SEXY BEAST (2000) Second Sight Films 4K Ultra HD Review

SEXY BEAST (2000) 

Label: Severin Films

Region Code: Region-Free

Rating: Cert. 18

Duration: 88 Minutes 46 Seconds 

Audio: English DTS-HD MA  5.1 Surround, Stereo 2.0 with Optional English Subtitles

Video: Dolby Vision HDR10 2160p Ultra HD Widescreen (2.39:1) 

Director: Jonathan Glazer

Cast: Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, Ian McShane, Amanda Redman, Julianne White

Crime-thriller Sexy Beast (2000) is directed by Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin), and tells the tale of doughy retired Brit gangster Gary "Gal" Dove (Ray Winstone, The Departed) and his best mate Aitch (Cavan Kendall, Eureka), who are happily soaking up the sun in Costa del Sol, Spain with their lovely wives DeeDee (Amanda Redman, Brit TV's New Tricks) and Jackie (Julianne White, Brit TV's The Young Doctors). That comfy lifestyle of suntanning by the pool without a care is upended when an old criminal associate Don Logan (Ben Kingsley, Sneakers) arrives at their doorstep looking to enlist Gal for a bank job back in dreary old London, a heist planned by sinister crime lord Teddy Bass (Ian McShane, John Wick). It's clear from Aitch and Gal's reactions to his arrival that Don is a force to be reckoned with, and Gal is nervous about telling him he's not interested in the offer. You might be thinking that Ben Kingsley is not a menacing man, especially when  compared to the liked of Ray Winstone, but Kingsley is a fucking powder-keg of volatility in this flick, I remember being pretty wowed seeing this at the cinema back in 2000. It was unexpected and surprisingly vicious, it's one of those powerhouse performances that made me push myself back in my seat a bit to escape the intensity of it, for real. 

Things get complicated when Don Logan refuses to take no for an answer, beginning a high-pressure campaign to get Gal to acquiesce to his request for one-last, and launching personal attacks and a high-pressure campaign to force Gal to accept the offer out of sheer terrifying willpower. The abrasive back and forth eventually gets a bit too personal and it turns deadly. 

Through violent machinations Gal is forced to take the safecracking gig, and reluctantly travels to London to join Teddy Bass's heist crew, and let me tell you, to this day I believe this is Ian McShane at his most quietly frightening, he's so sinister and coiled here. We've just endured the stunted aggressiveness of Don Logan, who for violent reasons disappears from the film in the final third, and then we're in the snake's den with Teddy Bass, who is not as outwardly explosive or profane, but due to McShane's performance he is somehow even more terrifying without ever having to raise his voice, he has a certain devil incarnare quality to him. 

We get flashbacks that lead to the heist, including Teddy bass meeting a banker (James Fox, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes) at an elite orgy, who then shows him an impenetrable vault he operates, with Bass planning a heist that involves drilling into he vault from an adjacent bathhouse pool to flood the vault, it's a very well executed heist, which goes off without a hitch, but when Bass becomes curious about the whereabouts of Don Logan things get a bit dicey. 

Few crime films are as perfect from the ground-up as Sexy Beast, which runs an astonishingly lean 89 minutes, but it's dense and really packs in a lot. The dialogue as scripted is profane perfection, and the visuals are sharp and stylish, and the acting is absolutely phenomenal, especially from Sir Ben Kingsley who is always great, but who has never been better than this profanity-laden insecure powder-keg of a man who absolutely refuses to take no for an answer.  

Audio/Video: Sexy beast (2000) makes it 4K UHD debut from Second Sight n 2160p Ultra HD framed in 2.39:1 widescreen, sourced from a new 4K restoration from the original camera negative supervised and approved by Director Jonathan Glazer, with Dolby Vision HDR10. I saw this at the cinema and then again during it's initial DVD release, so seeing it in 4K with WCG upgrades offered a bit of wow-factor. The  film grain looks organic throughout, plenty of fine detail and clarity, and those sun-drenched Spanish exteriors are dazzling with crisp white and accurate looking sunbaked skin tones, the colors really shine. The darker sequences like the later London sequences involving the bank heist look phenomenal with deep nuanced blacks and shadow detail.  Audio comes by way of English DTS-HD MA 2.0 stereo and 5l1 Surround with optional English subtitles. The tracks are clean and well-balanced, the film is largely dialogue heavy but when the intensity of the dialogue goes up the track capably renders it, as it does the sound of a gunshot ringing out, and the pulsing electronic score by UNKLE, and select songs by The Gibson Brothers, Henry Mancini, and my favorite track, "Peaches" by The Stranglers which opens the film. 

