The simple Blu-ray features only a commentary track as bonus material (and a cute Amazing Amy book in the package), but hearing Fincher talk for two and a half hours is more than enough. He’s constant with information and anecdotes, and talks straight about practical setups and thematic analysis.
