Blu-ray Movie Reviews

The Criterion Collection Movie ••••½Disc ••••½

The increased visual resolution of the Blu-ray Disc format isn't only there to boost the wow factor of one's home theater. If you've got optimal picture and sound quality, you've got a more involving experience overall - even with a relatively quiet piece that doesn't have a lot of car chases and whatnot.

Actually, the characterization "quiet" doesn't do justice to François Truffaut's The Last Metro (1980). A story of a theatrical company struggling to stay afloat in occupied Paris during World War II, this comedy-drama is hardly a shy creature; on the contrary, it bristles with Truffaut's wit, intelligence, and compassion. Hiding her Jewish husband, the theater's director, in the basement of their house while ostensibly taking his place, Catherine Deneuve's Marion finds herself falling for the new leading man, Gérard Depardieu's Bernard. This is just one of the plot lines in Metro's beautiful, buzzing bustle.

It's all captured on film by the great cinematographer Néstor Almendros, who gives the movie a burnished, almost nostalgic look, using a lot of warm, almost gaslight-like tones. The Blu-ray image is remarkably inviting; the disc as a whole brings you into another world.

Criterion got into Blu-ray late in 2008, and it hasn't gone one foot wrong. Released concurrently with The Last Metro and also highly recommended is the company's wonderful Blu-ray of Truffaut's first feature, The 400 Blows, a very visually different film, in widescreen black-and-white.