James Woods

Twilight Time Blu-ray or MGM NTSC DVD for the original mono mix

• Shout! Factory 4K only has a stereo downmix (which sounds muffled, as do the surround tracks)

• Twilight Time Blu-ray has the mono track with seemingly the best fidelity, but its dynamic range has been heavily compressed

• MoC UK Blu-ray has a proper dynamics and good fidelity, but bizzarely, everything is repeated after a few miliseconds, rendering echoey and metallic

• MGM NTSC DVD has been denoised and has had a strong EQ applied and sounds muffled as a result, but it retains proper dynamics

• Koch Media DE BD had poor dynamics and wrong pitch

• Analog 1986 US LaserDisc sounds poor
  

Perhaps the digital JP LD would be better.

Shout! Factory 4K Blu-ray is a strong upgrade in PQ compared to a poor old Blu-ray

Shout! Factory 4K Blu-ray sound was improved compared to the old mixes.

251 min cut (Extended): Fox Blu-ray. Eagle Pictures has forced Italian subs in some parts

229 min cut (Theatrical): WB Blu-ray

139 min cut (US theatrical): VHS

Eagle Pictures 4K Blu-ray, caps

The 4K includes both theatrical and extended cuts. It's overall a solid upgrade over previous discs, but some will strongly dislike the color grading.
There are some issues with encoding and grain management.

Nic's review:

Some definitely messed with it as there’s grain management going on that resulted in magnetic, squishy grain movement. Both cuts (4K discs) are affected and it doesn’t look like an encoding issue to me as the bitrates don’t drop down to single digits á la Paramount or StudioCanal. During opticals, the lowest I’ve noted on the Extended 4K was around 30 MB/s vs. ~5 MB/s more for the theatrical cut.

Darker scenes are mostly (but not always) better but when it gets brighter, particularly in exteriors or scenes like the Jennifer Connelly dance scene at minute 38, I can’t unsee the digital tinkering as it does some damage texturally.

I compared it with the Eagle Pictures and Warner Bros Fox Blu-ray of the extended cut and they all look fine without grain management like that. Eagle Pictures’s Blu-ray is an older one if anyone’s curious and credited to another authoring house than 64Biz, which did the 4K.

Other than that, except for some encoding-related chroma noise that peeks through in the DV layer, Eagle Pictures did everything right. They corrected the framing to 1.85, kept the original English titles, the English restoration note, subtitles, HDR/DV is gentle and respectful of the source black levels are better than on the Warner Bros/Fox Blu-ray. Without that grain management, this would’ve been the all-timer release we all longed for.

251 min cut: Fox Blu-ray (24-bit, Eagle Pictures is 16-bit, not audible)
229 min cut: Warner Bros LaserDisc (missing 2 minutes, but original mono mix was never released on DVD/Blu-ray)

Extended edition adds scenes cut from the theatrical, but from a much lower quality source. It's intended to approximate the original cut, but to what extent that is true is debatable.
US theatrical cut is infamously bad, was panned at release and never re-released on home video.

StudioCanal 4K Blu-ray solid encode but controversial colors by Hiventy

StudioCanal UK 4K Blu-ray > Criterion US, better encode on the UK disc

France Seven7 has Dolby Vision and Atmos unlike the US disc but was most likely encoded in the wrong color space

Russia Sony Blu-ray has a superior 24-bit Dolby TrueHD 5.1 original mix compared to the 16-bit LPCM 5.1 on other Blu-ray releases and the 16-bit DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 on the 4K Blu-ray included with the Dolby Atmos remix.

Caps by BR user Donald McDonald. The encode looks absolutely spotless even in the highlights and without Dolby Vision filling anything in.

Criterion is entirely unfiltered and sounds significantly more detailed than previous tracks, see Blah-ray.

Cinematographe is mis-credited to be an FiM encode. It isn't. Neither the encode nor the color grading are entirely satisfactory.

Italy Eagle Pictures 4K Blu-ray > US A24 4K Blu-ray