Tom Norton

Deckard is a Blade Runner. His job is to seek out and eliminate Replicants who….oh, never mind. If you need me to describe the plot of <I>Blade Runner</I> in detail then you must be new to the entire movie game. If you haven't seen it, you should discover it for yourself. And if your reaction is typical you'll likely be blown away by this new 5-disc HD DVD boxed set from Warner Brothers (also available on Blu-ray). (Much of this material is also available on a multi-disc DVD package, but be careful; the 4-disc standard DVD set omits the work print version of the film described below.)

I don't count myself a big fan of this widely praised film. It was directed by Steven Spielberg during his "good aliens" period&mdash;a period that included the far superior <I>ET: The Extraterrestrial.</I>

When does a trilogy become a quadrilogy? (Is there such a word? There is now.) When they release the third sequel, of course. And the Spider-Man films have been such a rousing success that you can be sure another one is in the pipeline.

When it was released in 1998, <I>Elizabeth</I> (HD DVD) was nominated for a bushel of awards, but most of them went to a competing Elizabethan drama, <I>Shakespeare in Love</I>. The latter was more accessible, crowd-pleasing, and fun. <I>Elizabeth</I> on the other hand, was a dark take on the early years of Elizabeth I, with the emphasis on the international intrigue and court politics that both preceded and followed her accession to the throne.