But wait… there’s more! Lest you think that the dwindling sands of the 2025 hourglass held no further physical media releases of note, the studios have staged a grand finale. Rather than a quiet drift into the new year, these final weeks have bestowed a stunning infusion of digital excitement, from long-rumored 4K upgrades to genre-defining box sets that arrived just in time to drive one last nail into our holiday budget. So, before we close the book on ‘25, check out these eleventh-hour recommendations.
The Killer 4K
Hard Boiled 4K
Peking Opera Blues 4K (all Shout! Studios)
Shout! continues to mine the Golden Princess library to bring us some of the most celebrated and influential martial arts masterpieces for their ongoing Hong Kong Cinema Classics line, liberating titles from a prolonged copyright hell to bring us prime work from some of the genre’s undisputed masters. The three here are all restored in 4K from the original camera negatives, presented in Dolby Vision and granted newly translated subtitles, beautifully packaged with numbered spines to bring a touch of class to our shelves.
Chow Yun-fat is The Killer, an assassin with a conscience in a plot that combines intense action and personal drama like few films ever have. In Hard Boiled, he’s a cop who doesn’t always play by the rules, at the center of some of the most ambitious and technically brilliant shootouts ever put on film. With these two, director/co-writer John Woo elevated the R-rated thriller to a genuine art form.
Tsui Hark’s action-comedy Peking Opera Blues did female empowerment before it was a thing, as three women from different backgrounds cross paths in 1913 Beijing, risking life, limb and family honor to thwart a nefarious warlord in this relentlessly entertaining feast for the eyes. There’s a new expert commentary, and the supplied HD Blu-ray of the movie also carries several newly filmed interviews. Peking arrives in a simple albeit handsome O-card, whereas The Killer and Hard Boiled are housed in heavy-duty slipcase boxes next to outstanding companion booklets. This pair also packs three audio commentaries each, including a new one with Woo and an archival Woo track borrowed from the Criterion Collection. The two Woos also contain a third disc, entirely of extras, among them a new feature-length documentary in The Killer.
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues Blu-ray (Decal)
We at Sound & Vision would be remiss if we did not acknowledge what would be the late director Rob Reiner’s final narrative feature film, the legacy sequel to his seminal 1984 rockumentary/mockumentary. Decades later, the core trio is forced into a contractually obligated reunion show, the geriatric headbangers battling advancing arthritis and waning relevance, aided this time out by a new female drummer. Nostalgia alone makes the movie worth a watch, with its familiar faces and A-list cameos, now a doubly bittersweet swan song. (Also available in a SteelBook-exclusive 4K edition.)
Boogie Nights 4K (Warner)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s sophomore feature film put him on the map, eye-opening not only to the ins and outs of the adult film business but also to his extraordinary skill behind the camera. Warner’s single platter begins with a much-anticipated native 4K upgrade and serves up a welcome amalgamation of new and legacy bonus content. For starters, both Anderson’s “serious” solo commentary from the New Line Platinum Series DVD and the famous Criterion Collection laserdisc group track with the cast are here. Fifteen minutes of outtakes featuring actor John C. Reilly reappear, along with an additional half-hour of deleted scenes and a music video, these last two items with optional director commentary. New for this disc is a pair of live discussion panels with Anderson and Reilly recorded in 2003, covering a wide range of topics as only this friendly duo can.
Under Siege 4K Limited Edition (Arrow)
Steven Seagal’s ticket to the big time reunited him with a pre-Fugitive Andrew Davis (Above the Law) at the helm, with Davis bringing cohort Tommy Lee Jones (The Package) along for this wild ride. The first Seagal movie to eschew his typical three-word title, Under Siege effectively moved the Die Hard model onto a U.S. Navy battleship with hostages, a heist, and one feisty hero to rule them all. With a few twists and turns all its own, this 1992 actioner would mark the biggest hit of the ponytailed martial arts impresario’s entire career. Newly restored and director-approved, the movie is presented in Dolby Vision and remixed for Atmos, alongside the original lossless stereo. Long a bare-bones DVD/Blu-ray despite its popularity, Under Siege finally gets its due with a new commentary by Davis and writer J.F. Lawton, newly filmed talent interviews, and lovely slipcased packaging with reversible sleeve art and an above-average booklet.
The Emperor’s New Groove 4K (Disney)
“Pull the lever, Kronk!” Although it failed to find its groove at the box office in 2000, The Emperor found its stride on home video, going on to become the best-selling DVD of the following year, and enjoying a devoted fanbase ever since. The challenge: The movie pivoted mid-production from a dramatic musical called Kingdom of the Sun to a smaller-scale, experimental comedy. The shift resulted in an unrecognizable mashup of The Prince and the Pauper and The Emperor’s New Clothes with no big musical numbers, despite plans for an epic song score by Sting, and its bumpy journey even yielded an underground documentary called The Sweatbox, directed by Mrs. Sting, Trudie Styler. (You can only find doc that bouncing around the internet, and in point of fact, there are zero extras in this two-disc set.). No matter, my kids are among the generations of Kronk-ites who can’t get enough of the screwball, meta farce of it all, now looking and sounding groovier than ever in upscaled 4K Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos.
