Physical Specimens: New 4K Reviews, Including The Wages of Fear and Amadeus

This week in Physical Specimens, our biweekly round-up of new physical media, we review new 4K UHD releases of Mick Jagger’s first movie, one of the most acclaimed films of the 1980s, and a European classic that might be the most painfully suspenseful movie ever made.

The Wages of Fear

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s unbearably tense thriller is finally available in 4K in America, a year after its European release, thanks to Criterion. This darkly pessimistic condemnation of the whole damn human condition might seem needlessly cruel today, but try to imagine what it must have been like to be alive in 1953, less than a decade after the carnage of World War II and the revelations of the Holocaust and the creation of a weapon that could destroy all life on earth. Who can blame anybody from that era for making a film this bleak and misanthropic, especially a Frenchman who had briefly been banned for life from making movies in France after the pragmatic but morally indefensible decision to work for a German state-owned studio in Nazi-Occupied France? The Wages of Fear is a brutal but entirely appropriate response to the death and destruction of the 20th century.  

The movie’s pitch black core is clear from the first shot, where a naked child plays with cockroaches tied to a string in a pothole on a dusty road. A group of desperate, impoverished men loiter outside a rundown bar in a small South American shanty town, struggling to survive in a world that doesn’t care if they live or die. An American oil company is sucking the wealth and resources out of the unnamed country, their jobs the only solid employment around, even if the local workers are drastically underpaid and risking their lives every day. A fire breaks out at one of the oil wells, killing several of the workers and halting production; the only way to put it out requires a dangerous amount of highly combustible nitroglycerin, and the only way to get it there is to drive it in trucks across rugged terrain and barely maintained roads. Their normal drivers are union members who would never agree to such a deadly task, so the oil company offers a life-altering sum of $2,000 apiece to four of the men from the village—two Frenchmen, an Italian, and a Dutchman. They agree to haul the nitroglycerin in two trucks with a steady distance between them, in case one of the trucks explodes. The stress and fear this instills in them drives the bulk of the film, which includes probably the longest, most sustained escalation of tension in cinematic history. 

That constant threat of unexpected, unpreventable explosion is obviously a direct response to the bomb and living in a world where somebody could press a button and almost instantly kill hundreds of thousands of people on the other side of the world. Clouzot’s relentless, withering contempt for American-style capitalism and corporate indifference to humanity makes just as much of an impression, especially today, as one unelected billionaire is somehow being allowed to dismantle America’s government and the whole order of the post-World War II Western world. Sure, it’s not remotely subtle when the two drivers played by Yves Montand and Charles Vanel almost drown in a sea of oil late in the film, but there’s also nothing subtle about a world that’s mechanized death on a mass scale and that allows the exploitation and corporate imperialism that drove American hegemony after the war. A movie like this needs to be inflexible in its single-minded drive towards an almost comically hopeless ending, and Clouzot doesn’t let up for a second. I don’t know if anybody could’ve made a movie like this except for a Frenchman, and it makes sense that it was one who had to make morally repugnant choices to survive during World War II. William Friedkin adapted the same novel with 1977’s similarly unflinching Sorcerer; as great as that film is, it can’t match the tension or clarity of vision of The Wages of Fear. 

The Wages of Fear
Original Release: 1953
Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Format: 4K UHD + Blu-ray
Label: Criterion
Release Date: March 4, 2025

Amadeus

Have you ever felt like you’ve seen a movie even when you haven’t, simply because of how much it’s been referenced by other pop culture? I’ve always felt that way about Amadeus. I mean, I’ve seen the Mr. Show sketch; I’m good. Right? 

Well, no, obviously. Milos Forman’s epic examination of artistic genius doubles as a portrait of the greatest hater to ever live, Antonio Salieri—or at least would, if the historical Salieri was anywhere near as jealous and petty as F. Murray Abraham’s portrayal. This sumptuous period drama looks at Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s last decade of life, a period when he lived and worked in Vienna, producing some of his greatest and most important works. Salieri is the court composer for the Holy Roman Emperor, earning him much greater acclaim and financial security than Mozart, which means little to Salieri when he realizes Mozart is a far more inspired, ambitious, and talented composer. And because Mozart, as portrayed by Tom Hulce, is also an immature, obscene vulgarian, that means God must really hate Salieri, and so the once-pious court composer decides to destroy Mozart to get back at the Creator. Forman recreates pivotal Mozart works like The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni as shadows of Mozart’s manic genius and Salieri’s debilitating combination of boundless admiration for Mozart’s music and utter contempt for his person, as both actors brilliantly capture the inner workings of these two men. (Also let’s share some praise for Elizabeth Berridge, who doesn’t get enough for her strong depiction of Mozart’s steely, confident wife Constanze.) It’s an exhilarating film that goes by much faster than you’d expect from its 160-minute running time. Besides being technically pristine, this 4K restoration also marks the return of the original theatrical version of the film; a three-hour version billed as a “director’s cut” (despite Forman’s preference for the film that played in theaters) was the only legally available version of Amadeus for over 20 years.

