KD^3 C^3 - 20250720 Monkey got broke
Once a month, Criterion announces the new titles that will be released in a few month's time. It's July so this week we got the announcement of October's movies. It's an interesting slate of movies. You've got Cronenberg's A History of Violence, Ken Russell's Altered States and 4K upgrades of Eyes Without a Face and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. But the one that stuck out to me was Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley. It didn't stick out because I thought this was a great film (I think it's alright,but not his best work) but it stuck out because Criterion is releasing, alongside the original theatrical cut, a director's cut that is slightly longer and in black and white. This was screened in a couple theaters back when the movie came out, but there was no word of it getting an official release.
This matters to me, because a little over a year ago, I was trying to do a survey of all the movies that were originally released in color but had official black & white re-releases. I thought I had tracked them all down, and where possible, I had acquired a copy and watched them. I knew about the Nightmare Alley screening, but had written it off as one that wou;dn't get a release. So this was a pleasant surprise! But that got me to look back into other movies that I had passed up last time and I surprised myself by finding even more movies with B&W versions that I didn't know about.
By my count there are now 13 movies which have received official black and white versions, and I have seen exactly half of them. There are also a few bonus movies that half count, which I'll talk about too.
Re-releasing a color movie, regraded into black and white can be done for a variety of reasons. Most of the time it was the "director's intended version" but B&W films are less marketable so color is what they get pushed into doing by the studios. With digital filming, it's much easier to regrade a whole movie than it would have been 50 years ago, which is why one of the movies on this list really surprised me.
In reverse alphabetical order, because why not:
The Mist (2007) - dir. Frank Darabont
Most people probably know Frank Darabont as the guy who created the Walking Dead TV series, but he also directed The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption and this movie. A kind of low-budget horror movie about a town trapped in a fog full of deadly monsters. He apparently wanted to originally film in black & white, but got pushed to do otherwise by the studio (not uncommon, as we'll see) but the black and white matches the kinda cheesy kinda campy tone of the 50s b-movies that this is calling back to. In my opinion, the B&W version is the only way to watch it. This is the first instance that I'm aware of where being filmed digitaly made it much easier to go back in and re-grade the whole thing from scratch in black & white. Plus it's a lot bleaker than you might expect.
Texasville (1990) - dir. Peter Bogdanovich
Bogdanovich was a direcor who could get great performances out of people. His masterpiece might be The Last Picture Show, a melancholy look at youth in a small Texas town in the 50s. 20 years later he made a film catching up with those characters called Texasville. Between 1971 (when Last Picture Show premiered) and 1990, two of the main cast (Jeff Bridges and Cybil Shepherd) had become major stars, and of you looked at the marketing material you would think this is a love story between those two characters. But that's pretty misleading. Bogdanovich wanted to film in black and white, like the first movie, but was overruled. Like Last Picture Show it's a nuanced look at a time and people. The black and white director's cut also re-adds a lot of previously cut material making it much longer. It's only available as a bonus feature on the Criterion 4k release of The Last Picture Show, but is absolutely worth tracking down if you like the first movie.
Shin Godzilla (2016) - dir. Hideaki Anno & Shinji Higuchi
I haven't seen the black and white version of this yet, because ti was only released on blu ray in japan without english subtitles. That's not insurmountable, but I haven't bothered to surmount it yet Shin Godzilla is a modern re-working of Godzialla set in the modern day, where Godzilla shows p for the first time. A movie about bureaucracy as much as giant monsters, it's a good time. I think the black & white release is meant to be a throwback to the original 1954 Gidzilla, but I can't say that with 100% confidence.
Parasite (2019) - dir. Bong Joon Ho
Parasite won the oscar for best picture. The first non-english film to do so. It's a good movie. This is an example where the movie wasn't intended to be in black & white from the beginning, but because they shot digitally, the director figured why not give it a try. Like many of the others, its a bonus feature on the Criterion release. The B&W version is almost as good as, but not better than, th original. But either version is absolutely worth checking out.
Nightmare Alley (2021) - dir. Guillermo del Toro
This is technically a remake of a previous film and del Toro wanted to shoot in black and white as an homage to that film (also in the Criterion Collection, actually!) I'm glad this is getting a black and white release, because the things I liked most about ths movie were the cinematography and lighting which will be enhanced in black & white.
Nickelodeon (1976) - dir Peter Bogdanovich
I know almost nothing about this movie, but I was very surprised to learn Texasville wasn't Bogdanovich's first attempt to re-release a color movie in black and white. This seems to be a movie about the silent film era, so black & whit makes sense as an artistic choice. THe black and white version is only available as a double feature on standard definition DVD with, yup Last Picture Show. I'm in the process of hunting down this disc, which will make THe Last Picture show the only movie I own on 4K, blu ray and DVD.
