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As I mentioned in Friday's What’s Worth Watching newsletter, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks deep in preparing my ballot for this weekend’s Toronto Film Critics Association vote – in fact, when you receive this I’ll be sitting down with my colleagues to hash out this year’s winners. As I always say, awards are dumb and art is subjective, so I just hope we can guide people to some good movies. And my own best-of list will be right here later this month, of course.

While I’m off doing that, I invite you to retreat to the comforts of a lost and foreign land, since not one but two classics of British cinema are newly available in 4K editions. I Know Where I’m Going! and Howards End are very different films, produced decades apart by two legendary film teams … but they do speak to one another.

When Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made I Know Where I’m Going! in 1944, it was seen as a distraction, really; a trifling romance to keep them busy until A Matter of Life and Death could go into production. But the Archers were too talented to just knock out a middling programmer – and after several years working in service of the war effort, this simple tale of a woman on a journey gave them the excuse to tell a different sort of story about the country they so loved.

I Know Where I’m Going! starts out with a perfect screwball premise: Bright young thing Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) is en route from Manchester to Kiloran, an island in the Hebrides, to marry a wealthy, older industrialist. Joan gets as far as the Isle of Mull before rough weather delays the last leg of her trip; stuck waiting for the waters to settle, she ends up spending a few days on Mull with naval officer Torquil (Roger Livesey), who’s also trying to get to Kiloran. Initially, Joan dismisses him as an obnoxious townie, but Torquil doesn’t have layers … and dash it all if he doesn’t become more appealing the more time Joan spends with him.

Throw in eccentric locals, a family curse and a supposedly haunted castle and you’ve got the makings of a broad comedy, but Powell and Pressburger go in a different direction. I Know Where I’m Going! was written and produced after D-Day, with Europe on the verge of liberation and the end of the war finally in sight, and a sense of tentative renewal – a feeling that something better is almost certainly coming – runs through the film. Joan’s days on Mull don’t just introduce her to a new suitor but to new possibilities: The safe and comfortable life she’d planned for herself might no longer be the life she wants.

Again, that’s the plot of dozens of comedies – It Happened One Night feels like the road map this specific story is unconsciously following – but Capra made that movie in 1934, and ten years later the Archers were working in a very different world. They expect the war will be over when I Know Where I’m Going! is released, but they also know the audience will still be reliving it – and so the picture carries a layer of darkness, a sense that Joan and Torquil are having their little adventure in defiance of the horrors raging in Europe. The whole story happens because these people are taking shelter from a storm, after all.

Indeed, one might detect a slightly eerie quality to the bogs and ruins of Mull – beautifully photographed on location by Erwin Hillier, who’d just shot the Archers’ A Canterbury Tale – and when Joan mocks Torquil for his reluctance to cross the threshold of a supposedly accursed castle, Powell and Pressburger can show Joan as good-natured and rational while also leaving room for us to remember that Torquil is on leave from a war, so maybe a little superstition can be excused: There are a lot more ghosts these days, and one must be respectful.

There are ghosts everywhere in Howards End, but they know their place. James Ivory’s eminently respectful study of the limits of aspiration in Edwardian England is all about structure and propriety, and even the wishes of the dead can be subject to interpretation if they’re judged unseemly.

Such interference is the secret at the heart of Forster’s story, in which two families – the aristocratic Wilcoxes and the supposedly unmannered Schlegels – are entangled by both passion and gentle fraud.

A youthful fling between the younger Schlegel sister, Helen (Helena Bonham Carter) and the impulsive Paul Wilcox (Joseph Bennett) first brings the families into contact, but the engagement is dismissed as quickly as it's announced.

Months later, when the families find themselves neighbors in London, Helen’s more level-headed sister Margaret (Emma Thompson) and the ailing Ruth Wilcox (Vanessa Redgrave) become good friends – good enough that Ruth decides to leave her childhood home, Howards End, to Margaret. But the Wilcoxes refuse to acknowledge the bequest, destroying Ruth’s letter to ensure Margaret never learns of the gift.

