The best Blu-rays and 4K UHD releases of 2023

2023 marks our first yearlong dive into the world of physical media. If you’re a regular reader, you’ve probably already read our monthly lists curating the most promising new Blu-rays and 4K UHD discs. We build those collections from exciting scheduled new releases, often giving a heads-up before we’ve had a chance to see them for ourselves.

This list is different — and more prestigious. Here we collect the best discs of the year. We’ve tried them. We love them. We want to share them. That’s it! We don’t set any additional boundaries to our curation. Whether you want a killer midnight horror film or a challenging collection of art house cinema, you will find something to appreciate.

The following recommendations have been listed in reverse chronological order of these disc releases, so you’ll always see the newest entries up top. The list will be updated throughout the year, and in December we will issue a final update along with awarding our favorite disc of 2023.

This week, we’ve added beautiful 4K special editions of The Lighthouse and Hugo. Be sure to share your own favorite new discs in the comments!

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The best Blu-ray and 4K releases of 2023

The Lighthouse (4K UHD) – June 8

Did you know A24 is in the Blu-ray business? The studio has been gradually building a home video catalog that would fit comfortably on your shelf alongside Arrow and Criterion Collection releases… were its boxes not so unusually large. Storage note: They rest better alongside hardcover books.

So far, the company has released collector’s editions of recent hits like the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once and Aftersun. My favorite of the bunch is the 4K edition of The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers’ black-and-white two-hander starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as a pair of 19th-century lighthouse keepers who lose their gourds.

In the U.K., Arrow released a similar 4K edition of the film with a proper boatload of extras. This edition doesn’t have quite as much material in its hull; however, A24 has included something no less special: a 64-page book featuring storyboard excerpts, production designer drawings, and behind-the-scenes photography. With the keys to its film archives, A24 makes a case for its spot in the home video market, giving us a rare look at the materials that go into a film, which third-party distributors rarely have access to.

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Gorgo (4K UHD + Blu-ray) – Aug. 29

You know Godzilla, but do you know Gorgo? This homage to Toho’s iconic kaiju has one of the more shameless poster taglines: “Like nothing you’ve seen before.” Of course, you have seen this before, just not in the streets of Great Britain. Screenwriters John Loring and Daniel Hyatt splice Godzilla and King Kong with a vial of Irish/British tension, producing one of the stranger entries in the mega monster movie genre.

Vinegar Syndrome gives Gorgo the treatment once reserved for Film School Classics, pulling a beautiful 4K transfer from the original 35mm camera negative. And its team has included more extras than one expects for a movie that might best be known in the U.S. for appearing on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Included in the two-disc package, you’ll find everything from interviews with film historians to a 2009 short film about the fictional British government agency tasked with the mundane job of prepping for a return of Gorgo. Aptly, it’s titled Waiting for Gorgo. Like Gorgo itself, you have to wonder what came first: the title or the story?

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Hugo (4K UHD + Blu-ray) – July 18

2023 is a banner year for underappreciated Scorsese films getting the treatment they deserve. Hugo charmed critics but puzzled audiences in 2011. In the midst of the director’s collaborations with Leonardo DiCaprio — after Shutter Island, before Wolf of Wall Street — we got a 3D film starring two precocious child actors and Sacha Baron Cohen, then best known as Borat. At the height of his filmmaking, why would Scorsese interest himself in adapting young adult fluff?

If you’re a regular reader of Polygon, you already know the answer: YA is no less thoughtful or inventive than most of its adult fiction contemporaries. (Tellingly, Hugo’s box-office failure was blamed on its proximity to another adaptation: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1). In Brian Selznick’s 2007 book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Scorsese spots his core interests: not crime and vice, but the history of film, the necessity of faith, and the power of artificial images (and people) to move our hearts toward something divine.

Arrow’s UHD Blu-ray aspires to meet the film’s ambitions, spanning three discs, including an HD 3D Blu-ray. New interviews with Selznick, the film’s composer Howard Shore, and film scholar Ian Christie complement a collection of essays and featurettes. The film is a love letter to one of film’s founding fathers, Georges Méliès, so the inclusion of an audio commentary with filmmaker and writer Jon Spira, publisher of The Long-Lost Autobiography of Georges Méliès, is a lovely touch.

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After Hours (4K UHD + Blu-ray) – July 11

Killers of the Flower Moon marks the twilight of Martin Scorsese’s career. Early festival reviews suggest it’s a long, controlled, and masterful historical drama, the kind of film that only a veteran director could make. After Hours is the opposite. And that’s why it feels so fresh and contemporary decades later.