Mother (2009) - dir. Bong Joon Ho
Proving not only can Bogdonavich release 2 films with black and white versions, here’s the second movie by Bong Joon Ho. I haven’t seen this movie and I have no idea what it’s about, which is how I like to go into my Bong Joon Ho movies. This was originally only available in a very rare limited release on blu ray, but in Korea it got rereleased in a more accessible way sometime in the last 2 years (I only found out yesterday). There is now a copy being shipped to me from a korean seller on eBay. It might take a while to get here.
Mad Max Fury Road (2015) - dir. George Miller
This is the first on the list that I have seen where I think it doesn’t really enhance the film to be in black and white (or black & chrome as it calls itself). The color palate on this movie is so impressive that taking it away mutes some of the movie. It also really feels like this wasn’t a case of “We filmed it for black and white, but had to release in color” because the re-grading makes things a lot more muted and the visuals become a little muddy sometime, when they were crisp and sharp in the original.
Logan (2017) - dir James Mangold
You know, that movie Deadpool 3 literally desecrated in its credit sequence. Mangold claims this was originally meant to be in black & white (called Logan Noir in the rerelease) but like Fury road, it doesn’t really work for me. I don’t think Mangold has enough command of the lighting necessary for a black & white shoot, so a lot of what this ends. being is just dark. Too dark to really see anything, which I hope wasn’t the intention.
Johnny Mnemonic (1995) - dir. Robert Longo
This shouldn’t work at all, but it’s maybe my favorite black and white version. It elevates what felt like kinda silly hacker movie into a really strong neofuturist cyberpunk french new wave sort of thing. I don’t own the color version of this movie and don’t think I’ll ever bother watching that one again. I don’ think this was ever the original intention of the director (based on the interviews I could find) but he was happy to try it out for the fins 25th anniversary release and Im so glad he did.
Hush (2016) - dir. Mike Flanagan
I haven’t seen the original one, but i think I would like it. I haven’t actually seen any of Mike Flanagan’s work, but he’s got a couple popular mini0series on netflix, he did the Shining sequel Doctor Sleep and he’s even got a movie in theaters right now (Life of Chuck) that I know nothing about. I don’t follow horror a lot, so i never looked deeper into this. The black and white version also re-does the sound in ways I think are meant to reflect the protagonist (who is deaf). I’ll be picking this one up if I can find it on sale, but more out of a sense of completion than anticipation. I’d be happy to be pleasantly surprised.
Godzilla Minus One (2023) - dir. Akashi Yamasaki
An amazing Godzilla film. Worth tracking down in either version. The black & white re-grade feels a little perfunctory, like with Shin Godzilla i think it was don to harken back to Godzilla (1954) rather than because it enhances the film, but it looks great regardless. Because of the 1940s era the film is set in, it works well enough to set the tone, but that wasn’t a problem the color one had either. This got a theatrical release, and I snatched up the blu ray version as soon as I could because I was pretty sure they weren’t going to make a lot of them. I’m not even sure you can buy them right now.
Basquiat (1996) - dir. Julian Schnabel
Possibly the most obscure one of these. I only found out about it when someone was talking about Nightmare Alley on youtube. Criterion released this biobic of the 1980s era artist and didn’t even make a big deal of the fact that it featured a B&W directors cut of the movie. Basquiat (played here by a young Jeffrey Wright) had such a sense of color in his work, I’m curious to see what removing that does to the picture. Both versions are on the Criterion Channel, so Iw ill probably check them out before picking up the disc.
Movies that almost, but don’t quite, count (also in reverse alphabetical order):
Zack Snyder’s Justice League - Justice is Gray edition.
You can’t say Zack Snyder doesn’t know what he wants. He makes the movies he wants, how he wants, I just don’t like the vibe of them at all. I have seen this, all four hours of it, in black and white, and oof is it a hard watch. The movie already had a very muted color palette, and this just dials that down until it’s gone. It really puts the gray into Justice is Gray, the whole thing feels so ugly to watch nothing stands out in a sea of muddied cgi that didn’t look great in color and looks worse here. But that’s not why it doesn’t count. It doesn’t count because I can’t buy this movie. It is only available on HBO Max to stream. I would probably buy a blu ray of this, but thankfully I don’t know that it’ll ever get one so I’m safe.
Lady Vengeance (2005) - dir. Park Chan-work
I like Oldboy, which this is part of a trilogy of thematically connected films with. I suspect I would also like Lady Vengeance. The Black and white version isn’t actually that, though. It’s a “fade to white” version where it starts in color and over the course of the film fades into black and white as the color drains out. I still think this is a very cool idea, and it’s a choice that feels like it could dramatically enhance the movie’s themes when it wasn’t in the original release. I’m gunna track this down, but copies are very hard to get and expensive.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) dir. George Miller
Like the above movie with this name backwards, there is a “Black and chrome” release, but I cannot confirm if it has been put out on blu ray. It hasn’t been in the US, but I have seen mixed information about possibly British release. The problem with that is that it’s going to be a different region and probably won’t play in my player. There is a digital only release, but like with Justice League, I’m not counting that because I only count it if it’s on physical media.
