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by Simon Brew | May 14, 2025

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John Carpenter's Escape From New York is getting a deluxe VHS release in the UK, and it's available to order here. It is 2025.

The people at Vice-Press comfortably win this week's they-must-be-mad-but-love-'em award. It's announced a brand new physical media release of John Carpenter's seminal Escape From New York, and by absolutely unpopular demand, it's bringing the film back to VHS.

Two different editions are being offered. There's a limited slipcase edition, where the cover art has been done by Phantom City Creative, and comes with a screenprinted tape design.

Then there's a collector's edition with a double-sided cover, and Matt Ferguson has done the design work there.

As for the film itself, it's presented in the PAL format, and in widescreen. None of this pan and scan nonsense here.      

The release, inevitably, is a limited edition one, priced at £29.99 for each edition. Escape From New York's return to VHS comes on Thursday 15th June, and is shipping from the UK. You can find more details on the releases, and order yourselves copies on Vice Press's website.

We've covered Vice-Press and its VHS releases in our print magazine before, and over at its website, you can find its previous release of They Live, as well as its much in demand collection of posters as well. Note too that it has an open house coming up at its Sheffield premises in October, and you can find more details on the website.

If you're not familiar with the film, what a treat you're in for (there is a planned remake, but it's stalled.) It's absolutely worth the trouble of locating a VHS player, and the finding a modern day television that still accepts a SCART connection. A good double bill with The Purge: Anarchy too, arguably the highlight of that particular franchise.

Here's looking forward to more collectable VHS releases, and hopefully Vice-Press can get around to some HD DVD release soon, so I've got an excuse to get my player out of the garage.It's 2025, and Escape From New York has just got a new VHS release

Hard Boiled | John Woo's Hong Kong classic has been rescued and restored in 4K

by Ryan Lambie | May 16, 2025

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Once feared lost, the original negative of John Woo's action classic Hard Boiled has been rescued and restored. The 4K disc is due in June.

There's cool, and then there's 'Chow Yun-fat sliding down a banister, shooting bad guys with a toothpick in his mouth' cool. It's an early, iconic moment in an action thriller stuffed full of them: 1992's Hard Boiled cemented director John Woo's reputation in Hollywood, and remains a high point in Hong Kong cinema.

For years, however, it was thought that Hard Boiled's original print was lost. Although that film -- and other films in Woo's back catalogue -- can be purchased on disc online, some knotty rights issues mean a new 4K release was long thought to be impossible.

In the mid-90s, Golden Princess, the production company that made Hard Boiled and numerous other Hong Kong classics, went bust. The rights to its library of films were then purchased by a firm called Fortune Star, but as part of that acquisition deal, it only had the rights to distribute those movies in Asia.

Those rights eventually ended up in the hands of a massive real estate conglomerate, Kowloon Development Company (KDC), and it was feared that a generation of classic films could be in danger of vanishing into an archive somewhere; KDC refused to sell the rights to individual movies, and so purchasing the entire catalogue would have required a company with deep pockets.

Fortunately, Shout! Studios came to the rescue, and made a deal to buy Golden Princess's entire film archive in January 2025. This means it now owns 156 titles, from Woo's A Better Tomorrow and its two sequels, Ringo Lam's City On Fire, and too many others to list.

If you need a refresher on just how thrilling Hard Boiled is, here's the 4K restoration trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgvK_qhyqgA

In the months since the deal went through, the original print of Hard Boiled has been tracked down in the Hong Kong Film Archive and undergone a painstaking restoration process. In a report by Variety, the 33 year-old print was showing considerable signs of age, from dust and scratches to tears running right across the celluloid.

"Our team encountered a significant tear that had split the image across the frame," a film restoration expert Michael Coronado at a company called Duplitech, told the outlet. "To restore this section, our skilled restoration artists used clone-painting techniques by overlaying adjacent frames to repair the damaged footage."

"Restoring the film was both a challenge and a labour of love," added Henry Weintraub, restoration supervisor at Shout!. "Hard Boiled means a lot to so many people, myself included, and I wanted to be sure we did it justice. It was important to preserve the original look and sound design of the era, while also enhancing both to bring out their full potential."

The restored Hard Boiled is set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival under its Cannes Classics section today (the 16th May). After that, though, it'll be getting a 4K Blu-ray release, making it the definitive home version of a true landmark in action cinema.

Hard Boiled will be released on disc in the US on the 25th June as part of its Hong Kong Cinema Classics line. You can find the full list of its planned releases on the Shout! website.Hard Boiled | John Woo's Hong Kong classic has been rescued and restored in 4K

Here's a review i wrote recently. Please enjoy.

Jackie Chan presents his own take on the Indiana Jones franchise in this adventure across Europe.

Despite losing money in cinemas on Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola is said to be insistent that his oddball epic be seen on the big screen rather than streaming or disc.

Veteran filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola famously gambled a considerable amount of his personal fortune on his 2024 epic, Megalopolis. But given that his sprawling, $120m saga is said to have lost tens of millions for the director -- it's said to have made just $14m in cinemas -- you might be forgiven for thinking he'd be keen to recoup his cost through other means.

Quite the opposite.

