Some viewers have complained about the old (and thus this) release coming with a slightly lighter strip on the right hand side of the image but I didn’t notice it all – I suspect you’d have to tinker with your TV settings to the extreme if you want to even see it, and therefore it has absolutely no impact on the presentation or score. Black levels are superb, with no signs of crush, allowing for some splendid shadowing – note the jail scene, or the shot of the hooded fighter coming out of his corner. Excellent detail, spot-on low contrast, negligible print defects and damage (certainly nothing that would impinge upon your enjoyment of the movie), and simply no digital side-effects are amongst the highlights of this transfer. It was a tactic used by Scorsese to avoid getting an X-rating for all the bloody fight scenes (and also to ensure the boxing gloves didn’t look too modern because of their brighter red colour) but the end result was to make the movie even more iconic and memorable, and the cinematography is perfectly captured by this rendition. The movie’s all-but entirely monochrome – black and white to be precise – with only a couple of home videos shown within the film coming out as colour (and also intentionally faded for effect). It may not be absolutely perfect, but it’s unquestionably close, and almost impossible to fault. But thankfully the earlier edition already sported an outstanding video presentation which is undeniably demo-quality, and certainly the best that we have ever seen from the Scorsese masterpiece.

On the downside, this means no remastering, and this means that the (admittedly minor) issues with the aforementioned release have simply been carried over here. Raging Bull comes to UK Region-Free Blu-ray with – as far as I can tell – exactly the same 1080p High Definition video presentation, in the movie’s original theatrical aspect ratio of widescreen 1.85:1, as we got for the original early 2009 Blu-ray release.

Raging bull in colour