First a note about the Russian DVD reviewed by Nostalghia.cz above - a friend of his bought it for him in Moscow, in a regular DVD store, however, later they found out they were sold a pirate copy on DVD-R! Well, I guess that's Russia for you... ;-) According to vobzor.com, the Krupnyy Plan original is a DVD5, so I see no harm in using the "bootleg" copy for comparison purposes. OK, so what are the differences between these two versions? Let's start with framing - judging by the rounded corners, Krupnyy Plan shows the frame in its entirety. Řitka zoomed the picture in - quite excessively I'd say. They got the sharpness / level of detail much better though, that is, not taking the last quarter of the film into account, where the picture gets blurry towards the right side of the frame (see e.g. frame 128439). Unfortunately, that's not the biggest problem Řitka's DVD has - in addition to the above, it's plagued by the same issue I pointed out in my reviews of Conan the Barbarian, Fistful of Dollars & The Ninth Heart, i.e. "the video stream seems to be interlaced, but closer inspection reveals it's in fact shifted by 1 field. It's necessary to take the bottom field from one frame, and the top field from the next frame to get one progressive frame." Here's an example to illustrate this issue:

Last but not least, after like 15 minutes into the film, Řitka's Russian soundtrack gets out-of-sync with the video by approx. 1/4 s, and stays that way until the end...

Update: What I find interesting about these 4 editions is the fact that all of them but the Krupnyy Plan one display the blurriness on the right side of the frame towards the end of the film (again, see e.g. frame 128439). Mind you, Krupnyy Plan is easily the worst looking of the 4 - contrast boosted & edge-enhanced to oblivion, however, it makes one wonder if the blurriness is inherent to the original film negative, or solely to the copy** the studios outside Russia were given to work with...

(**To my eyes, Criterion & Řitka's 1st effort ("sans" the "faux" interlacing) look pretty similar, hence the notion they both come from the same source.)

This is a (cheaper) re-release of the above DVD that was supposed to fix the audio sync issue. It did fix it, but, unfortunately, the video was "fixed" too (see below)...