While the film isn’t go-for-broke through its entirety, even the quieter moments mix things in an interesting manner. Bass also gets a lot to do but is never overpowering. It’s a lot, but it’s mixed beautifully, taking full advantage of the surround environment, moving things naturally by the viewer with a significant amount of range. The film opens with what appears to be a car chase, with loud music, a lot of yelling, and things whizzing by with some crashes and screeches thrown in. To match its intense visuals and quick editing the sound design really goes all out, right from the very first frame. The film’s 5.1 surround soundtrack is presented here in DTS-HD MA.

I’m hoping, at the very least, Lionsgate may see fit to release the film on the format in the future. It’s a terrific looking image, and though I doubt Lionsgate would have ever even offered it as an option for Criterion, this would look absolutely incredible in 4K. Restoration work has also cleaned things up beautifully and I don’t recall any blemish or issue. Details are razor-sharp throughout as well, and I can’t recall any instance where the image even goes even a wee bit soft. The grain can be gritty, even heavy, but it’s rendered fantastically, never looking like noise. The presentation also looks incredibly film-like. Black levels still hold on strong, and while yes, the colours do look desaturated and come off very blue-ish, I still thought they managed to pop. The old high-def stream I sampled still had a similar look, but it’s far more intense on this Blu-ray, especially the contrast, leading the image to almost look blown out at times. As explained in the features found on the disc, the film, when developed, went through a bleach bypass process (or “skip-bleach”), which means the silver in the film stock is left intact (not bleached out) leading to deeper blacks, desaturated colours, and increased contrast. I'm not sure why this is the case, but I had never seen the film prior to this edition, so I cannot compare directly to the previous Lionsgate DVD and Blu-ray releases, though comparing it to a high-def stream of the film this one does end up looking a bit different, though I wouldn’t say all that significantly, it's just been enhanced. The film has been given an all-new 4K restoration, scanned from the original camera negative, and it’s delivered here with a 1080p/24hz high-definition encode. Iñárritu’s Amores perros to Blu-ray, presenting the film in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1 on a dual-layer disc.

Amores perros stream