Displaying items by tag: Oppenheimer

All right, welcome to a new week Bits readers!

Today is all about James Cameron here at the website, and to that end I’ve just finished knocking out in-depth reviews of the filmmaker’s The Abyss (1989), Aliens (1986), and True Lies (1994) in long-awaited physical 4K Ultra HD and remastered Blu-ray from 20th Century Studios!

The gist is that all three of these discs are worth picking up for Cameron fans and cinephiles, though one of the three titles is a bit complicated. The Abyss is the best looking of the three, nearly on par with the recent Titanic 4K release. Aliens is not far behind in terms of A/V quality and both titles include a nearly complete archive of all past special features created for the films.

True Lies is... well, it looks a lot better than the previous DVD, LaserDisc, and D-VHS releases. Sometimes, it looks fantastic. But at other times, the remastering is a little bit heavy-handed.

It’s still way better looking than StudioCanal’s Terminator 2 4K release though, so it’s a very solid upgrade over previous physical media releases, and it includes some nice features too.

Anyway, you’ll find all of the details in the linked reviews.

But while we’re on the topic of Cameron—and speaking the Terminator—producer Gale Anne Hurd shared over the weekend that plans to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Cameron’s original The Terminator (1984) are soon to be revealed. And we have good word that a new 4K Ultra HD release will chief among them. In the meantime, you can see her post on X/Twitter here. [Read on here...]

I have the good fortune of having one of the thirty theaters on Earth that’s showing Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer in 15 perf/70 mm IMAX located within three miles of my house. So I needed all the coffees on Tuesday morning, after seeing the film at an 11 PM showing on Monday night, which is the only decent single ticket I could get my hands on. (My theatre of choice is virtually sold out well into the second week of August.)

I must say, the experience of this film in IMAX 70 was impressive, with the urgency of its editing and immediacy of its cinematography creating a uniquely engrossing narrative momentum. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and career, from his college years to his post-war exile, are covered in extensive detail, and while all of this adds context, I’m not sure that much detail was strictly necessary. (In Nolan’s shoes, I might have shortened the film by a good twenty minutes.)

The ensemble cast is fantastic, each of them disappearing into their roles to a degree I didn’t think some of these actors were capable of. There are many familiar faces that I knew would appear in this film, but many more here were unexpected (including Jack Quaid as Richard Feynman of all people, James Urbaniak as Kurt Gödel, and Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman), yet all of them raised their game. What’s more, this is certainly the finest performance of Cillian Murphy’s career, and one of the most compelling. Hands down, the guy deserves an Oscar for this role. [Read on here...]