According to a piece on The Hollywood Reporter, there's a good reason as to why you can't purchase Megalopolis on DVD and Blu-ray, at least in the US: Coppola wants it to remain a big-screen experience.

Megalopolis was available to stream not long after its cinema release in September 2024. By that November, the movie was available to rent on such platforms as Prime Video, Apple TV+ and Google Play; by early 2025, however, Megalopolis had been pulled from all those services, at least in the US. In the UK, Coppola's fable is available to purchase in UHD for £13.99 from Prime Video.

It's a similar story on disc. In the UK, such outlets as HMV and Amazon are happily selling Megalopolis on DVD, Blu-ray and its fancy 4K Ultra HD younger relative. In the US, the disc release still hasn't emerged; there have been reports from customers that it was available to pre-purchase at one stage, but they later had those orders cancelled.

Again, the reason for its obscurity in the US is because Coppola "wants it to play in theatres, the way it was intended," according to a THR source. Instead, the director appears to be personally taking his film around for special screenings; one such event in Boston was said to be sold out, while another is set to happen in Detroit later in May.

Adam Driver leads an all-star cast in Megalopolis, the actor playing Cesar Catalina -- a brooding architect determined to rebuild a shattered city after his own design. Coppola's piece is all retro-futuristic decadence and homebrew special effects, with similarly outlandish performances from such big names as Aubrey Plaza (here playing a TV reporter named Wow Platinum) and Jon Voight as a wealthy banker who likes to boast about his priapism.

Curiously, Voight himself seems to be on his own Cesar-esque quest to rebuild Hollywood after his own image, albeit with the aid of one Donald Trump. We'll have to wait and see how that works out for them.

Depending on who you talk to or read, Megalopolis is either a fascinating oddity or simply an outright disaster. Whatever your opinion, it seems that Coppola's intent on keeping his film shrouded in its own kind of mystique.

The unique throwback sci-fi film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow didn't make the splash it was hoping for with audiences. In fact, we feel it's an overlooked film here at JoBlo as Chris Bumbray tries to shine a light on the alien invasion film with a retrospective video. He recommends it highly by saying, "If you haven't seen this movie, I urge you to check it out. It's a fun, old-fashioned adventure with a great score by Edward Shearmur, who never entirely became the A-list composer he should have been. It has a bouncy pace and even an early example of post-mortem casting with Laurence Olivier playing the bad guy despite having died 13 years before this came out. Give it a shot!"

However, some movies can still find audiences late in life, and perhaps that can happen with the new physical release of Sky Captain. Blu-ray.com has announced that Shout Factory will be distributing a new special 4K remastered Blu-ray this summer. Sky Captain was written and directed by Kerry Conran and stars Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi, and Michael Gambon.The new two-disc 4K Blu-ray is due to hit retailers on May 27.

The description reads,

"When giant robots attack New York City, intrepid reporter Polly Perkins (Academy Award winner Gwyneth Paltrow) enlists the aid of ace aviator and old flame Joseph 'Sky Captain' Sullivan (two-time Academy Award nominee Jude Law) to stop a plot to destroy the world before it's too late. Co-starring Academy Award winner Angelina Jolie, Sky Captain And The World of Tomorrow will thrill and amaze you right through to the action-packed finale."

Special Features and Technical Specs:

DISC ONE -- 4K BLU-RAY

• NEW 4K TRANSFER FROM THE 35MM DIGITAL NEGATIVE
• DOLBY VISION/HDR PRESENTATION OF THE FILM
• Audio Commentary with Director Kerry Conran, Production Designer Kevin Conran, Animation Director Steve Yamamoto, and Visual Effects Supervisor Darin Hollings
• Audio Commentary with Producer Jon Avnet
• Optional English subtitles for the main feature

DISC TWO -- BLU-RAY

• NEW 4K TRANSFER FROM THE 35MM DIGITAL NEGATIVE
• Audio Commentary with Director Kerry Conran, Production Designer Kevin Conran, Animation Director Steve Yamamoto, and Visual Effects Supervisor Darin Hollings
• Audio Commentary with Producer Jon Avnet
• "Brave New World" -- A Two-Part Look at the making of Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow
• "The Art of World of Tomorrow" Featurette
• "Anatomy of A Virtual Scene"
• The Original Six-Minute Short
• Deleted Scenes
• Gag Reel
• Theatrical Trailers
• Optional English subtitles for the main feature

Production has officially commenced on a third “Enola Holmes” movie in the UK with Netflix making the announcement this morning.

The news also confirmed returning cast members which include Millie Bobby Brown as Enola, Henry Cavill as her brother Sherlock Holmes, Louis Partridge as Tewkesbury, Helena Boham-Carter as Eudoria Holmes, Himesh Patel as Dr. John Watson, and Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Moriarty.

Jack Thorne, who penned the two previous films, returns here and re-teams with director Philip Barantini following their highly successful collaboration on “Adolescence”.

Barantini steps into the director’s chair for the first time on the franchise, replacing Harry Bradbeer who directed the first two films. Mary Parent, Ali Mendes, Alex Garcia, Robert Brown and Millie Bobby Brown produce.

In the third instalment, Enola is in Malta where personal and professional dreams collide on a case more tangled and treacherous than any she has faced before.

The first two films have been critical and commercial hits for the streamer, no word as to when the new film is targeting a release.