DVD details for
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) More at IMDbPro »

Michel Hafner (21 January 2000):
This DVD version of _Unbearable Lightness of Being, The (1988)_ from Criterion is pretty good looking despite some shortcomings.
The film master used is not the cleanest. There is no shortage of speckles in many scenes. But it's not yet distracting. Image steadiness is pretty good. Contrast rendition is very good with deep blacks and nice shadow detail. Color rendition is convincing as well. Sharpness of this 16:9 enhanced DVD is uneven but mostly good. The noise and grain level is moderate. The weakest aspect is, once more, video artifacts. Digital noise suppression has been applied throughout, it seems, and artifacts are visible most of the time. They are more or less slight and of the usual kind (fine image detail is a bit flickering, textures in motion look unnatural, image sharpness is reduced, texture detail sometimes gets smeared and image parts moved around, creating a jittery look). In addition there are over-enhanced edges in some scenes (for example check out Sabina's hat which has a white outline).
This DVD is pretty good looking, despite the video artifacts, and should please on any kind of display. Art house movies like this often get much worse transfers and we are pretty lucky to have this movie in good quality. The noise suppression problems are a minus, but should not prevent anybody who likes the movie from buying this DVD. The artifacts are not that bad.