Anaconda 4K (Sony)
1997 was relatively early in the evolution of CGI but filmmakers eager to use new tricks to bring movie monsters to life pushed the boundaries and gave us cult classics like Anaconda. There are some pretty solid practical effects as well and the results remain pretty scary, as a documentary film crew deep in the Amazon rainforest suddenly finds themselves fighting for survival against a massive, territorial, and man-eating green anaconda. I haven’t yet seen the new comedy remake (okay) but Oscar winner Jon Voight is still a trip as the crazed Paraguayan snake hunter. For the movie’s 4K disc debut, Sony has given us a new restoration in Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, a new audio commentary by genre expert Scott Harrison, plus ported interviews with director Luis Llosa (Sniper, The Specialist) and co-writer Hans Bauer (Komodo, Anacondas) along with five deleted/extended scenes. They’ve even given it a new SteelBook case, of a completely different design from last year’s Mill Creek Blu-ray, hopefully strong enough to protect us from the deadly reptile within.
Scars of Dracula
4K (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)
This is the first Hammer film I recall seeing, on Channel 5 one lazy Saturday afternoon. One of the esteemed horror studio’s R-rated Draculas, Scars serves up ample blood and cleavage, and of course the incomparable Christopher Lee as The Count, back in his castle, with sufficient intrigue to make this a standout entry in the series. The new Dolby Vision master from a scan of the original camera negative shows off the superior production values, supplemented by a new critic commentary, plus an archival track with Lee, director Roy Ward Baker and Hammer expert Marcus Hearn, along with a 2019 behind-the-scenes featurette.
The House With Laughing Windows
4K (Arrow)
Arrow really brought it for this lesser-known 1976 giallo (La casa dalle finestre che ridono), a departure from the style of Argento or Bava with its isolated, rural setting, slow-burn pacing and subdued color palette. It also eschews excessive nudity and gore, instead focusing on the underlying psychology of folk horror to great effect, instilling a creeping dread while still delivering a knockout ending. Restored from the camera negative and graded by Arrow, Laughing Windows gets cleaned-up lossless Italian mono (no Inglese audio) and newly translated English subtitles. Bonus-wise, there are two new critic commentaries, a new feature-length documentary and two new “visual essays,” while the premium packaging includes reversible sleeve art, a two-sided poster and a perfect-bound companion book in one of Arrow’s limited-edition rigid, slipcased boxes.
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse 4K (Lionsgate)
The ultimate counterpart to one of the most storied motion picture productions ever undertaken, this documentary gains unintended new perspective with the passing of Eleanor Coppola, who stood by her man and shot extensive behind-the-scenes footage on location, and in the wake of the monumental crash-and-burn of Francis Ford Coppola’s recent Megalopolis. Completed with modern interviews and framing by George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr who cut it all together and set it loose on the world in 1991, Hearts of Darkness imparts an appreciation for any movie really, as we come to understand just how many challenges filmmakers face at every turn while trying to create something special, and how it can go completely off the rails. It would be a decade later before we saw the Redux version of Apocalypse Now, and then another 18 years until the Final Cut, so tidbits like the deleted French Plantation scene first revealed here are the real carrot for me, beyond the countless jaw-dropping admissions of cast and crew. Derrick Scocchera has even created a documentary about the documentary with his 2025 short “The Making of Hearts of Darkness.”
Minority Report 4K
Catch Me If You Can 4K (both Paramount)
2002 saw Steven Spielberg direct two very different films, each teaming him with one of the biggest stars in Hollywood (Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio) and neither set in the present day (2054; primarily the 1960s, respectively). Minority Report is his radically unfaithful adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short story, a sci-fi thriller that pits a lone supercop against a problematic police state. Catch Me If You Can, by contrast, is extremely true to its source material… but since it was a book written by a notorious con man, most of its “facts” are just plain lies. No matter, both films are jolly good entertainment, and Catch Me in particular is a meticulously realized and enjoyable time capsule of the Mad Men era. Both are also landing as two-disc packages, and the movie-only 4K platters for each are high-bitrate affairs on triple-layer BD-100s, in Dolby Vision with DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtracks (Minority was Oscar-nominated for Sound Editing, Catch for Original Score). The provided HD Blu-rays pair the movie with a host of legacy featurettes, more so for the stunt-/VFX-heavy Minority Report.
Black Phone 2 4K (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment)
The Grabber returns from beyond the grave to terrorize those unfortunate siblings in this new tale directed and co-written by Scott Derrickson from a pitch by original short story author Joe Hill. Set four years after the events of the first film, Black Phone 2 delves into Finney and his psychic sister Gwen’s lingering trauma while expanding the lore of the family’s unusual gifts, including their late mother’s dark secret. Derrickson isn’t just phoning it in for his audio commentary, while the three revealing featurettes go deeper still and seven deleted scenes show us what might have been. The snowy aesthetic of the movie inspired the creepy, embossed slipcase, and Black Phone 2 is also available in a Walmart-exclusive SteelBook in addition to a two-movie pack, although keep in mind that a threequel is a strong possibility.
