The Lincoln Lawyer 4K Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		5.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

The Lincoln Lawyer 4K Blu-ray Movie Review

The Lincoln Lawyer garnered Matthew McConaughey some of the best pre-Dallas Buyers Club acclaim of his career, but it still seems like a somewhat odd choice for a 4K UHD upgrade, at least considering the fact that much of the film either plays out in drab interior courtrooms or hazy Los Angeles environments.

The Lincoln Lawyer 4K Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Note: The included screenshots are sourced from a 1080p Blu-ray disc. Watch for 4K screenshots at a later date.

The Lincoln Lawyer is presented on 4K UHD courtesy of Lionsgate Films with a 2160p transfer in 2.35:1. Digitally captured with Red One cameras and finished at a 2K DI, the 1080p presentation of Lincoln Lawyer received extremely high marks from me personally, but I have to say I was less than completely pleased with some of the "upgrade" to 4K. While there's the typical increase in detail and especially fine detail levels here, HDR has added a somewhat cooler temperature across the board, making the blue graded scenes positively icy at times, and with other, supposedly sun baked, sequences looking just slightly pallid. While noticeable in the 1080p presentation, brief flurries of noise (as at around 48:29) are almost swarm like now. The most prevalent issue I experienced was pretty pronounced image instability in lateral pans or any sideways movement within the frame itself. I noticed it first in the credits sequences, where names drift in from the side of the frame and then move across the frame, but repeatedly when the camera panned, the image stuttered and at one especially noticeable moment at around 1:50:08, I feared that a hospital was going to crumble before my eyes. I seem to be more sensitive to this "judder" than a lot of people, and so I invited an innocent bystander to view selected moments of the film without me giving any hint of what I was seeing, and even this person mentioned how "shaky" things looked.

The Lincoln Lawyer 4K Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

If the video presentation is at least intermittently a little wonky, the audio presentation on the 4K UHD disc takes what was an already excellent sounding DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 mix on the Blu-ray and ups the ante with a great sounding Dolby Atmos track. From the first sounds of Bobby Bland under the opening credits, it's clear there's a new presence in the mix, one that continues in appealing midair placement of effects in several jail scenes, or later when Mick is walking around outside of the courtroom, where the general bustle of "white noise" courtesy of Los Angeles traffic clearly wafts overhead and seems to surround the dialogue taking place. Both source cues and underscore have a new energy in this mix, and discrete channelization continues to be first rate.

The Lincoln Lawyer 4K Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The 4K UHD disc commendably ports over all of the supplements detailed in our The Lincoln Lawyer Blu-ray review.

The Lincoln Lawyer 4K Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Lincoln Lawyer manages to craft an enjoyable mystery, and it provides McConaughey with a chance to dig a little deeper than some of the actor's more lightweight acting choices have. That said, this seems to be an odd choice for a 4K UHD upgrade, and with video encountering a few hurdles that makes things even more questionable. One way or the other, the new Atmos track sounds fantastic.