ADDITION: Arrow - Region FREE - Blu-ray November 15': The new 4K restoration by the Czech National Film Archive (as was Arrow's recent Blu-ray of The Firemen's Ball) looks very film-like in HD. The Arrow 1080P is a shade darker and has beautiful textures. The transfer is dual-layered with a max'ed out bitrate. It may gain a small amount of information on the top and sides - losing a sliver on the bottom. It looks impressive in-motion - another very pleasing HD transfer of a Czech New Wave masterpiece.

Arrow go with a linear PCM Audio 1.0 channel mono, original Czech, track at 1152 kbps (24-bit). Likewise, it seems very pleasing to me - flat but exporting the rail yard sounds with minor depth. The score by Jirí Sust and everything sounds quite crisp via the uncompressed transfer. There are optional English subtitles on the region FREE Blu-ray disc.

Arrow, as usual, add some great supplements - we get a 24-minute appreciation by Peter Hames, author of The Czechoslovak New Wave and Slovak Cinema: Theme and Tradition (2009). He discusses director Jirí Menzel and many aspects of pre-production offering a personal appreciation of one of the key films that inspired him to start serious research into Czech Cinema - and it's extremely informative - almost like a visual essay. There are archival interviews with director Jirí Menzel, cinematographer Jaromír Sofr and film historian Jan Luke running almost 9-minutes in total. They are taken from Martin Sulik's documentary 25 from the Sixties (2010) exploring important films from the Czechoslovak New Wave. I was especially keen on Closely Observed Films - 48-minutes of Michael Brooke exploring the six-film collaboration between Menzel and novelist Bohumil Hrabal (a key writer for the genre). The package has a reversible sleeve featuring two pieces of artwork from the original release and a 24-page liner notes booklet with contemporary reviews and an essay by Jonathan Owen as well as film credits, notes on the restoration and photos. This is dual-format with a DVD included.