The Best Discs of 2025

Well, here we are. And I should start by saying that this will be a necessarily incomplete accounting of the year’s finest 4K and Blu-ray releases, as there are hundreds of new discs I wasn’t able to get my hands on. But from the hundreds I did watch, these were the standouts.

NEW RELEASES

Sinners (Warner Bros. Discovery)

Warner had a great run this year, rolling out an unmatched lineup of complex, engaging, idiosyncratic works from directors with something to say: Drew Hancock’s Companion, Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, James Gunn’s Superman, Zach Cregger’s Weapons, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Ryan Coogler’s epic monster-movie musical was the glorious jewel in the crown, a large-format explosion of ideas and energy, and Warner’s 4K release brought the experience home with dazzling clarity, replicating the split-format presentation by shifting between 2.76:1 Ultra Panavision 70 and screen-filling 1.78:1 for the large-format sequences – not the full height of the theatrical IMAX experience, but close enough – and a straight port of its beautiful Atmos mix. When it came out earlier this summer I said it was the best-mastered new release I’d seen since Universal’s Oppenheimer; I stand by that statement.

Warfare (A24)

And speaking of expertly produced, immersive stories of a small group under siege, Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s relentless war movie – which recreates Mendoza’s actual experience as a member of an ambushed SEAL team in Iraq in unflinching detail – got a top-shelf release from distributor A24, with a sterling presentation of the feature and two bonus features that enhance and expand our understanding of the project. In an audio commentary, Garland and Mendoza are joined by military consultant Brian Philpot to discuss their commitment to authenticity, and how they achieved some of the most harrowing moments, while a half-hour production featurette “Courage Under Fire” backs them up with extensive behind-the-scenes footage, as well as glimpses of the cast alongside the men they’re playing – and why they wanted to there. This was as much an exorcism as a re-creation.

Anora (Criterion)

Criterion was working on this beautiful 4K release of Sean Baker’s scrappy drama well before it bulldozed the Oscars, but the modern-classic status bestowed by Anora’s immediate inclusion in the Collection was a nice cherry on top of that triumph. And Baker’s latest meditation on class and desire in America – with Mikey Madison as the eponymous sex worker hired by a wealthy young Russian (Mark Eydelshteyn) to provide a girlfriend experience – and maybe more – pops in UHD just as well as any bigger, louder production, with Drew Daniels’ 35mm anamorphic images retaining their distinctive bulge and wintry textures. And the hour-long documentary that kicks off the supplements strikes the perfect balance of thoughtful and rambunctious. A perfectly pitched package, even if we all know Eydelshteyn’s Vanya would have torrented it instead of buying it at Barnes & Noble.

Smile 2 (Paramount)

This one shouldn’t have worked. Parker Finn’s first film was … fine, I guess, but a little long and a lot derivative of The Ring. But the sequel improves on literally every aspect of its predecessor, scaling up in terms of performance, budget and focus to follow Taylor Swift-like megastar Skye Riley (Naomi Scott, unrecognizable as the live-action Jasmine of Guy Ritchie’s risible Aladdin), who’s the latest to be infected by the grinning entity that drives its victims insane before jumping to the next host. Finn and Scott add a streak of dark comedy that makes the movie fun, too, its glossy surfaces parting and reconfiguring to build elaborate traps into which poor Skye keeps falling. Can she trust anyone around her? Will she ever learn her stage choreography? Can she down another bottle of water before the next freakout? The 4K disc started 2025 on a high with crystalline video and actively unnerving Atmos audio, and signaled Paramount’s return to 4K/BD combos after a year or so of individual releases. So that was nice too.

 

REISSUES

The Searchers 4K (Warner Archive Collection)

Yeah, I know, this one’s a 2024 title. December 17^th, 2024, specifically, and it took months for me to get my hands on a copy. But this was, hands down, the best disc I watched all year – a thoughtful and loving restoration of a film that was always beautiful calibrated and lovingly produced. George Feltenstein and his team at Warner Archive knew their first UHD release had to be something truly special. And it is, it truly is, delivering John Ford’s 1956 Western in all its VistaVision, Technicolor glory – easily the best it’s looked and sounded in almost 70 years.

Yes, the movie’s depiction of its Comanche characters isn’t the most respectful, and it’s amplified by the unfettered racism of John Wayne’s protagonist, Ethan Edwards. But Ford and screenwriter Frank S. Nugent know it, and make Edwards’ bitterness and loathing a crucial element of the story, framing his undying lust for revenge as something we’re meant to question rather than applaud. And Wayne really was the only actor who could have played this role, bringing his entire history as a Western icon into the world of the story. It’s as revelatory a performance – whether consciously or not – as Clint Eastwood’s in Unforgiven, and I promise you, you’ve never seen it this clearly.

