Heat

CHICAGO – Warner Brothers expanded their DVD box set offerings for their anniversary year to five (following Pictures, Musicals, Romance, and Comedies) with the release of “Best of Warner Bros. 20 Film Collection: Thrillers,” a collection of twenty good-to-great films, including some of the company’s most beloved. If you don’t own a large number of these, it’s a great way to go, especially since most outlets price them to a degree where it works out to less than $5 a film.

CHICAGO – What would you say is the “Ultimate” gangster film? The chances are it’s included in one of two box sets recently released from Warner Bros., separated into “Ultimate Gangsters Collection: Classics” and “Ultimate Gangster Collection: Contemporary.”

CHICAGO – Michael Mann might first seem the ideal fit for Blu-Ray. He’s a notorious perfectionist, apparent in every frame of his remarkable output of films that includes such great modern classics as “Manhunter,” “The Insider,” “Collateral,” and “Public Enemies”.

CHICAGO – Last fall, Francis Ford Coppola made the comment that Al Pacino and Robert De Niro (along with Jack Nicholson) had lost their ambition. Coppola essentially said they have been phoning in their performances and picking safer movies. “Righteous Kill” could be the case study to that argument.

CHICAGO – A bootlegged recording of “The Dark Knight” IMAX prologue, which is showing in theaters before “I Am Legend,” is now on YouTube. My review of the prologue is here.