On 4K Ultra HD - David Hare finds two showstoppers DEEP RED (Dario Argento, Italy, 1975) and NO TIME TO DIE (Cary Fukunaga, UK, 2021)

To call these two showstopping is to deny them justice.

Arrow’s Deep Red was mastered by Dave McKenzie and Fidelity in Motion and like everything they do it is quite simply flawless. Thus a film shot in 1975 in two perf Techniscope stock with, of course original prints done in dye transfer Technicolor from the Technicolore Italiana outfit is now a new 4K disc breathtaking for its depth and detail.

No Time to Die’s director Cary Fukunaga and DP Linus Sandgren chose a film based medium for shooting, rather than digital and the film was photographed with four perf 65mm Imax Cameras, mastered for 2.35 Scope widescreen. I didn’t see it theatrically, and our local venues could only show 4K DCP, but in my limited experience of 4K UHD discs this is the most spectacular ever. On my own projection system the sharpness, detail, depth, stability, color spectrum and dynamic range are the best I’ve seen, and that ain’t chopped liver. 

The picture itself may go on for probably 30 minutes too long, indeed the credits don’t start until the 32 minute point, but so did several of the other Daniel Craig Bond movies. In this case Craig’s character is actually reflecting on a strange life , and with more Proustian references than a window full of Madeleines the picture is constantly imbued with melancholy and a sense of personal darkness which Fukunaga I believe brilliantly plays against the outrageously big action sequences.

And for once I have to agree with a comment by Peter Bradshaw in his Guardian review last year, the movie breathlessly lifts us out of our two year plus isolation under the current plague and does what every Bond movie ever did, it takes us out and away on a glorious, impossibly exciting journey across the world.

Loved it.