Drive
It got stiffed by the Academy, but Nicolas Winding Refn's stylish thriller Drive, is still one of our favorite movies of 2011, powered by beautiful visuals, some great performances (among them Ryan Gosling, Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston and Ron Perlman) and a killer soundtrack that we can't stop listening to. Just watch the first fifteen minutes and try not to be seduced by the film's '80s-style noirish vision of Los Angeles.
Extras: Four behind the scenes featurettes and an extended interview with Refn.
Click here to read our review

The Thing
Dream House
Universal released a pair of horror movies last fall and watched them deservedly sink without a trace. The least interesting of the two is The Thing, yet another underwhelming attempt to reboot/remake a classic '80s chiller, in this case, John Carpenter's beloved 1982 picture starring Kurt Russell. This new Thing is designed as a prequel to the earlier movie, but really it's just a dull rehash with none of the wit or scares of the Carpenter flick. Dream House, on the other hand, would seem to have everything going for it: a strong cast (Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz and Naomi Watts) and a respected director (Jim Sheridan of In America acclaim). So what went wrong? Blame it on "creative differences," as in, Sheridan had a vision for the film that clashed with the movie's producers. And you can probably guess who won out. That's probably why the released version of Dream House is such a muddle. We'd like to believe there's a superior director's cut out there, but odds are pretty good that we'll never get a chance to see it.
Extras: The Thing comes with deleted and extended scenes, two featurettes and a commentary track with the director and producer. Perhaps not surprisingly, Sheridan does not contribute a track to the Dream House disc, but there are four behind-the-scenes documentaries that studiously avoid mentioning the movie's troubled post-production process.
Click here to read our review.

In Time
After a well-received supporting role in The Social Network, 2011 was supposed to be the year where Justin Timberlake graduated to leading man status. But the results proved mixed. While his rom-com Friends With Benefits was a modest hit, this futuristic action vehicle, directed by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) and co-starring Amanda Seyfried, failed to ignite at the box office. Chalk it up to a convoluted premise that involved the characters stealing time in order to remain forever young. We still love the futuristic slang that the film tried to coin though, including "Timekeepers" and "Minutemen."
Extras: Deleted and extended scenes and a lone making-of featurette.
Click here to read our review

Best Picture Academy Award Winners: Five Film Collection
With the Oscars approaching, now's as good a time as any to revisit past Best Picture winners so you'll be able to see how this year's nominees stack up. This five-disc set kicks off with the 1996 champ The English Patient, followed by 1998's Shakespeare in Love, 2002's Chicago, 2005's Crash and 2007's No Country for Old Men. Your mileage may vary, of course, but we personally think only two of these movies -- Shakespeare and No Country -- actually deserved to win (and even in the case of No Country, we would have preferred to see There Will Be Blood triumph instead). The least deserving? Crash, of course, followed closely by Chicago. The English Patient, meanwhile, strikes us as the King's Speech of its day: an entirely serviceable and mildly enjoyable period piece that was the compromise choice amidst more daring, interesting films (specifically Fargo and Secrets & Lies).
Extras: None.

The Piano
Speaking of movies that deserved to win Best Picture, Jane Campion's gorgeously strange 1993 drama makes its Blu-ray debut. Holly Hunter and a crazy young Anna Paquin (both of whom won Oscars for their roles) play a mother and daughter who travel to New Zealand (along with the titular piano) to make a new family with a rough man of the soil (Sam Neill). When he proves an unsatisfactory mate, Hunter finds herself falling for another man (Harvey Keitel) who strikes a daring bargain with her involving the return of her prized instrument. Shot on location in New Zealand, The Piano is far and away Campion's strongest film and one of the best movies of the '90s.
Extras: Just the original theatrical trailer.

Also on DVD:
Jessica Chastain was in a number of high-profile films last year, but one that may have slipped past your radar was Texas Killing Fields, a based-on-a-true-story crime picture about two detectives (Sam Worthington and Jeffrey Dean Morgan) pursuing a serial killer in a rural Texas town. If you don't have enough bombast in your life, pick up Transformers Limited Edition Collector's Trilogy, which packages all three of Michael Bay's Transformers extravaganzas into one massive box set along with ten hours of bonus features. Or if you just want the final installment in the trilogy, you can pick up the new edition of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which offers bonus features not included on the previous release last year. One of the odder films released last fall was the PG-rated The Big Year, which starred Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson as a trio of birdwatchers competing to see who can see the most number species of birds in North America. If you wondered who in the world would go and see a movie like that, the answer is not very many people. The Big Year was one of 2011's biggest bombs, costing $41 million and grossing only $7 million. Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kitano returned to the yakuza genre with Outrage, a twist-filled (and wildly violent) mob story set in contemporary Tokyo. Produced by Jamie Foxx, the documentary Thunder Soul tells the life story of a popular high school band leader in Houston. If you don't want to shell out the dough for that 5-film Best Picture winner collection, you can pick up two of those titles independently. Shakespeare in Love and The English Patient are both newly available on Blu-ray, along with Salma Hayek's passion project, Frida and Anthony Minghella's Civil War epic, Cold Mountain, which finally won Renée Zellweger an Oscar. Finally, the 1952 classic To Kill a Mockingbird: 50th Anniversary Edition gets a lavish special edition release, complete with a feature-length making-of documentary, archival interviews with star Gregory Peck (who played upstanding Southern lawyer and one of the best movie dads ever, Atticus Finch), a commentary track with the film's director Robert Mulligan and a booklet of production photos and storyboards. In honor of Universal's 100th anniversary, similar releases are being planned for two other of the studio's classics, E.T. and Jaws. Can't wait.

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