Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.5
Overall		4.0

The Town 4K Blu-ray Movie Review

The Return of Doug MacRay

As Warner prepares for the release of Ben Affleck's latest directorial effort, Live by Night, the studio has dusted off Affleck's two previous efforts as writer/director/star for 4K treatment: Argo, the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 2012; and the 2010 heist thriller, The Town. Both films have been previously issued on Blu-ray in multiple editions and cuts, but Warner has limited its UHD treatment of both features to their theatrical versions, thereby prompting substantial (and, frankly, justified) grumbling among the 4K crowd. In the case of The Town, however, the new disc offers more of an upgrade than expected, primarily because of the film's peculiar history on Blu-ray.

The Town's original 2010 Blu-ray contained both the 125-minute theatrical cut and an extended version, with twenty-five minutes of added scenes, on a single disc. To the consternation of many technically minded Blu-ray fans, both versions were encoded in toto, rather than utilizing seamless branching. The result was over five hours of movie being crunched onto one BD-50 with average bitrates in the mid-teens. My colleague Kenneth Brown concluded that, despite the low rates, both versions of The Town looked remarkably good.

In 2012, Warner re-released The Town in an Ultimate Collector's Edition containing the original two-version Blu-ray, plus an entirely new disc featuring the extended edition with an alternate ending. With only one cut on the second disc, Warner's encoding achieved a more respectable bitrate of almost 26 Mbps. Ken's review compared this more generous encode to the original, concluding that it was "better . . . but honestly, not that much better". He specifically noted a "more refined" grain field and less artifacting. But those improvements were limited to the extended edition (plus alternate ending). The version released to theaters has never received an improved encode—until now.

Screenshots are sourced from a 1080p Blu-ray disc. Watch for 4K screenshots at a later date.

The Town 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 Town's theatrical cut receives an upgrade on Warner's 2160p, HEVC/H.265-encoded UHD. The image features the same chilly blues, deep blacks and natural skintones as the Blu-ray, complete with the occasional flash of bright colors for contrast, like the red trim on MacRay's jacket or the reddish-orange prison jumpsuit worn by his father. Textures and fine detail are even more finely rendered on the UHD than on the Blu-ray, whether it's the pores and irregularities on the faces of MacCray and his crew, the individual strands of Claire Keesey's (Rebecca Hall) black hair or the incessant five o'clock (and sometimes ten o'clock) shadow on the face of dogged FBI Agent Frawley (Jon Hamm). The same traces of the original photography on film noted in Ken's review remain, but the occasional soft shot looks less soft now, aided by enhanced contrast and detail.

Now, since The Town was finished on a digital intermediate at 2K, the new disc presents the same riddle as the UHD of I Am Legend: To what extent are the visible improvements a function of 4K up-conversion and HDR encoding, as opposed to superior authoring with a new codec, a more generous allotment of digital real estate and no high frequency filtering to facilitate compression? A deeper analysis of the 4K disc's encoding will have to await the availability of UHD computer drives and appropriate analytical software, but even then it may well be impossible to determine the exact cause of the improvements with any certainty. In the meantime, the enhancements offered by the UHD of The Town's theatrical cut are visible on the screen for all to see.

A final note, which I am borrowing from one of my esteemed colleagues: I'd caution against any comparison of my scores on this release with scores of the previous Blu-rays. There's no guarantee I would have scored those discs the same way Ken did, and conversely Ken might very well have scored this release differently than I have.

[Viewed on a system calibrated using a Klein K10-A Colorimeter with a custom profile created with a Colorimetry Research CR250 Spectraradiometer, powered by SpectraCal CalMAN 2016 5.7, using the Samsung Reference 2016 UHD HDR Blu-ray test disc authored by Florian Friedrich from AV Top in Munich, Germany. Calibration performed by Kevin Miller of ISFTV.]

The Town 4K Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The UHD of The Town features the same lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 track reviewed here.

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

A copy of the 2010 Blu-ray is included, with all of the extras described in the previous review. The UHD also features the commentary for the theatrical cut.

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

I happen to think that, despite the inherent interest of the additional and alternate scenes in The Town's expanded cuts, the theatrical version is the best: swift, brutal and relentless in its forward motion, all while effectively maintaining a hold on the emotional lives of its central characters. While it would have been preferable to have all three versions remastered in 4K, the upgrade of the theatrical cut offered by this UHD iteration is significant enough to make it an easy recommendation.