Warner’s subsequent 4K editions of High Society, Get Carter and The Curse of Frankenstein are living up to the standards set here, and I’m excited to see what the new year brings. And given that Netflix is currently trying to purchase the studio, its library and its physical media operations, grab these discs while they’re still readily available.

Swimming to Cambodia (Cinématographe)

Having previously resurrected Jonathan Demme’s forgotten Hitchcockian thriller Last Embrace with a beautiful 4K special edition, Vinegar Syndrome’s Cinématographe sub-label – which specializes in releasing beloved deep cuts like Little Darlings, A New Leaf, Thieves Like Us and, um, Drop Zone – did right by the late director once again with this first-ever Blu-ray release of his 1987 collaboration with Spalding Gray.

It’s a masterwork among masterworks, turning Gray’s transcendent monologue into a fluid, immersive and undeniably cinematic experience, and given how the film has bounced around from catalogue to catalogue I’d more or less given up hope of ever seeing it get a decent release. (I mean, I still have the LaserDisc.) But here it is, the lovely 2K master supported by new interviews with producer Edward Saxon, executive producer Ira Deutchman and filmmaker Roland Joffé, whose casting of Gray in a small role in The Killing Fields led to the monologue that Demme filmed.

There’s also a new audio commentary by critic and video essayist Scout Tafoya, two of Demme’s appearances on my pal Thom Powers’ Pure Nonfiction podcast – one of which also features Renée Schafransky, Gray’s former partner and frequent character in his monologues. It’s as much a memorial to Gray as it is to Demme, and it’s something to be treasured. And if Cinématographe ever finds the materials for a 4K disc, I’ll make the upgrade the day it hits the shelf.

Winter Kept Us Warm (Canadian International Pictures)

The CIP label has been putting out exceptionally well-considered discs of older Canadian cinema for a couple of years now, and this splendid restoration of David Secter’s 1965 indie – the first queer film from English Canada, made at a time when homosexual activity was literally illegal – is one of the most important. Exquisitely restored from the original 16mm reels, and loaded with supplemental material, the Blu-ray is both a vital reclamation of a film of considerable cultural significance and an exceptional special edition – which I could also say for CIP’s subsequent release of Martin Defalco’s Cold Journey, come to think of it.

Cruising (Arrow Video)

William Friedkin was famous for fiddling with his movies after the fact, tinkering with aspect ratios and color temperatures and sound mixes every time there was a new DVD or Blu-ray release. His death in 2023 has allowed various labels to remaster and restore his films to something more in line with their original theatrical presentations, resulting in two of the best discs I saw this year. Arrow had already released Friedkin’s 1980 thriller – starring Al Pacino as a straight cop who enters New York’s queer demimonde to catch a serial killer preying on gay men – on Blu-ray, but that disc used a 2018 master approved by Friedkin; for the 2025 upgrade, Arrow went back to the negative for a new restoration that removed all of the director’s subsequent tweaks and restored the original mono audio. And in addition to porting over all of the extras from the Blu-ray, the label added a bonus disc of new and previously unseen supplements that paint a cohesive picture of both the film’s production and the landscape into which it was released. Absolutely essential. And not the only Friedkin resurrection performed this year, as you’ll see … right now!

 Sorcerer (Criterion)

There were a lot of really great additions to the Criterion Collection this year, among them splendid restorations of Night Moves, Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, Hell’s Angels, Withnail and I and a pair of Edward Yang films I never thought would make it to disc in North America – but the single best release that I saw was their UHD release of William Friedkin’s magnificently grimy 1977 thriller, which updates Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear into a throbbing, high-pressure nightmare of endurance and desperation. Other titles might have had greater historical standing or cultural significance, but this disc brings Friedkin’s movie roaring back to life in every speck of grain and drop of sweat.

It’s a tactile, immediate presentation that feels like you’re watching a 35mm print in danger of catching fire at any moment. And the supplements – starting with Francesco Zippel’s feature-length documentary Friedkin Uncut – give us a sense of Friedkin fighting for this picture through the decades, urging critics and colleagues to give Sorcerer the consideration it’s being afforded at long last.

The Long Kiss Goodnight (Arrow Video)

It was weird that Arrow would release one of the all-time great Christmas movies in April rather than waiting for the holiday season; I choose to believe they were so excited to share their gorgeous 4K restoration of Renny Harlin’s bonehead action classic that they put it out into the world as soon as it was feasible. It’s stuffed with both seasonal cheer and a Blu-ray of special features, so if you’ve been meaning to pick it up there’s no better time to bring it home. Go get ’em, amnesia chick! (And speaking of boneheaded action classics, Arrow did a bang-up job with Deep Blue Sea this year as well.)