In 1985, following Taxi Driver and Raging Bull but before The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese made this compact and abstract story about a dull uptown office worker who gets devoured by the tawdry Soho art scene. Scorsese partnered with screenwriting agent of chaos Joseph Minion, who would later pen Nicolas Cage’s most bonkers role (a feat!) in Vampire’s Kiss. Scorsese provides just enough structure to keep the story from spinning out of control while maintaining the anxious feeling that the film could collapse at any time.

Papier-mâché bagel paperweights, marauding neighborhood watch groups, and a cavalcade of “I know that actor” moments make for a surreal experience, best enjoyed in a quiet room after everyone’s asleep. This is Scorsese evolving his voice following years of prestige. The disc is available on Blu-ray and 4K, the latter of which benefits the beautiful photography of downtown Manhattan in the couple of hours each night that people aren’t crowding the streets.

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Avatar: The Way of Water (4K UHD + Blu-ray + Digital) – June 20

Sometimes you buy a Blu-ray because it’s a great movie you can watch over and over again. Sometimes you buy a Blu-ray because it makes the most of your fancy TV or speakers. And every once in a while, you buy a Blu-ray that does both, like Avatar: The Way of Water.

Ahead of the release of James Cameron’s latest action film, social media speculated on the cultural impact of the Avatar franchise. Do people remember its characters? Does anyone genuinely love it? But The Way of Water is a reminder that this meta-level of criticism is less interesting than the old-fashioned question “How does it make you feel?”

The Way of Water will make you feel something. You will love it. Or hate it. Find it touching or cringe-inducing. That’s the magic of Cameron and his collaborators. They make bold choices and though you might not remember the name of a Na’vi, you won’t forget how it felt to watch them.

The release (available on Blu-ray and 4K UHD) contains a titanic amount of behind-the-scenes materials, so you can see how the production team blended real actors with state-of-the-art computer animation to create some beautiful true lies.

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Superman Collection (4K UHD + Blu-ray + Digital) – May 9

The next Superman movie won’t hit theaters until mid-2025 at the soonest. If you’re craving some blue-spandex-and-red-cape heroics, this collection is your best bet. The collection includes the entirety of the Christopher Reeve era: Superman 1-4, along with the alternate Richard Donner cut of Superman 2.

The set also includes a smorgasbord of Superman. For fans of the films, the package features a truckload of commentaries, behind-the-scenes featurettes, a making-of TV special, and deleted scenes. And for folks who just love any and all things Superman, Warner Bros. bundled in a grab bag of episodes of the classic Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons.

I hadn’t seen the films until this release, and they’re a delight — and a refreshing alternative to the current trend of self-aware superhero fare. Plus, they’re stacked with some top-tier talent of their time, including Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty, Marlon Brando, and Margot Kidder.

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Police Story 3: Supercop (4K UHD + Blu-ray) – April 25

When a few friends recently visited, I grabbed this disc off the shelf and promised to show them one of the most dangerous stunts they’d ever see on film. Police Story 3 is, of course, a great movie. So rather than skip ahead, we decided to watch the whole thing.

Every few minutes, they’d ask if this was the wildly dangerous stunt I’d mentioned. Michelle Yeoh jumping a motorbike onto a moving train? Nope. Jackie Chan dangling from a rope ladder attached to a helicopter? Nah, not that one.

For me, the most stomach-wrinkling stunt comes near the end, and involves Yeoh getting tossed from the roof of a truck and onto the windshield of a speeding convertible. Behind the scenes, Yeoh actually performed the stunt multiple times, nearly falling off the car and under its wheels on two takes.

Now, let me be clear: I am thrilled filmmaking has moved away from actors feeling they should risk their lives for one incredible shot. Yeoh’s most recent hit — Everything Everywhere All at Once — shows a good action movie can be made in humane fashion. But I also carry a conflicting respect for this astonishing stunt work.

Watching with newcomer friends, I realized this film doesn’t have one of the most jaw-dropping stunts in history. It has many. Yeoh and Chan bring out the best in one another as two of the last great artists in a type of filmmaking we will likely never see again. Fortunately, we can look back on it now through this breathtaking 4k restoration, knowing full well both would survive and have long, successful, and safer careers.

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Small Axe (Blu-ray) – April 25

One of the greatest directors of our generation released five films within a single calendar month. Practically nobody saw them. You can blame the pandemic (the films premiered in the fall of 2020) or the distribution and marketing of streaming cinema (they launched on Prime Video), but blame doesn’t solve the problem.