I'll keep watching these as long as people keep putting them out.
This matters to me, because a little over a year ago, I was trying to do a survey of all the movies that were originally released in color but had official black & white re-releases. I thought I had tracked them all down, and where possible, I had acquired a copy and watched them. I knew about the Nightmare Alley screening, but had written it off as one that wou;dn't get a release. So this was a pleasant surprise! But that got me to look back into other movies that I had passed up last time and I surprised myself by finding even more movies with B&W versions that I didn't know about.
By my count there are now 13 movies which have received official black and white versions, and I have seen exactly half of them. There are also a few bonus movies that half count, which I'll talk about too.
Re-releasing a color movie, regraded into black and white can be done for a variety of reasons. Most of the time it was the "director's intended version" but B&W films are less marketable so color is what they get pushed into doing by the studios. With digital filming, it's much easier to regrade a whole movie than it would have been 50 years ago, which is why one of the movies on this list really surprised me.
In reverse alphabetical order, because why not:
The Mist (2007) - dir. Frank Darabont
Most people probably know Frank Darabont as the guy who created the Walking Dead TV series, but he also directed The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption and this movie. A kind of low-budget horror movie about a town trapped in a fog full of deadly monsters. He apparently wanted to originally film in black & white, but got pushed to do otherwise by the studio (not uncommon, as we'll see) but the black and white matches the kinda cheesy kinda campy tone of the 50s b-movies that this is calling back to. In my opinion, the B&W version is the only way to watch it. This is the first instance that I'm aware of where being filmed digitaly made it much easier to go back in and re-grade the whole thing from scratch in black & white. Plus it's a lot bleaker than you might expect.
Texasville (1990) - dir. Peter Bogdanovich
Bogdanovich was a direcor who could get great performances out of people. His masterpiece might be The Last Picture Show, a melancholy look at youth in a small Texas town in the 50s. 20 years later he made a film catching up with those characters called Texasville. Between 1971 (when Last Picture Show premiered) and 1990, two of the main cast (Jeff Bridges and Cybil Shepherd) had become major stars, and of you looked at the marketing material you would think this is a love story between those two characters. But that's pretty misleading. Bogdanovich wanted to film in black and white, like the first movie, but was overruled. Like Last Picture Show it's a nuanced look at a time and people. The black and white director's cut also re-adds a lot of previously cut material making it much longer. It's only available as a bonus feature on the Criterion 4k release of The Last Picture Show, but is absolutely worth tracking down if you like the first movie.
Shin Godzilla (2016) - dir. Hideaki Anno & Shinji Higuchi
I haven't seen the black and white version of this yet, because ti was only released on blu ray in japan without english subtitles. That's not insurmountable, but I haven't bothered to surmount it yet Shin Godzilla is a modern re-working of Godzialla set in the modern day, where Godzilla shows p for the first time. A movie about bureaucracy as much as giant monsters, it's a good time. I think the black & white release is meant to be a throwback to the original 1954 Gidzilla, but I can't say that with 100% confidence.
Parasite (2019) - dir. Bong Joon Ho
Parasite won the oscar for best picture. The first non-english film to do so. It's a good movie. This is an example where the movie wasn't intended to be in black & white from the beginning, but because they shot digitally, the director figured why not give it a try. Like many of the others, its a bonus feature on the Criterion release. The B&W version is almost as good as, but not better than, th original. But either version is absolutely worth checking out.
Nightmare Alley (2021) - dir. Guillermo del Toro
This is technically a remake of a previous film and del Toro wanted to shoot in black and white as an homage to that film (also in the Criterion Collection, actually!) I'm glad this is getting a black and white release, because the things I liked most about ths movie were the cinematography and lighting which will be enhanced in black & white.
Nickelodeon (1976) - dir Peter Bogdanovich
I know almost nothing about this movie, but I was very surprised to learn Texasville wasn't Bogdanovich's first attempt to re-release a color movie in black and white. This seems to be a movie about the silent film era, so black & whit makes sense as an artistic choice. THe black and white version is only available as a double feature on standard definition DVD with, yup Last Picture Show. I'm in the process of hunting down this disc, which will make THe Last Picture show the only movie I own on 4K, blu ray and DVD.
Mother (2009) - dir. Bong Joon Ho
Proving not only can Bogdonavich release 2 films with black and white versions, here’s the second movie by Bong Joon Ho. I haven’t seen this movie and I have no idea what it’s about, which is how I like to go into my Bong Joon Ho movies. This was originally only available in a very rare limited release on blu ray, but in Korea it got rereleased in a more accessible way sometime in the last 2 years (I only found out yesterday). There is now a copy being shipped to me from a korean seller on eBay. It might take a while to get here.
