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The plus of the Arrow is Robert Gordon's commentary track - he also wrote the BFI Classic monograph on the film... Nevertheless, I'll be double dipping for the Criterion transfer...

Chris, your Bicycle Thieves main page indicates the movie is directed by Les Blank et licenced from RLJ Entertainment.

Thanks! When I get a chance I will correct that.

I own the Italian BD, which is reputedly superior to the Eureka. To help decide if it's worth me picking up the Criterion, does anyone own both or know of any online comparisons?

Just picked it up today and saw it. It looks amazing apart from any issues due to its source (that flicker during one of the crossfades about 10 minutes, probably due to an error in the optical printing the first time around). Apart from the higher resolution scan giving it the huge image improvement, the Blu-ray source was a fine-grain master positive from the original nitrate negative whereas the DVD was just from an duplicate negative. No encoding issues and definitely no windowboxing =D

Same features as the DVD with no changes and you all know what the packaging looks like =].

As for the film itself, I never considered it one of my all-time favourites (that does not mean I am not moved by it ... far from it). But at the same time, it definitely see it as a cinematic milestone and I highly appreciate it, even celebrate it, for that alone. For me, this is my "before/after" film for cinematic history because I think without this film, you wouldn't have had the European cinema of the 1950s going into the French New Wave and then, of course, the New Hollywood. This was also a favourite film for Satyajit Ray and I can see what Ray drew from Ladri di biciclette into Pather Panchali (another point to make the case for this being the demarcation point). While one can make the case for Rome, Open City as the demarcation point, that film still feels like a constructed melodrama that was shot on location (albeit a well-constructed one ... and an honest one) whereas this feels like "real life created the drama". You could say that if de Sica and Zavattini were able to make a film with just those elements, what else could you make? In other words, romantic realism does not have to be the only style for cinema.

P.S. Yes, Mark Cousins informed my view of cinematic history =]

Watched this yesterday for the first time (not the Criterion release) and it left me completely cold.
Pity because i'm frustrated when i cannot connect to a highly and universally acclaimed film.

The CC BD doesn't have any known technical issues, does it?

70 years on, new resto screening @ Cannes Classics 2018...

...il restauro realizzato dal laboratorio L'Immagine Ritrovata, promosso da Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna e Compass Film di Stefano Libassi, in collaborazione con Arthur Cohn, Euro Immobilfin, Artedis, e con il sostegno di Istituto Luce-Cinecittà.