This collection, however, makes an effort. Small Axe collects the latest films from Steve McQueen, which range from one to two hours and blur the line between prestige TV, anthology series, and art house cinema. The result echoes McQueen’s history with visual art, nodding at every page of his portfolio, from his Turner Prize-winning art to the Academy Award-winning 12 Years a Slave to the “should have won every award” heist thriller Widows.

McQueen’s films span a wide range of subjects, but what connects them is a historian-like approach to filmmaking, emphasizing veracity and the elevation of underheard voices. Small Axe is, perhaps, the culmination of this focus. All five films capture the lives of West Indian immigrants in London from the ’60s to the ’80s. They range from small domestic dramas and romances to interrogations of policing and imprisonment.

The Criterion Collection is the best way to watch these films, not just because the image is as good as any other Criterion transfer, but because the set comes with some additions that feel as if they always belonged with the anthology: a filmed conversation between McQueen and professor Paul Gilroy, and the entire three-part documentary Uprising, released by McQueen and James Rogan the year after Small Axe, documenting the 1981 New Cross house fire.

McQueen’s work is audacious, smart, and important — which can sound difficult and intimidating. But here’s the good news: Small Axe is entertaining. Extremely entertaining. You don’t have to watch the films in any order, so if you’re feeling overwhelmed, start with Lovers Rock.

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Violent Streets: The Umberto Lenzi/Tomas Milian Collection (Blu-ray) – March 28

Violent Streets is the most challenging pick on our list, but depending on your stomach for gore, it’s also one of the most rewarding. Italian director Umberto Leniz and Spaghetti Western star Tomas Milian partnered throughout the 1970s to create five harrowing crime films. The subgenre, dubbed poliziotteschi, now serves as a time capsule from Italy’s turbulent decade. But for the average English-speaking movie fan, where do you even start with a genre you’ve never even heard of, from a sociopolitical moment that wasn’t taught in your history class?

History — from the mouths of those involved — is the strength of Severin’s Blu-ray collections. Not only does its team provide the best possible way to see each film (beautifully restored, uncensored cuts), they also assemble the bonus feature equivalent of a college seminar. The first film alone comes with audio commentaries featuring the screenwriter and critics, interviews with Lenzi and Milan, and additional contextual featurettes.

I first dove into Almost Human, the most famous film of the bunch, trying its English language track. It played like a wacky, but uncomfortably violent, grindhouse bobble. Then I switched to the original audio and progressed all the way through some of the featurettes. And I felt like I’d learned about an entire other world and moment — while enjoying a wonderfully sweaty crime lord performance that would make Al Pacino blush.

If you enjoy film as a means of understanding the world, warts and all, then you have your next box set.

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The House That Screamed (Blu-ray) – March 7

The House That Screamed is pitched as Suspiria meets Psycho. The trouble with a pitch like this is the film in question can’t possibly live up to the comparison. Technically, that’s true here. No, The House That Screamed isn’t as good as two of the best horror movies ever made. But damn, it gets close.

For film dorks like myself, its status as “Spain’s first major horror production” and its early place on the timeline of giallo, slasher, and gothic cinematic horror make it a must-watch. For everyone else, there’s the tawdry (but rarely leering) story of a murderer skulking the woods of an all-women boarding school.

The set includes both the uncut version, titled The Finishing School (La Residencia), and the 11-minute shorter U.S. version. Go with the longer cut, which has room to let the characters breathe and the thrills boil. Also included: a bunch of archival interviews and a new commentary by critic Anna Bogutskaya.

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John Wick 1-3 Stash Book Collection (4K UHD + Blu-ray) – Feb. 28

One of the great modern action franchises just got a celebrated fourth entry, and Lionsgate released this fantastic “stash book” box set that is a replica of Wick’s own stash box from Chapter 3 – Parabellum. Designed like a Russian tome, with religious iconography on the cover, the three movie cases are hidden under about a dozen pages of a book of Russian folk tales. The set includes all three movies, behind-the-scenes footage, deleted scenes, and audio commentary from Keanu Reeves and director Chad Stahelski. The only drawback is it doesn’t include Chapter 4! —Pete Volk

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Road House (4K UHD + Blu-ray) – Jan. 31

Patrick Swayze rips out a dude’s throat and then roundhouse kicks him into a lake. That’s it. That’s the pitch.

Vinegar Syndrome’s colossal celebration of this modern masterpiece includes a commentary track with the director, another with Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier, many brand new interviews with on- and off-screen talent, an hourlong documentary, multiple featurettes, a 40-page book, and of course the brand-new 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative.