Salaam Bombay! (1988)
Crime, Drama • 1h 53m
Director: Mira Nair
Cast: Shafiq Syed, Hansa Vithal, Chanda Sharma, Anita Kanwar, Nana Patekar, Anjaan, Amrit Patel, Irrfan Khan, Raghubir Yadav, Raju Bernad, Chandrashekhar Naidu, Sarfuddin Quarrassi, Mohanraj Babu, Sanjana Kapoor, Murari Sharma, Ram Moorti, Irshad Hashmi, Kishan Thapa, Shaukat Azmi, Haneef Zahoor, Jamila, Ramesh Rai, Shaukat Inamdar, Neil Gettinger, Yunus Parvez, Habib Azmi, Ramesh Gohil, Biswajeet Chatterjee, Ameer Bhai, Ajju Kasam, Double Battery Stafford, Rana Singh, Ali Bhai, Dinshaw Daji, Jayant Joshi, Prashant Jaiswal, Joyce Barneto, Hassan Kutty, Preshit Shringarpure, B. D. Sharma, Mohammed Ali, Dilip Das, Alfred Anthony, Ramesh Deshavani, Aanjjan Srivastav, Eric Paymaster, Sulabha Deshpande, Mohan Tantaru, Haroon Sheikh
Criterion 4K Blu-ray
Best English-friendly release · updated 9 months ago
UHD tiers
Overview
After destroying his older brother's motorbike in retaliation for his constant bullying, 11-year-old Krishna is sent to a traveling circus to earn money to pay for the bike's repairs, but soon winds up in the streets of Bombay's poorest slums. There, he befriends the drug dealer Chillum and young prostitute Sola Saal, while trying to make enough money at a neighborhood tea stall to repay his debt to his family.
Director: Carol Reed
StudioCanal 4K Blu-ray or Lionsgate Limited 4K Blu-ray
StudioCanal 4K Blu-ray/Lionsgate Limited 4K Blu-ray (shared encode); slight improvement over the 2015 StudioCanal Blu-ray
StudioCanal/LG UHDs port the 1999 Criterion DVD, considered the best source
StudioCanal has a remastered Blu-ray, Lionsgate only a 4K Blu-ray
Director: Martin Scorsese
2024 Sony 4K Blu-ray Steelbook
2024 Sony 4K Blu-ray Steelbook fixes duplicate shot seen on the previous Columbia Classics release and has better encoding
Original mono mix: 1990 Criterion LaserDisc/1991 Columbia LaserDisc
The 4K Blu-ray mono is only minimally worse (see blah-ray).
5.1 remix: Sony 4K Blu-ray
Director: Jūzō Itami
Director: George Stevens
Criterion 4K Blu-ray is slightly better than French 4K Blu-ray see caps
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Director: David Lynch
Censored US version: Shout! Factory or Twilight Time Blu-ray
Uncensored version: old DVD
2026 Criterion 4K Blu-ray, confirmed to be uncut
Censored US version: Shout! Factory or Twilight Time Blu-ray
Uncensored version: old DVD
Director: Joachim Trier
Director: David Lynch
StudioCanal 4K Blu-ray > Criterion 4K Blu-ray.
StudioCanal 4K Blu-ray is encoded by FiM and doesn’t have the low-pass filter the Criterion 4K Blu-ray has.
Criterion 4K Blu-ray is closer to the original DVDs than the 2015 Criterion release, not sure about whether the StudioCanal 4K is like the Criterion 4K/original DVD
Criterion 4K Blu-ray has FEL Dolby Vision, StudioCanal 4K Blu-ray has MEL
More Crime on Blu-ray
Arrow UK 4K Blu-ray > Paramount US, same black crush as the US disc but encoded by FiM and very good new supplements
Paramount US 4K Blu-ray has FEL Dolby Vision
Arrow UK 4K Blu-ray has MEL Dolby Vision
Director: W.S. Van Dyke
Warner Archive Blu-ray, 4k scan
Director: Michael Mann
Theatrical Cut: Old Warner Bros DVD or fan restoration
Revised Cut: 2012 Japan Blu-ray for less revisionist colors, 2022 Disney 4K Blu-ray is controversially regraded and too dark overall.
Theatrical Cut: Old Warner Bros DVD or fan restoration
Revised Cut: 2012 Japan Blu-ray for less revisionist colors, 2022 Disney 4K Blu-ray is controversially regraded and too dark overall.
Director: Jon Favreau
Lionsgate Limited 4K Blu-ray
Lionsgate Limited 4K Blu-ray
Arrow UK 4K Blu-ray (damage removed, improved color/HDR, and best audio) or Capelight DE 4K Blu-ray (best compression but no damage removal and LaserDisc audio from Arrow)
Arrow UK /Capelight DE 4K Blu-ray > Kino Lorber US 4K Blu-ray, see caps
Arrow has done additional cleanup work removing nearly all the damage in the transfer. They have massaged the color timing and HDR to try and improve what they could. The Capelight may have better encoding but it does not have these improvements. The Arrow encoding is solid and in motion there are no issues whatsoever. The Kino Lorber release has the damage and other issues plus frequent noise due to the lesser encoding.
Some scenes in the Arrow transfer are better, some are better in the Capelight.
Original matrixed Dolby Stereo: Arrow 4K Blu-ray or Image Entertainment LaserDisc
(Arrow is a port of the LaserDisc track, see spectrograms) This track has the best fidelity of any release but does have some channel bleeding baked in. The 2017 2.0 on the Arrow and Shout! Factory Blu-rays was the Dolby Stereo original mix without channel bleeding but that had heavy noise reduction resulting in a very flat and underwhelming presentation. The surround winds up being lessened as well due to the processing. It's a tough choice between the two but the Image LaserDisc audio wins out because it hasn't been messed with and the impact is so unrestrained that no other version hits in the same way.
Capelight and old Arrow Blu-ray included the original stereo mix, but with excessive noise reduction rendering it much less detailed. Kino Lorber only included a painfully defective 2.0 track sourced from somewhere with limited fidelity, volume spikes and screechy high end which frequently ruins the music. The 5.1 remix on most modern release is a processed version that does not sound as good as it once did.
The best and most accurate of the 5.1 mixes is the original version from the 2003 Special Edition DVD in lossy AC3 form.
The best source for the commentaries are from the 2003 Special Edition DVD.
Kino Lorber Philo Vance Collection Blu-ray
Kino Lorber Philo Vance Collection Blu-ray
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