Ultra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Former Python Terry Gilliam's most notorious motion picture, Brazil, is not in fact set in the largest country on the South American continent, rather the title comes from a 1939 song, evoking romantic fantasies that echo our hero's longing for escape from his oppressive, bureaucratic world. Good-hearted Sam (Jonathan Pryce) is a government stooge whose world gets turned upside-down when he catches a glimpse of the literal woman of his dreams (Kim Greist), drawing him deeper into the authoritarian rabbit hole. What he finds is hilariously absurd, but soon enough he finds himself risking everything to oppose the regime.

In The Biz, this movie has come to symbolize the often nasty conflicts between filmmakers and studio executives, and Universal demanded cuts to the U.S. release, affecting the story and tone in big ways and small. Thankfully, Criterion's new 4K presents the director's cut, the restorations enhancing the Kafkaesque vibe, and most substantially reinstating a pair of absolutely brilliant scenes preceding Sam's interrogation.

Eight years earlier, in the summer of 1977, if your movie wasn't called Star Wars then good luck getting anyone to see it, even if it boasted post-Jaws Roy Scheider front and center and the esteemed William Friedkin at the helm, riding high from his back-to-back mega-successes The Exorcist and The French Connection. A pity, as Sorcerer finds Friedkin in peak form, following a disparate gang of desperate men who find themselves in the middle of the jungle, hiding from the sins of their past in a hell on Earth. In this unspecific Latin American village, the work is dangerous, the environment unforgiving, and the cops are as crooked as they come.

These ne'er-do-wells—a gangster, an embezzler, a hitman, a terrorist and an ex-Nazi—dream of something, anything better, and their chance finally arrives in a near-suicidal mission. Twin truckloads of unstable dynamite need to be transported 200 miles through unknown terrain in order to put out a raging oil rig fire, with a big fat paycheck waiting at the end, just what they need to start again somewhere else. The palpable hopelessness eventually gives way to seemingly insurmountable danger, highlighted by an iconic sequence of the trucks attempting to traverse an insanely fragile rope bridge inches above a raging river in the rain. It's about as gut-wrenchingly suspenseful as anything ever I've seen on film.

Gilliam is an undisputed master of ambitious visual storytelling and he's at the top of his craft with Brazil, relying on practical effects and extensive use of miniatures. The 1.85:1 image (1.78:1 on the set's HD Blu-ray) is just about flawless in terms of capturing the organic nuances of the production. The sharpness of focus can vary from shot to shot but consummate care appears to have been put into every frame of the remaster, such that we can now spot faint dirt, smudges and scrapes on the actors, costumes, sets, etc. The image remains stable even as smoke and mist waft by, shadows are natural with plenty of detail, and the stylized color palette serves the director's very specific vision like I've never seen for this movie.

Not everyone agrees with me on this but I think that the new 4K digital restoration of Sorcerer is fantastic, capturing this bleak world with an appropriate grittiness (and graininess), yet with outstanding clarity and strong colors that benefit from the meticulous Dolby Vision grade.

Sorcerer defaults to its original 2.0 Surround in DTS-HD Master Audio, but we can also select a director-approved 5.1 track that appeared on the 2014 Blu-ray. Either choice is a terrific track with a lot to recommend it, each handling the frequent rain and thunder in its own fashion, although we can really notice the booming might of the explosions in 5.1. Meanwhile, to my ear at least, the chirping jungle sounds displayed more depth and life in the 2.0. (The booklets for both of these movies encourage us to engage our receiver's Dolby Pro Logic decoding.)

Brazil is exclusively 2.0 Surround-equipped, and while no great lengths have been taken to bring the audio up to modern standards, the vintage mix does a fine job enveloping us "somewhere in the 20th century." The fullness of the action-heavy final act and in particular the emotion of Michael Kamen's musical score are more than adequately preserved, free of pops, clicks, hiss or dropouts.

Both titles are three-disc affairs, with the same content repeated on each Disc Two, in HD. There are no extras on the first two platters for Sorcerer, whereas Brazil includes a director's commentary, and watching a movie as fascinating and as storied as this with running insights from a filmmaker as gifted and as quirky as Gilliam is truly Criterion at its best. Brazil's third disc ports the excellent content from the legendary ten-side laserdisc of 1996. The American theatrical cut is not supplied here, but we are once again given the "Love Conquers All" TV version, the studio's ninety-four-minute, happy-ending cut of Brazil, with commentary by expert David Morgan. It remains a perfect encapsulation of the studio's misunderstanding (and mishandling) of this movie. To call it a mess would be generous.

The third disc for Sorcerer carries a quite interesting new conversation between filmmaker James Gray (Ad Astra) and critic Sean Fennessy, joined by an eclectic mix of archival supplements, most impressively Francesco Zippel's feature-length 2018 documentary, Friedkin Uncut.

Their South American commonality aside, Brazil and Sorcerer share problematic release histories, but their popularity has only grown in subsequent years. More significantly, the two films are about dreamers, men who yearn for something betond the restraints of their current existence and take the chance to make it real, even if that means paying the ultimate price.

Chris Chiarella