The 10 Best Director’s Cuts Which Improved Upon the Original

Next week sees the release of Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon,” and I’m sure you know by now that he has a 4-hour cut of the film waiting in the wings, to be streamed on Apple TV.

Scott is no slouch to re-releasing director’s cuts. He’s successfully premiered vastly improved versions of “Blade Runner” and “Kingdom of Heaven.”

I’m also still waiting on Andrew Dominik’s 195 minute cut of his masterpiece, “The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford,” which the filmmaker confirmed does exist.

Also, should we believe David Ayer when he says that his cut of 2016’s “Suicide Squad” is “vastly better” than the theatrically released version? Purely based on the theatrical cut, nothing would indicate to me that a good movie is hidden somewhere inside that mess of visual debauchery.

The truth is that nine times out of ten, a movie that a studio heavily interferes with is probably not that good to begin with. Of course, there are always exceptions …

As far as I’m concerned, never have there been finer examples than these 10 films, which started off as mediocre/decent entries, but turned into grand, sometimes masterful, personal statements in their fully reinstated original visions:

Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret”
Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner”
Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon A Time in America”
Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven”
Richard Donner’s “Superman II”
Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil”
Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now Redux”
Terrence Malick’s “The New World”
Ari Aster’s “Midsommar”
James Cameron’s “Aliens”

What am I missing?

There’s a fascination with director’s cuts; they have a redeeming quality about them, especially the rare ones that improve upon the original vision.

They are artistic statements through and through, whether it's Sergio Leone releasing his, once butchered, "Once Upon A Time In America" in its original structure or even, more popularly, Zack Snyder starting an online movement with his own cut of "Justice League”. It's a chance for a director to show is what he really intended.

One of the more recent examples of a film drastically bettered by a DC is Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret,” which was supposed to be released in 2005, but Lonergan (“Manchester by the Sea”) took too much time in completing his magnum opus in the editing room. This resulted in multiple lawsuits between Lonergan and Fox Searchlight Studios. Eventually, Fox Searchlight released a truncated 150 minute version of the film in 2011.

Critics were initially mixed on it: It garnered a 61 on Metacritic and a 73% on Rotten Tomatoes. Eventually, Lonergan would complete his own three-hour extended cut of the film, incorporating extra footage and a revised score. The result? “Margaret” is one of the best movies of the last decade, expressing the disillusionment of Post 9/11 America. It would end up placing 13th in our critics poll of the best films of the 2010s.

However, there might not be no finer example of a richly improved director’s cut than what happened to Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil.” The definitive cut of Welles' masterpiece only showed up 20 years after his death. When the original version was released back in 1958, Welles found out that a large batch of the scenes were re-shot with a different director. Welles also noticed that Universal had ignored nearly all of the notes he had given them.

The iconic opening shot, one of the greatest long-takes ever conceived, even had, in the earlier version, credits stamped on the screen, marring its effect. For shame! In 1998, some 30 years later after its release, several filmmakers used Welles' notes to create a movie "that was as close to his vision as possible."