The Green Knight (4K/UHD)(2021)

I went through a similar issue as another review here (from Gud) with the Sony UDP-X700 and a cheaper LG 4K player as well, before doing some research and learning that they're just not very good products. These players don't handle layer changes well at all, and stutter or even crash at specific moments in longer movies (Interstellar and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, both triple-layer discs, are also easy movies to see this phenomenon on these players). The issue is not with the movie, but with the players, and unfortunately there are no good "budget" 4K Blu-Ray players that play these movies well - your next best option is the Panasonic DP-UB820 which is... well, quite a bit pricier, but actually plays back the movie at the highest quality with no distracting glitches, and if you're buying physical media, perfection is probably the point. As for the movie, it's incredible. If you're the type who likes to turn on a movie late at night, pour yourself a fancy beverage, hide the phone in another room and lose yourself in another world, this is the film for you. It's in the ponderous and meditative vein, which, like a lot of stuff that bears the A24 moniker, throws people off who are expecting something more commercial, so if the word "arthouse" scares you, stay away. As is common with A24 releases, the 4K transfer is top tier, and frankly looks better than it did in the poorly-projected theater I saw it in. Just make sure you avoid the cheap LG and Sony 4K players like the plague.

The five stars in this review are for the movie itself. But, the quality of the disk is also a relevant subject. I want to talk about disk playback issues we have been experiencing. Some disks may be fine. We may have been very unlucky and got two bad disks. We would like to know who else has had the same or a comparable problem. Two different Green Knight 4K UHD Blu-rays each display a fairly similar problem when playing, fast-forwarding, and scene selecting. We want to know if anyone else with an equivalent player, or even a different player, while watching this disk, experienced a similar problem. For those who say this might be a problem with the player and not the disk, why would the player have the same problem in the same place with two different disks? We bought the Green Knight 4K UHD Blu-ray on, October 12, 2021, and exchanged it for another because it stopped at about 54 minutes and would not play any further. We briefly tried to forward past 54 minutes. Using scene selection, we checked about three scenes immediately following 54 minutes and nothing showed up. We were not as thorough as we now, after the fact, wish we were. Next, we checked other 4K UHD Blu-rays on our player, the Sony UPB X700. We know this player can freeze and a reboot allows us to go back and see the complete scene. To rule out the player as the problem, we checked for a similar problem with other 4K UHD Blu-rays. We encountered the usual problems but not this same problem. One person says this 4K UHD disk plays without problems on an Xbox Series X gaming console. No one should have to pay that much just to get through a movie without a glitch. After requesting an even exchange that same day, a replacement arrived one week later on October 19, 2021. Naturally, as you would do, we checked different places on the new disk. Yes, there were places where the new disk showed the usual problems and my hopes were getting up. Now we went to about 54 minutes and, as Gawain turns into the gloomy dark facing away from the camera, the film stopped at about 54 minutes and 2 seconds on the same eerie image as the first disk. This time we waited a few minutes and eventually it started again at 89 minutes. We repeated this exercise a couple of times with the same result. Then we tried, starting around 50 minutes, fast-forwarding. While fast-forwarding, the image skipped at around 54 minutes to 67 minutes. Using scene selection, we tried to access some time in the interval between 54 minutes and 67 minutes and the disk jittered and froze at 59 minutes.