Deconstructing Harry & Small Time Crooks – Woody Allen on Blu-ray

Two profoundly different Woody Allen films return to the Home Video arena thanks to new 2K Blu-ray editions: Small Time Crooks and Deconstructing Harry. Two works that, placed side by side, clearly illustrate the oscillations of an author capable of moving between pure entertainment comedy and ruthless self-analysis, often without compromise.

Small Time Crooks is an underestimated comedy, constructed with a precision that today seems almost disarming. The story of the petty thief who accidentally gets rich thanks to a commercial activity born as a cover is a pretext for a light satire on the American dream, on social climbing, and bad taste elevated to a cultural model. Allen plays for subtraction, relies heavily on rhythm and characterization, and delivers one of his most accessible films.

Two more Woody Allen gems in HD

Deconstructing Harry is of the opposite sign, a restless and deliberately complex work that dismantles the figure of the New York intellectual piece by piece. Here Allen abandons any idea of narrative compactness and constructs a fragmented film, where reality and fiction contaminate each other until they become indistinguishable. It is a cinema that looks within itself with fierce complacency, alternating moments of absolute brilliance with narcissistic drifts that are part, for better or worse, of a film that is not so immediate.

The new 2K Blu-ray editions offer the ideal opportunity to refocus on two souls of the same author: one more communicative and popular, the other openly corrosive and meta-cinematic. Two works distant in tone and ambition, but both indispensable for understanding Woody Allen in the late nineties and early two thousands.

Analog 35mm film on negative of unspecified ASA sensitivity, image format 1.78:1 for Small Time Crooks and 1.85:1 for Deconstructing Harry, (1920 x 1080 interlaced/25fps) AVC/MPEG-4 encoding on single-layer BD-25. Net of SDR and film material with an excellent starting point, we are in the presence of a technical-visual performance of remarkable quality, as well as for colors and black depth. The offer is completed with Dolby Digital (224 kbps) and DTS-HD Master Audio (16 bit), always 2.0 channels. The lossless offer is preferable, although these are dialogue-centric works with music truly in the background and very few ambient effects.

As extras, only the trailer.