The City of Lost Children 4K Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		0.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		4.0

The City of Lost Children 4K Blu-ray Movie Review

Sony has released the 1995 film 'The City of Lost Children,' directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro and starring Ron Perlman, to the UHD format. New specifications include 2160p/Dolby Vision video and a new English dub DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 lossless soundtrack. In addition to the legacy supplements, this release also includes a new audio commentary track. No Blu-ray disc is included; all extras are found on the UHD disc. At time of writing, this release is exclusive to the eleven-film Sony Pictures Classics: 30th Anniversary Collection boxed set.

The City of Lost Children 4K Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The included screenshots are sourced from a 1080p Blu-ray disc.

Sony's 2160p/Dolby Vision UHD presentation of The City of Lost Children displays the material as forcefully as the filmmakers intended. The picture is super-sharp and very heavily textured. The movie thrives on aggressive grain and the display of complex industrial textures. The film aims for a very tactile look and feel, which the UHD accomplishes with gusto behind the might of its 2160p resolution muscle. Viewers will see every location detail, set piece, and character detail with extreme definition, supported by the sharp grain. The film looks processed by design rather than to a fault. It's not an image that everyone will love, but it appears to be faithful to filmmaker intent. Print speckles are kept to a bare minimum and there appears to be no serious encode flaws, either.

Colors are muted within a heavily green tint, to the point that it almost looks sickly. This is not a cheerful, vivid color grading by any means, again as with the super-sharp grain and texturing on the resolution side of things, by director intent. To be sure there are reprieves from the thick green, with some warmth and push to red, but the green color dominates the film. Skin tones resultantly can veer all over the map depending on lighting and tonal grading mood. Black levels are very deep but can veer into crush, though perhaps, again, by design. Whites are solid, most notably in on-screen subtitle text.

The City of Lost Children 4K Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

This UHD release of The City of Lost Children contains the legacy French DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 lossless soundtrack, a review of which can be found by clicking here. The legacy Blu-ray also contained an English dub in Dolby Digital 2.0, but for this release Sony has included the English dub in the DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 lossless configuration. That track is quite good, offering impressive stage stretch along the front and a sense of fullness and discrete detail that brings the film's open, airy, reverberating, engaging, and immersive location audio cues to life with all of the richness of the original mix and all of the envelopment a 2.0 track can muster. The track also excels in offering high yield sound elements, including a big ship bellows at the 22:42 mark where the sense of power and space is not lost in the 2.0 configuration. A shotgun blast around the 71-minute mark is also impressively powerful. Dialogue is perfectly imaged to the center. There are no issues with clarity or prioritization.

The City of Lost Children 4K Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This UHD release of The City of Lost Children, as it ships in the Sony Pictures Classics 30th Anniversary boxed set, includes all of the same extras from the 2015 Blu-ray. In addition, a new audio commentary track is included. See below for a list of what's included, for a few words on the new commentary, and please click here for full coverage. As it ships in Sony Pictures Classics boxed set, a non-embossed slipcover is included.

• Audio Commentary: Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Actor Ron Perlman.
• NEW! Audio Commentary: Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet speaks about the film in French. With English subtitles. He does a fine job of dissecting the structure, narrative peculiarities, technical oddities, and more.
• "Making Of" Featurette
• Les Archives de Jean-Pierre Jeunet
• Interview with Jean-Paul Gaultier
• Teasers and Trailers

The City of Lost Children 4K Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The City of Lost Children will divide audiences, and the UHD may likewise divide audiences. The UHD appears to be faithful to its filmmaker intended vision. It's very sharp, very aggressively grainy, pushes textures hard, and holds to a heavily green-tinted color. The new English track is fine, but faithful film fans will want to watch with the original language track turned on instead. The extras are solid, including a brand-new commentary track.