Margaret becomes close with Ruth’s widowed husband Henry (Anthony Hopkins), who eventually proposes marriage to bring some stability to both their lives. But of course it does quite the opposite, uniting the Wilcoxes and Schlegels in a cycle of quiet misery, the Wilcoxes’ initial deception poisoning everyone’s future. Although it’s also possible, given the way Henry conducts himself in matters both business and personal, that the poison was there all along.

As with all of their literary adaptations, Ivory and his producer Ismail Merchant (and their frequent screenwriter, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala) bring a potentially stuffy story to life by focusing on the human cost of the story, letting the themes lurk in the background as the emotions pull us along. And yes, the Merchant Ivory brand was embraced by some moviegoers as a signifier of highbrow art-house fare – the production design is reliably exquisite, and beautiful people looking quietly haunted in dinner jackets and evening gowns make for a great poster – but the movies always land their emotional punches, and Howards End is perhaps the strongest.

Certainly, it was the film best-positioned to make its mark, arriving in theaters just months after Hopkins won his Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs and offering audiences a very different sort of monster in Henry Wilcox. Henry isn’t even a monster, really; he’s just entitled and selfish, using his social standing to ruin his lessers because that’s how the world works from his perspective. The wreckage which piles up over the course of the film is someone else’s problem. And that, I dare say, is why Emma Thompson won her Oscar the following year.

But really, everyone is doing stellar work in Howards End. Thompson, Hopkins, Bonham Carter, Redgrave; the late Prunella Scales has a fine cameo as the Schlegel sisters’ expressive Aunt Juley, and Samuel West is a portrait of suffering as their doomed friend Leonard Bast, whose only crime is to want a decent job and whose aspirations Henry casually derails. Ivory pitches all of this – well, nearly all of it – at an unrelentingly civil tone, ensuring we feel the emotions the characters won’t allow themselves. Like I said: The punches land.

Howards End was restored in 4K for a theatrical release in 2016, and that restoration served as the master for the Cohen Media Group’s initial Blu-ray special edition – though the transfer was matted a little too tightly, to 2.50:1. That disc is also included in the new 4K combo edition, along with a second Blu-ray of extras – but the 4K disc is properly framed at 2.39:1. No HDR grade was applied, which is curious, but the image looks splendid even in standard dynamic range.

Another fun connection: Howards End used to be in the Criterion Collection, in an excellent special-edition Blu-ray that’s long since gone out of print. Some of the special features that were included in that release have made it onto Cohen’s release, which a rarity with Criterion extras; I suspect there was a loophole because the material was originally produced for an earlier DVD release in Criterion’s Home Vision Entertainment sub-label. But however it worked out is fine with me.

Initially entered into the Criterion Collection on LaserDisc in 1994, and then bumped up to DVD a decade later, I Know Where I’m Going finally gets a proper upgrade in a beautiful 4K restoration by The Film Foundation, which serves as the master for both Criterion’s UHD and BD release. (It doesn’t offer an HDR grade either, as Criterion reliably masters black-and-white material in SDR.)

As for Criterion’s new release of I Know Where I’m Going!, the bulk of its extras were produced for that 1994 LaserDisc – a thoroughly researched audio commentary by Ian Christie, galleries of production stills and home-movie footage of the location scout narrated by Powell’s widow Thelma Schoonmaker, and another gallery of those locations shot by the writer Nancy Franklin in 1993 when she accompanied Cousins to the Hebrides to shoot “I Know Where I’m Going! Revisited,” the half-hour retrospective doc that rounded out the LD supplements.

There are two new elements: A booklet essay by Imogen Sara Smith, which replaces the one Christie wrote thirty years ago, and the introduction produced to accompany the restoration’s streaming premiere in the spring of 2022, with contributions from Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese. They love this movie so much. You will too.

Howards End is available now in a 4K/Blu-ray combo from Cohen Media Group through Kino Lorber; the earlier Blu-ray set is still in print. I Know Where I’m Going! arrives Tuesday, December 9^th in 4K/BD and BD editions from the Criterion Collection.

Up next: Severin Films' massive Saga Erotica: The Emmanuelle Collection and Warner's 4K release of Boogie Nights arrive just in time for the holidays. Saddle up.