Second Sight's release is well-stocked with extras, we get an Audio Commentary by film critic John Bleasdale, pleas a wealth of new and archival interviews. New interviews include a 29-min That’s the Job: New interview with Actor Ray Winstone, 16-min Poetic Drama: New interview with Actor Ben Kingsley, 11-min  The Real Criminal: New interview with Actor Ian McShane, 21-min That’s Cinema: New interview with Producer New interview with Editor Sam Sneade. There is also a new 25-min Beast Mode: Creating Don Logan – Video essay by Leigh Singer. Disc extras are buttoned-up with archival extras by way of the 8-min Behind the Scenes, 3-min On Location, and 12-min Archive Cast & Crew Interviews.

We get a terrific set of extras, I particularly enjoyed the interviews with Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, and Ian McShane, but it's all good stuff. I've only ever owned this on DVD, but I did notice that it is missing the Audio Commentary with Producer Jeremy Thomas and Ben Kingsley from the 2001 Fox DVD, but the fantastic new interviews with both on this disc go a long way towards making up for that, though I still would have appreciated it's inclusion here.  

This standard 4K UHD edition arrives in an oversized keepcase with a single-sided sleeve of artwork which looks to be modeled very closely on the original movie poster.  

Special Features:  

- New Second Sight Films 

- Presented in HDR with Dolby Vision

- Audio commentary by John Bleasdale

- That’s the Job: a new interview with Actor Ray Winstone (29:20) 

- Poetic Drama: a new interview with Actor Ben Kingsley (16:04) 

- The Real Criminal: a new interview with Actor Ian McShane (11:10) 

- That’s Cinema: a new interview with Producer Jeremy Thomas (20:46)

- Finding the Rhythm: a new interview with Editor Sam Sneade (15:59) 

- Beast Mode: Creating Don Logan – a video essay by Leigh Singer ,(24:39) 

- Behind the Scenes (8:14)

- On Location (2:35)

- Archive Cast & Crew Interviews (11:38) 

Second Sight's 4K UHD of Sexy beast (2000) is a must-own 4K upgrade with a stellar A/V presentation and a wealth of wonderful extras, this comes highly recommended!

THE TERROR: DEVIL IN SILVER SEASON 3 (2026) Acorn Media International Blu-ray Review + Screenshots

THE TERROR: DEVIL IN SILVER - SEASON 3 (2026) 

Label: Acorn Media International

Region Code: B

Rating: Cert. 15

Duration: 270 Minutes 

Audio: English DTS-HD MA 2.0 Stereo, 5.1 Surround with Optional English Subtitles

Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (2:1) 

Director: Karyn Kusama, Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr., Craig William Macneill

Cast: Judith Light, CCH Pounder, Aasif Mandvi, John Benjamin Hickey, Stephen Root, Michael Aronov, Marin Ireland, Chinaza Uche, Hampton Fluker

The Terror: The Devil in Silver is based on based on the novel of the same name by showrunner Victor LaValle, and it stars as hot-headed Dan Stevens (The Guest) as Peter "Pepper" Coffin, a working-class metal drummer from Queens, NY who finds himself wrongfully committed to the New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital after accidentally throwing fists into the face of plainclothes cops during an altercation with his girlfriends controlling ex. He ends up at the psychiatric hospital not because they think he's mental, but because they are too lazy to do the paperwork at the station so close to the end of their shift. Peter dubs the three cops Huey, Dewey and Louie, among them is actor Michael Aronov (Snowpiercer), Marin Ireland (Y the Last Man), and Philip Ettinger (The Brawl in Cell Block 99). They tell him he will have to stay for a 3-day psyche hold, take a few pills, and he will be released, framing it as being an easier alternative to being booked for assaulting a cop and potentially spending time in jail. 

He's admitted and evaluated by Dr. Anand (Aasif Mandvi, TV's Evil) the facility manager of the New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital who basically tells him the same 3-day spiel, that he will be admitted and observed for a 3-day psychiatric hold and then released. However, when Pepper grows understandably agitated during the check-in and gets pumped full of haloperidol and wakes up four days later, missing his 3-day window, now finding himself trapped in the psychiatric institution for what begins as an extended two-week hold. 

