While the Black Power movement was reshaping America, trailblazing director GORDON PARKS (The Learning Tree) made this groundbreaking blockbuster, which helped launch the blaxploitation era and gave the screen a new kind of badder-than-bad action hero in John Shaft (Embassy's RICHARD ROUNDTREE, in a career-defining role), a streetwise New York City private eye who is as tough with criminals as he is tender with his lovers. After Shaft is recruited to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a Harlem mob boss (Amazing Grace's MOSES GUNN) from Italian gangsters, he finds himself in the middle of a rapidly escalating uptown vs. downtown turf war.

A vivid time capsule of seventies Manhattan in all its gritty glory that has inspired sequels and multimedia reboots galore, the original Shaft is studded with indelible elements-from Roundtree's sleek leather fashions to the iconic funk and soul score by ISAAC HAYES.

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Alternate uncompressed stereo soundtrack remastered with creative input from Isaac Hayes III
• Shaft's Big Score!, the 1972 follow-up to Shaft by director Gordon Parks
• New documentary on the making of Shaft featuring curator Rhea L. Combs, film scholar Racquel J. Gates, filmmaker Nelson George, and music scholar Shana L. Redmond
• Soul in Cinema: Filming "Shaft" on Location (1971)
• Archival interviews with Parks, musician Isaac Hayes, and actor Richard Roundtree• New program on Hayes's score featuring Redmond
• New interview with costume designer Joseph G. Aulisi
• New program on the Black detective featuring scholar Kinohi Nishikawa and novelist Walter Mosley
• A Complicated Man: The "Shaft" Legacy (2019)
• Trailers
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Amy Abugo Ongiri