NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

ADDITION: Kino Blu-ray (November 2026): Kino have transferred Jacques Deray's Flic Story to Blu-ray. Visually, Flic Story favors a muted, autumnal palette of dampened greens, slate grays and nicotine yellows. Jean-Jacques Tarbès’s photography of rain-slick Paris streets, cramped apartments and country inns has a lived-in, documentary texture rather than the cool blues of Melville. Flic Story arrives on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber on a dual-layered disc with a max'ed out bitrate. The transfer comes from StudioCanal’s new HD master, sourced from a 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative, and it shows. The image is presented in the original 1.66:1 aspect ratio in 1080P. Detail is consistent. The tweed and herringbone weave of Trintignant’s overcoat, the texture of Delon’s suits and the lines of his face in close-up are all rendered with real depth. The palette has the muted, autumnal look of the photography: drab greens and olive walls, browns and nicotine-stained creams, with occasional pops of color like the red tie against Delon’s green trench coat or the teal glass lampshade in Buisson’s hideout. Skin tones look natural without any push toward warmth. Grain is present and finely resolved, with no sign of heavy noise reduction or edge enhancement. Contrast is solid, and the darker interiors and night scenes hold their black levels without crushing. Shallow-focus backgrounds, such as the street storefronts behind Trintignant, look true to the original lensing rather than to any transfer softness. Aside from some green leaning, it’s a clean, film-like presentation that looks like the best this film has ever appeared on home video.

NOTE: We have added 52 more large resolution Blu-ray captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

On their Blu-ray, Kino use a DTS-HD Master dual-mono track (24-bit) in the original French language. It’s faithful to the source, with clean, clear dialogue and no distracting hiss or dropouts. Claude Bolling’s jazz-inflected score comes through with good presence and some warmth in the lower register. Effects like gunshots, shattering glass, car engines and the scrape of chairs in interrogation rooms have a crisp, period-appropriate punch without sounding artificially boosted. Kino offer optional English subtitles on their Region 'A'-locked Blu-ray.

The extras on the Kino Lorber Blu-ray are headlined by a new audio commentary track featuring filmmaker and historian Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson of Mondo Digital. They cover the real-life Borniche/Buisson case, the Delon/Deray partnership, and the film’s place in 1970s French crime cinema. Flic Story: A Eurocrime Procedural is a short video essay by Will Webb, running just over 5 minutes, that looks at the film’s procedural structure and its place in the wider Eurocrime cycle. There is also an SD theatrical trailer for Flic Story. Kino rounds out the disc with trailers for Un Flic, Farewell, Friend, The Outside Man, Max and the Junkmen and The Outsider.

Jacques Deray (Symphony for a Massacre, Borsalino, La Piscine, Three Men to Kill, Le Gang) and producer-star Alain Delon (Purple Noon, L'Eclisse, The Leopard, Joy House, Is Paris Burning?, Le Samouraï, Diabolically Yours, Spirits of the Dead, The Girl on a Motorcycle, Farewell, Friend, The Swimming Pool, The Sicilian Clan, Borsalino, The Red Circle, The Widow Couderc, A Cop, Shock Treatment, Icy Breasts, The Burned Barns, Scorpio, Mr. Klein, Le Gang, Rocco and His Brothers) turn Roger Borniche's memoir into a lean, unglamorous policier. It is less a stylized exercise in cool than a patient procedural about the years it took to close the net on postwar France's most wanted man. The film's power rests on its central duel. Delon plays the methodical, ambitious inspector, and Jean-Louis Trintignant (A Man and a Woman, Amour, And God Created Woman, And Hope to Die, Confidentially Yours, Deadly Sweet, Death Laid an Egg, Is Paris Burning?, Le combat dans l'île (aka Fire and Ice), Love at the Top, My Night at Maud's, Spotlight on a Murderer, The Conformist, The Crook, The French Conspiracy, The Great Silence, The Man Who Lies, The Sunday Woman, Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, Three Colors: Red, Trans-Europ-Express, Z, Crime Thief) plays the soft-spoken Émile Buisson, who kills without hesitation or apparent feeling. The film keeps them apart for most of its length, so their eventual face-to-face across a table is electric. Jean-Jacques Tarbès's (Cathy's Curse, Borsalino, The Swimming Pool, Farewell, Friend) muted, autumnal photography and Claude Bolling's (The Day and the Hour, Three Men to Kill, Le Magnifique, Borsalino) sparing, jazz-tinged score give the late-1940s setting a threadbare, morally compromised texture. By the final reel, the capture feels less like a triumph than the grim end of a long job. Kino's Blu-ray uses StudioCanal's new HD master, from a 4K scan of the original camera negative. The result is a clean, detailed, film-like image, easily the best the film has looked on home video. The original French mono is offered in 24-bit lossless, and the new commentary plus Will Webb's video essay add genuine value. This is one of the finest French crime films of the 1970s, and it is absolutely recommended.

Gary Tooze