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“Justified: City Primeval”
In Summer 2023, Sony, FX, and Hulu collaborated to bring Raylan Givens back to life. The hero of FX’s excellent “Justified” rode off into the sunset in 2015, but he returned in this great eight-episode mini-series that took Elmore Leonard’s character and grafted him onto another Leonard novel title, City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit. That’s where Givens matches wits with a sociopath who calls himself the Oklahoma Wildman (Boyd Holbrook). Once again, the team behind “Justified” is playing with the moral boundaries of lawmen and criminals, revealing where they often intersect. However, this is a wildly entertaining crime drama that they don’t make as often as they should. It’s also nice of Sony to release it as a standalone Blu-ray, although a special feature or two about its production would have been even nicer.
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Special Features
-Nothing
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“The Last Picture Show” (Criterion)
It’s been over half a century since Peter Bogdanovich’s stunning drama based on the novel of the same name by Larry McMurtry. Still a masterpiece, Criterion has restored the film in 4K and gone as far as to include an entire second film on the release, the 1990 sequel “Texasville,” which is nowhere near as good but still worth seeing. This great remastered edition also includes a fantastic pair of commentaries that feature not only Bogdanovich but also Cybill Shepherd, Randy Quaid, Cloris Leachman, and Fran Marshall. As if that’s not enough, there are three documentaries about the making of this classic, a film chosen for the National Film Registry a quarter-century ago.
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Special Features
4K digital restoration of the director’s cut, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features
Texasville (1990), the sequel to The Last Picture Show, presented in both the original theatrical version and a black-and-white version of the director’s cut, produced in collaboration with cinematographer Nicholas von Sternberg
Two audio commentaries, featuring director Peter Bogdanovich and actors Cybill Shepherd, Randy Quaid, Cloris Leachman, and Frank Marshall
Three documentaries about the making of the film
Screen tests and location footage
Introduction to Texasville featuring Bogdanovich, Shepherd, and actor Jeff Bridges
Excerpts from a 1972 television interview with filmmaker François Truffaut about the New Hollywood
Trailers
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: An essay by film critic Graham Fuller and excerpts from an interview with Bogdanovich about Texasville, with a new introduction by Bogdanovich biographer Peter Tonguette