Abraham's Valley (1993)
Vale Abraão
Drama • 3h 7m
Director: Manoel de Oliveira
Cast: Leonor Silveira, Luís Miguel Cintra, Ruy de Carvalho, Cécile Sanz de Alba, Luís Lima Barreto, Micheline Larpin, Diogo Dória, José Pinto, Filipe Cochofel, João Perry, Glória de Matos, António Reis, Isabel Ruth, Dina Treno, Dalila Carmo, Sofia Alves, Beatriz Batarda, Júlia Buisel, Laura Soveral, Miguel Guilherme, Marques D'Arede, Mário Barroso, Nuno Vieira de Almeida, Argentina Rocha, Rui Oliveira, Ricardo Trêpa, António Vaz Mendes, Isabel de Castro
Unreleased restoration or DVD
Best English-friendly release · updated 1 year ago
Overview
Ema is a very attractive but innocent girl, so pretty that cars crash in her presence. In her youth she marries Dr. Carlos Paiva, her father's friend, to whom she is not attracted. They move to the valley of Abraham. Carlos loves her, but decides to sleep in a separate room to avoid waking Ema when he has to return late at night. As time goes by she begins to feel unhappy about her marriage, so she finds a new lover.
More Drama on Blu-ray
Director: Julia Ducournau
Best format: UHD Blu-ray
Curzon 4K
HDR helps considerably with the deliberately murky aesthetic. VDMS encode is overall very good despite chroma noise in flashback sequences.
Directors: Benny Safdie & Josh Safdie
Best format: UHD Blu-ray
4K encode is low-pass filtered and noticeably so, which was unfortunately par for the course with Criterion 4Ks until sometime in 2024. Still better than the Criterion and Lionsgate Blu-Ray discs for the Dolby Vision grading alone.
Best format: 1080p Blu-ray
StudioCanal Blu-ray
StudioCanal was overseen and approved by Nicolas Roeg and has a more filmic color grade than the Warner Archive Blu-Ray.
Best format: 1080p Blu-ray
2014 Japan "Hayao Miyazaki Collection" Studio Ghibli Blu-ray
Japan Studio Ghibli 4K Blu-ray announced for a November 25, 2026 release
Japanese audio: 2014 Japan "Hayao Miyazaki Collection" Studio Ghibli Blu-ray/US GKIDS Blu-ray
English dub (Disney): 1998 US Disney VHS has better sounding vocals despite altered music and sound effects, the US Disney LaserDisc has limited audio
Releases from 2010 onward have the original music and sound effects, but distorted vocals
English dub (Streamline): 1996 Japan LaserDisc, available in Ghibli Aa Ippai Collection boxset
Director: Rob Reiner
Best format: UHD Blu-ray
Arrow 4K Blu-ray releasing December 14 2026
Director: David Fincher
Best format: UHD Blu-ray
4K Blu-ray has exclusive “unrated” audio with a small change to one line under the request of David Fincher (removed the poor dub over of frickin’ in the line “Screw it, let’s gut the f**kin’ nerd.”).
Director: Josh Safdie
Best format: UHD Blu-ray
Sources: testsbluray.com (opens in a new tab) · Blu-ray.com (opens in a new tab)
Entertainment in Video UK 4K Blu-ray or French Metropolitan 4K Blu-ray
The UK 4K Blu-ray and Canada 4K Blu-ray both do not have the low-pass that the US 4K Blu-ray has. The UK 4K Blu-ray has some general blockiness and chroma artifacting issues, but the Canada 4K Blu-ray has at least a handful of scenes where the encode completely falls apart and massive macroblocks are visible. The Canada 4K Blu-ray also does not have hardcoded forced subtitles for the newsreel scene like the US and UK 4K Blu-rays. The grade is the same between all three discs.
See tenia's review of the French 4K Blu-ray but no comparison available
The Atmos mix is the same between the US 4K Blu-ray and the UK 4K Blu-ray save for the amount of dynamic objects: the UK 4K Blu-ray has 15 to the USA's 11.
The UK 4K Blu-ray also has a DD-EX compatibility track and a lossless version of the commentary track that is in Dolby Digital on the US and Canada 4K Blu-rays.
UK 4K plays fine in motion https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=24007274&postcount=181
Director: John Schlesinger
Best format: UHD Blu-ray
Sources: Blu-ray.com (opens in a new tab)
Included Imprint Blu-Ray also has markedly better image compression than the Criterion Blu-Ray, though do note the Imprint has some adjusted color grading within roughly the first five minutes of the film
https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=16775595&postcount=450
https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=24237074&postcount=73
Best format: 1080p Blu-ray
Signal One UK Blu-Ray
Gorgeously filmic 2K remaster supervised and approved by Jerry Schatzberg from Fox and flawlessly encoded by FiM.
Director: Chris Columbus
Best format: UHD Blu-ray
Sources: slow.pics (opens in a new tab)
Disney 4K Blu-ray has encoding issues with bitrates dipping into 40mbps, and Kaleidescape has better encoding than Disney see caps
Old Fox Blu-ray master is stretched and sharpened
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