Amadeus
Original Release: 1984
Director: Milos Forman
Format: 4K UHD + Blu-ray
Label: Warner Bros.
Release Date: February 25, 2025

Performance

Speaking of musicians, Criterion also recently released a 4K restoration of Mick Jagger’s first acting performance, in Donald Callem and Nicolas Roeg’s aptly named psychosexual drug trip Performance. Jagger’s a reclusive, retired rock star in a polycule with Anita Pallenberg and Michèle Breton, and James Fox is a violent gangster in hiding who just rented out their basement. These two very different alpha males initially spar for dominance, but quickly become fascinated by each other, facilitated in part by the psychedelic mushrooms Fox unwittingly consumes. Performance’s dizzying edits and proto-music video flourishes give it a visual identity as flashy as its Swinging London setting, and Fox’s drug-induced exploration of femininity contrasts the sexual ambiguity of hippies and rock stars like Jagger (and the whole incoming glam movement) with the tightly defined masculinity found in British and Western culture in the late ‘60s. Both Fox’s textbook perpetuation of a Playboy-and-hi-fi James Bondian precursor to lad culture and Jagger’s embrace of long hair and that one-sided kind of hippie sexual liberation that always benefitted men more than women are a performance, Callem and Roeg argue, and the lines between them are far easier to blur than either Fox or Jagger’s characters would like to admit. Despite its rigidly tight editing, Performance is a pretty slow and shaggy film once Fox enters Jagger’s orbit, but it becomes richly satisfying as these two different examples of machismo start to slowly trade places. And if you’re only interested because of the Stones, it’s entirely worth it for the “Memo from Turner” scene.   

Performance
Original Release: 1970
Director: Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg
Format: 4K UHD + Blu-ray
Label: Criterion
Release Date: February 25, 2025

Notable Upcoming 4K Releases

March 11, 2025
Daylight, 1996, Kino Lorber
Thief, 1981, Criterion
Trick or Treat, 1986, Synapse Films
Weird Science, 1985, Arrow

March 18, 2025
Deep Blue Sea, 1999, Arrow
Forbidden World, 1982, Shout Factory
The General’s Daughter, 1999, Kino Lorber
Godzilla vs. Biollante, 1989, Criterion
Harlequin, 1980, Powerhouse Films
Thirst, 1979, Powerhouse Films
Tommy, 1975, Shout Factory
Wolf Man, 2025, Universal Studios

March 25, 2025
Antiviral, 2012, Severin
Babygirl, 2024, A24
Black Sheep, 1996, Kino Lorber
Bring It On, 2000, Shout Factory
The Brutalist, 2024, A24
Choose Me, 1981, Criterion
Delicatessen, 1991, Severin
Desperado, 1995, Arrow
Don’t Torture a Duckling, 1972, Arrow
Hookers on Davie, 1984, Canadian International Pictures
Night Moves, 1975, Criterion
Night of the Creeps, 1986, Shout Factory
The Possession of Joel Delaney, 1972, Vinegar Syndrome
Suddenly in the Dark, 1981, Terror Vision
Venom, 1981, Blue Underground

April 1, 2025
Companion, 2025, Warner Bros.
A Complete Unknown, 2024, Disney / Buena Vista
Flight Risk, 2025, Lionsgate
Harbin, 2024, Well Go USA
Love Hurts, 2025, Universal
Mufasa: The Lion King, 2024, Disney / Buena Vista
Renfield, 2023, Shout Factory
Summer Wars, 2009, Shout Factory
Ugetsu, 1953, Criterion

April 3, 2025
Re-Animator, 1985, Ignite

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.