New to Blu: November 11 – 17

After missing out on a theatrical release and going straight to digital instead, because of Covid-19 shutting cinemas worldwide, Niki Caro’s Mulan resurfaces this week on disc.

It can be bought on both Blu-ray and 4K-UHD; Disney’s also re-issuing the 1998 animated Mulan on 4K-UHD.

There’s more good news for 4K-UHD buyers, with Sony offering the flash box set of Flash Gordon and the original Resident Evil.

And three Quentin Tarantino favourites are being dusted off for new Blu-ray editions: Kill Bill Vol 1 and 2, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown (Kill Bill can be bought as seperate volumes or in a combo set).

Also new this week are Military Wives, season three of The Crown, and Doctor Who: Fury From the Deep.

“Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has once again pressed a very high-quality Blu-ray edition of The Crown,” HD Report says.

The third season follows the same specs as the previous two seasons, with 1080p video presented at 2.00:1 aspect ratio. The colour rendering is very close between the Digital 4K stream (supposedly with Dolby Vision) and the Blu-ray Discs, which may question whether or not HDR was used to effectively expand the colour depth. There is a definite advantage in sharpness to The Crown when streamed in 4K. But Ultra HD TVs do a pretty good job of upscaling 1080p to the 4K TV’s 2160p resolution.

Said Starburst of the Doctor Who release that animates a long-lost 1968 adventure: “Decent extras include an interesting documentary on the making of the animation and a fun feature in which cast and crew return to the original windswept locations, even visiting the crumbling sea fort where action scenes in the last two episodes were filmed.

“There’s also the usual collections of commentaries and galleries with the main feature presented in colour and black-and-white for the die-hards.”