Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Video: 4.5/5
Audio: 4.5/5
Extras: 4.5/5
In this true-life story, Julie Andrews lights up the screen as Maria, a spirited young woman who leaves the convent to bring love and music to the home of Captain von Trapp and his seven children.

A pair of army buddies (Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye) join forces with a sister act (Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen) in order to save a Vermont inn run by their former commanding officer.

The simplistic plot doesn't inspire but the plethora of Irving Berlin classics are mostly enjoyable. The song "White Christmas" was made popular by Crosby in the 1942 film "Holiday Inn," and within the first few minutes he's belting out the tune. My wife enjoys the film much more than I do—I find it somewhat boring—but the HD presentation kept my attention.

As Andy prepares to leave for college, his mother asks what he wants to do with his old toys. When they end up at a day-care center, Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) and Buzz (Tim Allen) must help the old gang escape from the toddlers' torture chamber and find their way back to Andy's room before he departs.

How do you top one of the greatest sequels ever made? Screenwriter Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine) somehow captures lightning in a bottle for the third time by taking our heroes and mixing them up with a new cast of characters that include Ken (Michael Keaton), a thespian hedgehog named Mr. Pricklepants (Timothy Dalton), and the evil pink teddy bear Lotso (Ned Beaty), who sentences the new toys to the toddlers' room.

Every Pixar release has been a demo showpiece, and this one is no exception. The 1080p video encode is perfect, and the DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 soundtrack features reference-quality dynamics, frequency response, and surround envelopment.

What happens after you say "I do"? With three of the quartet married, how do they get out on the town and have a good time? They don't. Instead, the girls get together for a trip to Abu Dhabi when a wealthy sheik asks Samantha (Kim Cattrall) to visit his luxury hotel, hoping she will promote it in America. With her three best pals in tow, they jet off on a first-class trip to paradise away from the stresses of marriage, kids, and careers.

As a fan of the TV show and the first movie I thought I would enjoy spending more time with the characters I'd gotten to know over the years. Boy was I wrong. The script is pathetically weak and bloated and characters have lost their appeal as they've aged. Not their sex appeal, which is perfectly fine—it's their vomit-inducing narcissistic behavior that wears you out over the 146 minutes and the far-fetched storytelling doesn't help matters.

Video: 4/5
Audio: 3.5/5
Extras: 3/5
Return to explore the boundaries of a mysterious mythology that holds millions of viewers in its hypnotic grasp. This 6-Disc, 22-Episode Season 2 of Fringe contains worlds (and alternate worlds) of excitement complete with shape shifters, cryonic heads, belly-dwelling beasts and people who turn to ashes before our eyes. But the overarching narrative takes three clandestine FBI agents - Olivia Dunham, Peter Bishop and Walter Bishop - through a mind-bending investigation of a parallel reality that threatens to destroy ours.

Video: 3.5/5
Audio: 3/5
Extras: 1/5
In "The Girl Who Played With Fire" - the second installment in the "Millennium" trilogy following "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" - Mikael Blomkvist is about to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society. On the eve of publication, the two investigating reporters are murdered and the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander.