Batman Begins (Warner; Movie ••••, HD DVD Picture •••½, Sound ••••, Original Extras •••, New Extras •½). Batman Begins is the first disc I've heard with a Dolby TrueHD lossless soundtrack, and it does approach what you hear in a theater.
This is the first Disney HD title I've viewed, and sadly it wasn't a particularly auspicious launch. On standard-definition DVD Eight Below seemed fine, but with the higher resolution of Blu-ray, there just doesn't seem to be enough detail.
Layer Cake (Sony Blu-ray Disc). Kicking off with a bang - an explosion that rips from front to back as an armored van is blown open - this 2004 pre-Casino Royale Daniel Craig movie takes us on a historical journey through the London underworld.
Open Season (Sony). This Blu-ray Disc's picture, shot digitally in high-def and authored with MPEG-4 compression, is incredibly three-dimensional and realistic. Boog the bear's fur looks like you could reach out and stroke it, and other objects look extremely solid.
For standard DVD, Warner has collected five Stanley Kubrick classics in a Directors Series box - but on Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, they're only available individually. Full Metal Jacket was released in high-def previously, so I'll stick to the four debuts.
Tony Montana (Al Pacino), a young Cuban immigrant, lands in Miami in search of the American dream. There he meets Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia), who mentors the young man on how to succeed in a life of crime, and Montana eventually becomes one of Miami's most feared drug kingpins. Staying at the top isn't easy, especially if you're mentally unstable, and when Montana neglects the two most important pieces of advice from Lopez, his empire begins to unravel and all that's left is his "little friend."
Written by Oliver Stone and directed by Brian De Palma, Scarface is a gritty tale filled with violence, foul language, and a fantastic performance by Pacino. That being said, this isn't one of my favorite gangster films. While I enjoy the mesmerizing cinematography, I find the screenplay to be a tad shallow, and at 170 minutes, it's much too long.
Steven Spielberg’s long-rumored dream project—bring- ing the factual, Holocaust-set book Schindler’s Ark to the screen—finally arrived to great acclaim in 1993, culminating in Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Picture, and more. Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) is a clever civilian businessman and a bit of a cad who achieves a fortune by manufactur- ing pots and pans for the German army during World War II. His secrets? World-class schmoozing and an unpaid legion of Jewish laborers. He has no love of the Nazis or their agenda, but as he bears witness to their escalating atrocities, he is reluctantly moved to become a champion of his ill-fated workforce. His steps are small at first, ultimately leading to the creation of a list of more than 1,000 names of people to be kept at his factory instead of sent to concentration camps or gas chambers. This decision winds up costing Schindler all of his vast wealth, but his selfless act made history. It’s a profound tale told with great passion and indelible images.