Celebrate 100 years of Columbia Pictures and complete your Columbia Classics collection as Sony Pictures Home Entertainment proudly debuts six more iconic films from its library on 4K Ultra HD™ disc for the first time ever.
Sony continues its celebration of the 100th Anniversary of Columbia Pictures with six of their films on “Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD™ Collection Volume 5.” Volume 5 is an excellent purchase for film lovers or anyone looking to sharpen a burgeoning collection this holiday season. It contains five classics, “All the King’s Men,” “A Man for All Seasons,” “On the Waterfront,” “Tootsie,” “The Age of Innocence,” and also “Little Women” by Greta Gerwig. I am not saying “Little Women” is a terrible film, but it is certainly not a classic.
Sony’s team did some great work with the Dolby Vision HDR transfers. Unlike some other recent poorly designed transfers like “True Lies,” “Terminator 2,” or even some screenshots of “I Love Lucy,” which I saw on Twitter. Due to companies using AI or DNR (Digital Noise Reduction) to upscale images, films become overlit and blown out. The warm film feeling of visible grains and textures is absent when these companies decide to employ AI or too much DNR. The whole point of a film is to LOOK like a film. These new upscaling techniques look bad and could cause talented people who work on these restorations to lose their under-appreciated jobs. Aside from Sony luckily avoiding this dystopian approach, the collection has multiple audio options and plenty of interesting extra features on each of the films. Some features contain hours of bonus content for each film and a hardbound book exploring the cultural impact of the six features.
When selecting films for these collections, Sony conducts surveys to decide which classics and relatively recent releases will be restored. As with their previous collections, Volume 5 is a pretty diverse assortment of genres and styles, which will be great for fans looking to revisit them or for film enthusiasts looking to broaden their tastes.
Although I consider myself well-versed in various Hollywood Classics, this was my first time watching “All the King’s Men” and “A Man for All Seasons.” While I always appreciated “On the Waterfront” and “The Age of Innocence,” they have become more meaningful to me as I got older. The socioeconomic aspects laid out through labor issues and the exploitation of workers portrayed in “On the Waterfront” remain even with today’s corporations like Amazon. When workers began to organize and form unions, Jeff Bezos hired the infamous Pinkerton Agency to infiltrate and subvert most of these attempts to unionize. Where are all the Marlon Brandos and white hat cowboys when we need them most? And “The Age of Innocence” remains relevant for its compelling narrative of societal pressure and hierarchical oppression, subsuming characters into heartbroken isolation. Whoever said Scorsese can only make male-dominated narratives centered around crime needs to see this immediately.
The only weak link to this otherwise fantastic collection is Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women.” Gerwig is a talented filmmaker, but her remake feels unnecessary and is quite milquetoast. While I adore the cast, after about six or more adaptations of “Little Women,” we need a new story.
I admire Sony for utilizing surveys to find out what films they should restore, but I think having coalitions of critics curate their collections would make for exciting releases. Columbia has a massive catalog, so it would behoove them to make more genre-specific releases. One focused solely on Noir, Horror, and even Science Fiction. Although variety is the spice of life, a more consistent genre-focused collection would be pretty popular. And most importantly, I hope Columbia and other distributors avoid AI or overusing DNR for restorations because films must look like films!
Now available in a Special Limited Edition Collector’s 4K Ultra HD™ Box Set
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