 

BOXED SETS

007: The Sean Connery 6-Film Collection (Warner Bros. Discovery)

How many different versions of these movies have you owned, over the years? I’ve had half a dozen, easily, on every format imaginable … and for more than a decade, they’ve been defined by the digitally massaged masters used for MGM’s Blu-rays. To master this definitive new collection, Warner went back to the vaults and restored Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever from the original camera negatives – and the results are dazzling. The movies look like movies again, and viewed in sequence they let us see how the rougher edges of Connery’s Bond were sanded off as the budgets increased and the adventures grew more grandiose. From Russia with Love is still the best, though; sometimes all you need is a girl and a gun. And a speedboat chase.

Blue / Fade In (Via Vision)

Australian label Via Vision added dozens of great titles to its Imprint label this year, including Gordon Parks’ Leadbelly and a boxed set of early Ang Lee films, but the one that proved most impressive was its three-disc collection of Silvio Narizzano’s 1967 Western Blue and its companion film Fade In, the latter shot during the production of the former. Blue is a gorgeous Panavision production starring Terence Stamp as a bandit tempted by domesticity on the frontier, while Fade In is a contemporary love story featuring a very young Burt Reynolds as a horse wrangler hired by Narizzano’s crew who strikes up a romance with an editor played by future auteur Barbara Loden.

The failure of Blue put Fade In on a slow road to nowhere, and director Jud Taylor ultimately took his name off the picture as it was reworked into a movie-of-the-week. But its workaday aesthetic has an undeniable charm, and Reynolds and Loden have chemistry to spare, and even if this isn’t the movie Taylor set out to make it’s still entirely watchable. With Daniel Kremer’s feature-length documentary Cruel, Unusual, Necessary: The Passion of Silvio Narizzano leading off a comprehensive suite of special features, it’s a modest treasure that makes both films seem brighter and more ambitious.

Imprint also rolled out a lovely special edition of Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York this year, bringing Scorsese’s shorter European cut to Blu for the first time and commissioning new special features to supplement decades of excellent extras from MGM’s earlier releases. Both sets are still in stock at the Via Vision website, so keep an eye out for their next sale!

 

Saga Erotica: The Emmanuelle Collection (Severin Films)

Severin’s just-released compendium of the adult-cinema trilogy that redefined the boundaries of mainstream cinema – if only briefly – is as much a work of scholarship as titillation, packaging near-pristine 4K restorations of the movies that made Sylvia Kristel an international star with hours of thoughtful, carefully curated supplements, two soundtrack CDs and even an earlier Italian adaptation that bears almost no resemblance to the book. Excess is the point of these things, after all.

 

Blaxploitation Classics: Volume 1 (Shout! Studios)

The first release in Shout’s celebration of landmark Black-centered actioners produced by the grindhouse gods at American International Pictures – specifically, Across 110^th Street, Coffy, Black Caesar, Hell Up in Harlem, Truck Turner and Sheba, Baby – kicked off the summer with a bang, celebrating icons like Pam Grier, Yaphet Kotto, Isaac Hayes and Fred Williamson in the movies that made them superstars. (Jim Brown gets his flowers in Volume 2, which followed later in the year and included his breakout Slaughter films.) The films may vary in quality – though Larry Cohen remaking Scarface is a guaranteed good time – but the restorations honor their low-budget origins, preserving every frame with a grainy authenticity.

 

PERSONAL FAVORITES

As it does every five years, Universal rolled out new anniversary editions of Jaws and the Back to the Future trilogy, adding new discs of special features to their existing 4K releases of those beloved blockbusters – Back to the Future gets an assortment of featurettes that celebrate the movie while carefully avoiding Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s message about nostalgia being more crutch than balm, and Jaws gets a new feature-length retrospective documentary from Laurent Bouzereau, who’s been working with Steven Spielberg since the first special edition of Jaws thirty years ago, and who uses the passage of those decades to build something truly special. And Universal subsequently commissioned a similar retro-doc for this month’s 4K steelbook of The Blues Brothers, so I’m hoping this is a new trend.

And finally, I’ve been delighted by all the 4K editions of Steven Soderbergh movies that rolled out this year: Warner’s The Good German and The Informant!, Neon’s Presence and Universal’s Black Bag all came out within weeks of each other this spring – I wrote about them here – and Universal released a 25^th anniversary edition of Erin Brockovich in August. (No new documentary on that one, though.) There’s still plenty more of his catalogue to restore and reclaim; hopefully Criterion will announce a deluxe edition of Solaris any day now. But if that’s too big an ask, I’ll settle for Traffic.

Up next: The best movies of 2025. Some of them are already on this list!