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I had completely forgotten about The Flowers of Shanghai. Sigh, it is very disappointing that we are still having released that are blasted into wax.

It's nowhere near as bad as that for what it's worth. I also forgot they worked on (some of?) the Wong films, and I'd say they're more along the lines of some of those (the better ones).

Would the new set look better or worse than the HK Megastar set? I'm trying to decide whether it's worthwhile upgrading

This doesn't look like much of an upgrade.

I'm confused when Tooze says that it doesn't look like DNR is the culprit for the waxy image, especially since it seems clear to me that these films have been DNR'd.

it's extremely disappointing how inconsistent that looks. some shots look clearly better than others, but even in the caps you can see how much they took away the depth of the image. these really should be a knockout - reference title look with these visuals. unfortunately, not gonna be in a rush to pick this up (I own no prior edition) nearly as much...

The caps of the 1st movie remind me of the Full Alert remaster, which has a mixture of both DNR AND EE, which gives it an uneasing aspect of looking quite fresh in some aspects but also clearly filtered. It fortunately seems to be at a lesser degree here (Full Alert looks, to me, way too sharpened), but it doesn't look very good and I can't imagine what the reviews will be when the French UHD set ends up (after humpteen delays) being released.

I guess I can stick with my (venerable) HK DVDs...

Shogun Supreme picked up the set and is giving his thoughts on his twitter feed.

His thoughts on the first film

My thoughts on the first one(still watching) It looks okay but not bad at all. Why I say okay. Very clean and detail, but not sharp. The issues are dark scenes but those scene’s use to be riddled with noise but scenes that have heavy shadows didn’t need to look like that.

The audio, however,he finds impressive

Okay, the audio on Infernal Affairs on this Criterion set has to be one of the best sounding HK transfers I have heard from that era. Is freaking insane how crisp and dynamic it is. The lows are freaking insane. They truly blessed it.

And some Blu-ray.com member commented on the subtitles being improved over previous releases.

dwk wrote: Thu Nov 17, 2022 12:21 am Shogun Supreme picked up the set and is giving his thoughts on his twitter feed.

His thoughts on the first film

My thoughts on the first one(still watching) It looks okay but not bad at all. Why I say okay. Very clean and detail, but not sharp. The issues are dark scenes but those scene’s use to be riddled with noise but scenes that have heavy shadows didn’t need to look like that.

The audio, however,he finds impressive

Okay, the audio on Infernal Affairs on this Criterion set has to be one of the best sounding HK transfers I have heard from that era. Is freaking insane how crisp and dynamic it is. The lows are freaking insane. They truly blessed it.

And some Blu-ray.com member commented on the subtitles being improved over previous releases.

Glad to hear that. IA has always had standout sound design, especially with those Morse code taps.

I saw all three restorations in theatres. I wouldn’t say the subs are particularly great, even though they’re probably an improvement over the past ones. There are some grammatical mistakes and referring to every character by their last name gets really confusing by the time we get to the last film. There’s Cheung, Keung, Leung, Yeung. I assume it’s quite tough for non-Cantonese speakers.

I am a tad confused as to why people say it looks bad?

Elizabeth Corday wrote: Thu Nov 24, 2022 6:20 am I am a tad confused as to why people say it looks bad?

It does not look terrible, but it doesn't really look like something shot on film anymore. The new restoration masters (and especially for the first two films) have had some overzealous grain reduction applied to them, which makes them far less true to the original negative source than they should have been. Furthermore, overall sharpness is reduced from what it could/should have been.

I think the non-revisioned films in the Wong Kar-Wai set (As Tears Go By and 2046 especially) were "restored" similarly where they look overly digitized. Days of Being Wild comes off looking the best to my eyes, rather surprisingly. you get into a very smooth image at times

didn't prioritize getting this boxset this sale (so I can't comment on how it looks in motion, but plenty of others have) but I will say it felt like a nice looking package in store - the sturdier cardboard this, Wall-E, and Malcolm X got were a nice surprise. also was really pleased both English and Chinese signatures featured on the "director approved" sticker

Short of a new restoration, I really doubt these are worth buying again.