A 2022 DVD Gift Guide for Movie Lovers

Have people forgotten about Matt Reeves’s early 2022 blockbuster? Sure, it’s been an incredibly long year, and this film has been on HBO Max for most of it, but collectors of comic-book movies should want to include it on Blu-ray or 4K, where it looks better than it does on streaming and comes with pretty excellent special features. Robert Pattinson comfortably steps into the role of the Dark Knight, co-starring alongside Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, Zoë Kravitz, John Turturro, and Colin Farrell. There are over two hours of featurettes on this Blu-ray about the complex production of this ambitious blockbuster, along with deleted scenes that flesh out the world of the film even more.

Here’s a little piece of trivia that could someday come in handy — this is the highest-grossing film in the history of A24, one of the most beloved distributors in the world. Why have people fallen in love with this ambitious fantasy film to such a degree that it’s expected to play all the way through awards season (co-star Ke Huy Quan has already won a couple, and it’s barely December)? It’s because it feels both ambitiously new and grounded at the same time. Yes, it’s a breakthrough visual experience that captures the possibilities of lives across multiple realities, but it’s also just about what really matters in life: those we love. The 4K release is fantastic. Watch it on the biggest screen in your house.

Tom Cruise bet on himself during the pandemic and refused to release his long-awaited sequel on streaming during the pandemic. The bet landed him one of the most remarkable box-office hits of all time, a film that has made $1.5 billion worldwide. Pretty much everyone has seen the biggest hit of the movie star’s career, but now you can own it in several editions, including a collectible steelbook one and a phenomenal 4K transfer edition. This is a film meant to be watched on a big screen — that’s why Cruise held it as long as he did — but the care that has gone into the video and audio transfers on this release will get you pretty close to that experience. Turn it up as loud as you can. Wake the neighbors.

It’s always a little interesting when a hit TV show releases a comprehensive collector’s-edition set while the show is still on the air, but Taylor Sheridan’s fan base is too enormous to ignore. Not only is Yellowstone still a massive hit for Paramount, it’s even spun it off into the prequels 1883 (which premiered in May) and 1923 (which premieres this month and stars Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford), with a third spinoff in production. This year’s holiday gift set for the Kevin Costner stan compiles the first four seasons of Yellowstone on Blu-ray or DVD, complete with all the special features available when they were individually released. It also includes the just-released first season of 1883 and a collection of four Dutton Ranch coasters. Those are admittedly a little cheaply made, but that won’t stop dDad from setting his eggnog down on them.

Horror fans are some of the most loyal collectors out there, and not just because it’s so easy to take a massive franchise and put it in an eye-catching box. The problem in 2022 is that most of the big horror juggernauts like Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street have already been released a few too many times. However, Paramount was betting around Halloween that fans of one of the most influential low-budget hits of all time would crave a collection of every film in the Paranormal Activity line, including the latest, 2021’s Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin, which is only available in this set (kinda lame, yes, but don’t shoot the messenger). This set not only includes all seven films but also a documentary, Unknown Dimension: The Story of Paranormal Activity. The physical collectible this time is nothing special — a sticker that says “Monitored by Paranormal Activity� — but the packaging is pretty neat. Sometimes that’s enough.

The best box set of the season pays tribute to one of the most essential film distributors of the modern era, celebrating the 30th anniversary of Sony Pictures Classics with 4K versions of 11 of its best films, the vast majority (ten) available in the format for the first time. In fact, one of the films in this box — the underrated and sweet SLC Punk — has never been on Blu-ray before at all. Now, yes, it’s a little disappointing that fans of these movies can’t get them in 4K stand-alones, but you really want to own this whole box, complete with special features and a book with essays about the films included, all fully remastered in 4K UHD: Orlando, The City of Lost Children, The Celluloid Closet, Run Lola Run, SLC Punk, The Devil’s Backbone, Volver, Synecdoche, New York, Still Alice, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and Call Me By Your Name. The producers of this set clearly wanted to capture the entire three-decade history of SPC and also provided a wonderful array of styles and countries of origin. It’s the best thing you could buy this year for the film fan on your list.

The Blu-ray for Sight and Sound’s newly christened greatest film of all time, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, may be out of print, but Criterion’s had a great year of releases regardless. It saved some of its best for the November window, knowing it would be front and center when people were doing their holiday shopping. One of the highlights of the company’s best month of the year was this 4K remaster of one of Spike Lee’s masterpieces, a film that also celebrated its 30th birthday this year. Denzel Washington gives one of the best performances of his career (he should have won the Oscar) in Lee’s impassioned biopic, a film that defies the standard tropes of the genre to feel vital and essential. The 4K remaster is a beauty, and the set includes some fantastic new special features, including a new conversation between Lee and the screenwriter, new interviews with Delroy Lindo and Terence Blanchard, and a feature-length documentary about Malcolm X narrated by James Earl Jones.

