4K UHD, Blu-ray Release: Shoeshine

By
Laurence
– August 18, 2025Find Others: Blu-ray, Movie, New Release, NewsGet More: , , ,

4K HUD, Blu-ray Release Date: Aug. 19, 2025
Price: 4K UHD/Blu-ray $34.99, Blu-ray $27.99
Studio: Criterion

An international breakthrough for neorealism, Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award–winning 1946 drama  Shoeshine remains an indelible fable of innocence lost amid the hardscrabble reality of 1940s Italy.

On the streets of Rome, two boys—best friends Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) and Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi)—set out to raise the money to buy a horse by shining shoes. When they are inadvertently caught up in a robbery and sent to a brutal juvenile detention center, their loyalty to each other is severely tested.

A devastating portrait of economic struggle made all the more haunting by its child’s-eye perspective, Shoeshine stands as one of the defining achievements of postwar Italian filmmaking.

Criterion’s new editions of Shoeshine offer the following features:

  • New 4K digital restoration, undertaken by The Film Foundation and the Cineteca di Bologna, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
  • Sciuscià 70 (2016), a documentary by Mimmo Verdesca, made to mark the film’s seventieth anniversary
  • New program on Shoeshineand children in Italian neorealism featuring film scholars Paola Bonifazio and Catherine O’Rawe
  • Radio broadcast from 1946 featuring director Vittorio De Sica
  • Trailer
  • New English subtitle translation
  • An essay by film scholar David Forgacs and “Shoeshine, Joe?,” a 1945 photo-documentary by De Sica
Buy or Rent Shoeshine

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.