Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Technologies that distribute audio and video around a home are incredibly cool—if you can afford them, if you can tolerate complicated installation, and if you can figure out how to use them once they’re in. I’ve long assumed a big consumer electronics company like Samsung or Sony would invent a more practical multiroom A/V solution, but it seems the technology that finally gets us past the old paradigms may be Apple’s AirPlay.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/wwonka.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Roald Dahl's classic story tells the tale of five kids who find a golden ticket that entitles them to visit the secretive Wonka Chocolate factory, where one worthy child will win a lifetime supply of chocolate. Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum), a poor kid who lives with his mother and two sets of grandparents in the shadow of the factory, is one of the lucky five. The others&#151;well, let's just say they are the result of bad parenting and poor choices.

As we've been saying for a while now, 7.1's coming of age - and, with increasing frequency and utility, it's coming to home theaters.

With a growing list of releases taking advantage of those extra channels, why not take a chance with us and get yourself a copy of Puss in Boots on Blu-ray.

No longer content to be tethered to A/V systems alone, many new Bluray Disc players augment their basic BD-Live online capability with streaming services like Netflix, Pandora, Vudu, YouTube, and CinemaNow.

<I>Avoid a Blue Tuesday by capping off your holiday weekend plans with the end of the world! Whether we will become extinct as a species from within or without is the subject of two movies on DVD, one an environmental-disaster flick of dubious distinction, the other a classic loosely based on the Victorian novel that in turn has inspired a current remake. Thomas J. Norton and Fred Manteghian report on 2004's </I>The Day After Tomorrow: All Access Collector's Edition<I> and 1953's </I>The War of the Worlds.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/greatdad.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Lance Clayton (Robin Williams) learns that fame and fortune may not always be the key to happiness when in the wake of a freak accident his lifelong dream of being a famous writer comes to fruition, but at what cost?