Shaft (1971), directed by Gordon Parks, Criterion 4k remaster, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including stereo remaster, original theatrical mono, and English subtitles.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067741/

Video encoded in two-pass 12.0 Mbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image.

English SDH subtitles OCRed, proofed and corrected.

Note : The film that, along with Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, started or at least popularized the Blaxploitation genre, finally gets a 4k remaster from Criterion, and it's a doozy. Richard Roundtree is suave and cool with infinite swagger, the portrait of early 70s NYC is grimy and gritty, the mob conflict is low-stakes but very well executed, and the soundtrack is of course incredible. An iconic landmark in American genre film.

John Shaft is a private investigator who's got it all under control, until some thugs show up at his office and he ends up throwing one of them out the window. It turns out they were there on the orders of Bumpy Jonas, a Harlem crime boss whose daughter has been kidnapped, apparently by Black radicals, and he'll do anything to get her back. But when Shaft maneuvers his way around the police's investigation and finds an old friend who's involved in radical politics, whose comrades promptly get murdered by unseen assailants with machine guns, it's starting to look like this is about more than just a kidnapped girl.

This brand new Criterion Collection 4k remaster looks pretty great, completely clean, very nice contrast and color (the cinematography in this is very contrasty and dark, but, in my opinion, quite beautiful), but unfortunately the extremely prominent grain was giving me a lot of trouble with getting a good encode, even at high bitrates, so this encode has a first for me: I've applied a conservative grain reduction to the entire film. There's still plenty of grain left, and in no way will this look oversmooth or plasticky, but this reduction, about 30%, allowed me to get a much cleaner and more artifact-free encode, and I think the overall viewing experience is improved. I'm open to feedback on this, I would love to hear your thoughts. The remastered stereo sounds fine, although I'm a bit disappointed by the lack of commentary tracks.

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