Now, tapped against his will he has little choice but to get to know the other patients, we have his roommate "Coffee", real name Kofi Osei (Chinaza Uche, TV's Dickinson), a former architect, Loochie (played by b, TV's Let the Right One In), Mr. Mack (Mel Johnson Jr., Hideous!), and Dorry (Judith Light, Who's the Boss) a longtime resident at the New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital, who through flashbacks we learn was originally admitted decades earlier by her husband because of her hysterical crying fits. The hospital staff include Miss Chris (CCH Pounder, Baghdad Cafe) the nurse administrator, Dr. Laurence Badger (Stephen Root, TV's News Radio) who leads a book club, and nurses Scotch Tape (Hampton Fluker, TV's Chicago Med) and Josephine (Maureen Sebastian, TV's American Gothic).

The hospital is dilapidated, struggling financially and understaffed, and the wrongful commitment of Pepper seems more tied to a malevolent entity inhabiting the dark corridors of the hospital that a corrupt system, but make no mistake, the series is definitely making commentary on the state of mental health facilities, no doubt. The regiments of popping pills and medicated stupors without any real treatment or healing therapy is the order of the day, but that aspect of it is not explored with any real nuance, it's all very surface level in my opinion, but the institutional horror is a an effectively eerie and depressing backdrop.  

The evil entity is dubbed "Duppy" by Miss Chris, with select staff and the patients coming to believe that the source of the evil is a comatose patient who years' earlier attacked and killed Dr. Walter, the hospital's founder. The patient was then lobotomized before falling comatose, and has been locked behind a silver door inside the facility for decades. The entity is most often represented by the droopy-faced ghost of hospital's founder Dr. Walter (John Benjamin Hickey, Salem's Lot), who was a prolific practitioner of frontal-lobe lobotomies, and Hickey is terrific in the role, with a sinister clinical demeanor. 

Other regular characters that pop up include Pepper's struggling single-mom girlfriend Marisol (Juani Feliz, Civil War), who is sympathetic to his wrongful incarceration but can do little about it, and Pepper's estranged son, Anthony (Hayward Leach, TV's Tom Swift), who arrives to visit the father who abandoned him at a young age during his own mother's mental health crisis.  

I found this third season to be not quite as engaging as the previous two, it's slower, the frights are scarcer, but I was really drawn into the mental health melodrama, and I was especially drawn into the character of Dorry, who is the heart of the story here, and we get an effective and heartbreaking flashback to her entrance into her decades long incarceration, and both Judith Light as the older Dorry and Kennedy McMann (TV's Nancy Drew) as her younger self are terrific. 

I liked how the characters are not drawn as caricatures of mental illness or cruel healthcare staff, they are deeper and multi-faceted, they could have easily been portrayed as unsympathetic or cruel, but they are fleshed out, and patients and staff are shown to be unwitting and sometimes complicit victims of the evil entity who feeds off the lifeforce of the hospital patients, and who craves to be unleashed into the world after years of starving as the hospital populace dwindling ever since the deinstitutionalization movement of the '70s, finding it's food supply growing increasing smaller through the decades. 

This season is noticeably shorter than previous seasons, a full four episodes shorter, and while I enjoyed much of it I did find that back end of it felt rushed and slightly muddied. Despite the excellent performances, story wise it didn't stick the landing for me, I enjoyed the ride, but it left me wanting more. That said, I don't regret watching it and would not chase anyone away considering giving it a watch, but for me, it is the least of the three seasons so far, but anything Dan Stevens is gonna be worth a watch for me. The Terror as a series has always offered claustrophobic, confined space terror, and the third season follows suite, but it delivered slightly more personal and arguably less satisfying meal compared to the two previous iterations, but is still an engaging slice of institutional horror with some seriously creepy moments and interesting psyche ward melodrama, including some fun winks to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but I found it lacking the more visceral  scares I was looking for and seemed to wrap in a less than stellar way.  

Audio/Video: The Terror: Devil in Silver arrives  on 2-disc Blu-ray set from Acorn media International in 1080p HD framed in 2:1 widescreen with English DTS-HD MA 2.0 stereo and 5.1 surround with optional English subtitles. The series looks and sounds terrific in 1080p, sharp, stylish visuals and an active surround track deliver the show in top-notch fashion. Extras include a 4-min An Inside Look at The Terror: Devil in Silver Featurette, plus  3-min Picture Gallery.

Special Feature: 

- An Inside Look at The Terror: Devil in Silver Featurette (3:56) 

- Picture Gallery (2:47)

Screenshots from the Acorn Media International Blu-ray: