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Luxury Week: 6 Great Demo Movies for Luxury Home Theaters

Cineluxe picks a half-dozen films released in 2022 that can show what your high-end installs can really do.

Luxury Week 2023 Bug – Presented by Sony

Watching the best 4K and 4K/HDR movie releases on a top-flight home theater system can actually beat the experience you can get at almost any commercial cinema. But just because a home release is in 4K doesn’t necessarily mean it will look and sound as good as its theatrical version. To help you separate the wheat from the chaff, here are six movies released in 2022 — both blockbusters and classics — guaranteed to give you a reference-quality experience at home.

For more recommendations, check out Cineluxe’s list of 4K HDR Essentials and Great Dolby Atmos Demos.

Luxury Theater Demos - Batman

The Batman

“Without question, I enjoyed watching The Batman more at home than I did in the theater. Being such a dark film, the HDR grade definitely improves images, giving nice, deep blacks with plenty of detail, along with delivering plenty of bright highlights from spotlights, streetlights, headlights, flashlights, or light pouring in through windows. Gotham’s downtown is filled with brightly lit buildings, video displays, and numerous neon signs that look great. Reds also benefit from the expanded color gamut, and brake lights, flares, fireballs from explosions, and pulsing lights in a club all look vibrant and deep.” —John Sciacca, 4/10/22
Read the full Cineluxe review.

Luxury Theater Demos - The Godfather Part II

The Godfather Part II

“Streaming just doesn’t cut it for this one. You need to experience The Godfather Part II at the highest bitrates possible to truly appreciate the work done on this restoration. Until something better comes along, which hardly seems likely any time soon, this will be my new reference standard for how older 35mm films should be restored, remastered, and encoded for UHD HDR.” —Dennis Burger, 4/1/22
Read the full Cineluxe review.

Luxury Week 2023: Movin’ On Up

Luxury Home Theater Demos – The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

“The transfer is astonishingly, seductively good. This is the way older films should look in 4K. The images are alive with grain, which is so essential to Leone’s style that it’s scary to think anyone would ever think of scrubbing any of it away — let alone all of it, à la The Godfather. This release is sans HDR but it’s hard to see where going there would do much to enhance its impact. It would likely result in the usual tradeoff of grit for polish, and if The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is about anything, it’s grit.” —Michael Gaughn, 8/18/22
Read the full Cineluxe review.

Luxury Home Theater Demos – Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction in 4K positively brims with organic but exceedingly fine grain and the sort of gorgeous halation you get with 35mm film. The pristine scan of the original elements, which makes the imagery more three-dimensional and beautifully resolved than ever before, legitimately serves to subtly enhance and underscore the inherent and intentional tawdry artifice of it all. If you’re a fan of Pulp Fiction, you need to see this new scan, and Kaleidescape’s download is an excellent way of acquiring it.” —Dennis Burger, 12/19/22
Read the full Cineluxe review.

Luxury Week 2023: Lifestyle Tech and Design for the Luxury Client

Luxury Home Theater Demos – Shadow of a Doubt

Shadow of a Doubt

“Let’s cut right to it: Shadow of a Doubt is the best 4K HDR Hitchcock release to date. It’s a still compelling, even riveting, work presented in a way that couldn’t be more true to how the film was made, without any jolts triggered by bad elements or overzealous hands at the knobs. If you want to see a Hitchcock film from the period when he was in full control of his artistry presented pretty much as he intended, this is it.” —Michael Gaughn, 5/9/22
Read the full Cineluxe review.

Luxury Home Theater Demos – Top Gun: Maverick

Top Gun: Maverick

“While I wouldn’t say the 2.39:1 images had that hyper-detailed overly crisp ‘digital’ look, they looked like the best of what a great film transfer can deliver, without any of the grain but still providing plenty of fine detail like the gold braid in Maverick’s uniform hat or the pattern in Ice Man’s ascot/scarf. The IMAX footage is often closeups, and you can see every line, whisker, and pore in the actors’ faces. The HDR grade delivers natural-looking images, and bright, punchy colors in the pilots’ helmets, the blue lighting in the aircraft carrier’s combat information center, the flashes of sunlight, or the gleam of sweat on faces.” —John Sciacca, 8/26/22
Read the full Cinelux review.

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