One of the reasons the attacks on Martin Scorsese every time he dares to criticize a comic-book movie are so frustrating is that they often ignore how much he does for the history of the form that he so clearly adores. He’s not just one of the best living filmmakers — he’s one of its most essential curators, doing incredible work through the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, which he established in 2007. The foundation preserves films from around the world that may have been otherwise lost to history, and Criterion has been releasing sets of six at a time as they’re remastered and preserved. These sets also help Criterion manage the reputation that it focuses too much on American and European filmmakers, as the latest includes films from Angola (Sambizanga), Argentina (Prisioneros de la tierra), Iran (Chess of the Wind), Cameroon (Muna moto), Hungary (Two Girls on the Street), and India (Kalpana). And these groundbreaking films include new introductions by Scorsese himself and supplemental features that include new and archival interviews. You should really pick up all four of these releases, but this one’s a great place to start.

The first Disney movie to join the Criterion collection made headlines when it was announced this year. This is one of the best Pixar movies ever, and if releases like it allow Criterion to keep releasing titles like the World Cinema Project, then it’s a worthwhile entry. And it’s not like Criterion phoned this in at all. On the contrary, it gave Andrew Stanton’s masterful story of a lonely robot a gorgeous 4K remaster that allows you to see the detail in this film in a whole new way. And Criterion loaded the release with new special features, importing most of them from the original Disney Blu-ray release, including more than a dozen featurettes about the making of the film. New stuff includes programs on the cinematic influences on Stanton and the production designer, along with a discussion between Stanton and his co-screenwriters.

You have to be kind of dead inside to not adore the work of LAIKA, breakthrough artists in stop-motion animated storytelling. These are not just technical wizards, but creative souls who value characters, setting, and detail in ways that so much modern-family entertainment ignores. Their first two films, Coraline and ParaNorman, have been given new 4K restorations for these steelbook releases, which include some of the best artwork in the history of the collectible form. They also have new Dolby Atmos 7.1 mixes along with all the previously available special features, including a commentary track with Coraline director Henry Selick, another one with ParaNorman director Chris Butler and co-director Sam Fell, deleted scenes, storyboards, and much more.

One of the most influential films of all time has been released on Blu-ray about a dozen or so times, but this season brings a pretty cool-looking new steelbook version of the film for the die-hard collectors, which includes a 4K edition of Quentin Tarantino’s wildly influential masterpiece. This is the first time the film has been available in 4K, and it’s a reminder of how well it’s aged, despite quickly approaching its 30th anniversary. The steelbook includes interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, and deleted scenes, but the real draw here is still the film that redefined cool for a generation of filmmakers, most of whom are still jockeying to catch up to Tarantino.

It’s been 25 years of people misunderstanding Paul Verhoeven’s action masterpiece, a film that appears to just be an alien-shooting action orgy but contains so much more to unpack. The truth is that it’s a film that works on two levels: enjoyable purely as rah-rah action or a conversation starter for something deeper about the military industrial complex and even fascism. To celebrate the anniversary, the film has been given a badass special-edition steelbook that includes a 4K version of the film with a Dolby Vision audio track and hours of archival special features. And that’s not all! There’s a 25th-anniversary cast reunion on this release that’s only available here. It’s a must-have.

4K restorations are more often given to modern blockbusters than black-and-white classics, but one can really appreciate this timeless masterpiece more than ever with this 4K release. Eighty years after its release, Casablanca has been restored and remastered from a scan of the best-surviving nitrate film elements. It’s an extensive process that makes the film look richer than ever, and Warner Bros. restored the original theatrical mono-audio track too, so it sounds better than you’ve ever heard it. If that’s not enough, this release includes tons of previously available special features, including an amazing commentary track by the most famous film critic of all time, Roger Ebert. There are also some wonderfully playful features, including a 1988 special called Bacall on Bogart, a WB cartoon spoofing the film, and a 1943 radio-broadcast version. This is an essential release of an essential film.

It would be wrong to exclude the wonderful people of Kino Lorber from a guide like this — they do some of the most reliable 4K work on the market. One of their best this year was the 4K release of Michel Gondry’s 2004 masterpiece, a movie about a man (Jim Carrey) who decides to erase the memory of a painfully lost love (the amazing Kate Winslet, who should have won the Oscar for her work here). Kino commissioned a new 4K restoration of the film and a new Dolby Vision audio track. It also imported all the old special features, including a commentary with Gondry and writer Charlie Kaufman, as well as produced a new featurette with the film’s cinematographer Ellen Kuras called “Memory Light.� This is one of the best films of the 2000s, and this is now the best way to own it.

Another Tarantino! Sorry for the double-up, but his first film has also been given the 4K treatment for the first time with a new restoration of his breakthrough thriller about a group of doomed criminals. For the 30th anniversary of Reservoir Dogs, Lionsgate perfectly remastered the film in 4K and released a standard UHD version for most outlets and a pretty wickedly cool one that’s exclusive to Best Buy with a slip case that makes it look like an ear is coming off a human head. The special features here are still pretty slim — deleted scenes and two featurettes — but, again, it’s the movie that matters most to collectors, and this is a fantastic 4K version of a film that still slays.