30 Years Later, This Underrated Crime Thriller Is Getting a New Release

The crime thriller genre has quietly become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the current physical media boom. While streaming libraries shuffle their catalogs around every month, labels like Criterion, Arrow, and Kino Lorber have spent the past few years rescuing less celebrated films and giving them the kind of respectful treatment once reserved for canonized classics. In the midst of all this, ’90s crime cinema in particular has enjoyed a steady reappraisal, which makes sense given how many smaller, character-driven films from that period were buried in the rush to cash in on Tarantino and never really found the audience they deserved.

That’s especially true of the first feature by a director who’s having the biggest moment of his entire career. Paul Thomas Anderson is coming off the awards-season success of One Battle After Another, and while most of the attention has gone to arguing over where that film belongs in his overall body of work, his 1996 debut — Hard Eight — has been quietly making its way back into circulation. British label 88 Films has announced a Blu-ray release of Hard Eight, starring Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Samuel L. Jackson.

The disc features a high-definition transfer, a newly produced appreciation titled “Beginner’s Luck” with critic and author Kim Newman, theatrical trailers, optional English SDH subtitles, and a reversible sleeve with new artwork by Thomas Walker. It’s a Region B-locked release, so American collectors will need a region-free player, though stateside fans were at least in line for their own upgrade before Kino Lorber’s planned 4K release fell through.

For anyone who mainly knows Anderson from Boogie Nights onward, Hard Eight is where the early outlines of his style begin to show. The film grew out of his 1993 short Cigarettes & Coffee and follows Sydney, a gambler played by Philip Baker Hall, who finds a broke young drifter named John outside a Nevada diner and — for reasons the movie is smart enough not to explain too quickly — decides to show him how to survive in the casinos. John C. Reilly plays John, Gwyneth Paltrow plays the cocktail waitress he falls for, and Samuel L. Jackson shows up as a smiling troublemaker.

There is also a young Philip Seymour Hoffman in a one-scene appearance at a craps table, which now feels like an early glimpse of one of the great actor-director collaborations of that period. Despite its reputation as an overlooked film over the years, Hard Eight was mishandled on its way to release. Anderson wanted to call it Sydney, but Rysher Entertainment recut the film after poor test screenings and pushed ahead against his wishes, forcing the young director to fight for his version after the movie played at Cannes.

He lost the battle over the title, but he did manage to reclaim the cut, and the whole episode is often cited as an early reason he became so protective of final cut later in his career. When the film opened in 1997, it made only a little over $200,000, and for years it was one of the hardest titles in his filmography to see in any proper home-video edition in the United States. Critics have been kind to it over time, and its 82% Rotten Tomatoes score now sits alongside a consensus describing it as “an absorbing showcase for Philip Baker Hall” and a debut that pays off handsomely.

The 88 Films Blu-ray of Hard Eight arrives September 28.