Mad Max Fury Road (2015) - dir. George Miller
This is the first on the list that I have seen where I think it doesn’t really enhance the film to be in black and white (or black & chrome as it calls itself). The color palate on this movie is so impressive that taking it away mutes some of the movie. It also really feels like this wasn’t a case of “We filmed it for black and white, but had to release in color” because the re-grading makes things a lot more muted and the visuals become a little muddy sometime, when they were crisp and sharp in the original.
Logan (2017) - dir James Mangold
You know, that movie Deadpool 3 literally desecrated in its credit sequence. Mangold claims this was originally meant to be in black & white (called Logan Noir in the rerelease) but like Fury road, it doesn’t really work for me. I don’t think Mangold has enough command of the lighting necessary for a black & white shoot, so a lot of what this ends. being is just dark. Too dark to really see anything, which I hope wasn’t the intention.
Johnny Mnemonic (1995) - dir. Robert Longo
This shouldn’t work at all, but it’s maybe my favorite black and white version. It elevates what felt like kinda silly hacker movie into a really strong neofuturist cyberpunk french new wave sort of thing. I don’t own the color version of this movie and don’t think I’ll ever bother watching that one again. I don’ think this was ever the original intention of the director (based on the interviews I could find) but he was happy to try it out for the fins 25th anniversary release and Im so glad he did.
Hush (2016) - dir. Mike Flanagan
I haven’t seen the original one, but i think I would like it. I haven’t actually seen any of Mike Flanagan’s work, but he’s got a couple popular mini0series on netflix, he did the Shining sequel Doctor Sleep and he’s even got a movie in theaters right now (Life of Chuck) that I know nothing about. I don’t follow horror a lot, so i never looked deeper into this. The black and white version also re-does the sound in ways I think are meant to reflect the protagonist (who is deaf). I’ll be picking this one up if I can find it on sale, but more out of a sense of completion than anticipation. I’d be happy to be pleasantly surprised.
Godzilla Minus One (2023) - dir. Akashi Yamasaki
An amazing Godzilla film. Worth tracking down in either version. The black & white re-grade feels a little perfunctory, like with Shin Godzilla i think it was don to harken back to Godzilla (1954) rather than because it enhances the film, but it looks great regardless. Because of the 1940s era the film is set in, it works well enough to set the tone, but that wasn’t a problem the color one had either. This got a theatrical release, and I snatched up the blu ray version as soon as I could because I was pretty sure they weren’t going to make a lot of them. I’m not even sure you can buy them right now.
Basquiat (1996) - dir. Julian Schnabel
Possibly the most obscure one of these. I only found out about it when someone was talking about Nightmare Alley on youtube. Criterion released this biobic of the 1980s era artist and didn’t even make a big deal of the fact that it featured a B&W directors cut of the movie. Basquiat (played here by a young Jeffrey Wright) had such a sense of color in his work, I’m curious to see what removing that does to the picture. Both versions are on the Criterion Channel, so Iw ill probably check them out before picking up the disc.
Movies that almost, but don’t quite, count (also in reverse alphabetical order):
Zack Snyder’s Justice League - Justice is Gray edition.
You can’t say Zack Snyder doesn’t know what he wants. He makes the movies he wants, how he wants, I just don’t like the vibe of them at all. I have seen this, all four hours of it, in black and white, and oof is it a hard watch. The movie already had a very muted color palette, and this just dials that down until it’s gone. It really puts the gray into Justice is Gray, the whole thing feels so ugly to watch nothing stands out in a sea of muddied cgi that didn’t look great in color and looks worse here. But that’s not why it doesn’t count. It doesn’t count because I can’t buy this movie. It is only available on HBO Max to stream. I would probably buy a blu ray of this, but thankfully I don’t know that it’ll ever get one so I’m safe.
Lady Vengeance (2005) - dir. Park Chan-work
I like Oldboy, which this is part of a trilogy of thematically connected films with. I suspect I would also like Lady Vengeance. The Black and white version isn’t actually that, though. It’s a “fade to white” version where it starts in color and over the course of the film fades into black and white as the color drains out. I still think this is a very cool idea, and it’s a choice that feels like it could dramatically enhance the movie’s themes when it wasn’t in the original release. I’m gunna track this down, but copies are very hard to get and expensive.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) dir. George Miller
Like the above movie with this name backwards, there is a “Black and chrome” release, but I cannot confirm if it has been put out on blu ray. It hasn’t been in the US, but I have seen mixed information about possibly British release. The problem with that is that it’s going to be a different region and probably won’t play in my player. There is a digital only release, but like with Justice League, I’m not counting that because I only count it if it’s on physical media.
I'll keep watching these as long as people keep putting them out.