The Other Boleyn Girl

When he begs her to give herself to him, Anne--wearing a Carrie Bradshaw-esque "B" pendant on her neck--counters, "Make me your Queen." Is the audience really supposed to believe that Henry the VIII--the most powerful man in the land--would divorce Catherine of Aragon, separate from the Catholic church, and put England in upheaval simply because Anne refused to sleep with him until he jumped through all her hoops? "I have torn this country apart for you," he hisses at her before finally getting his way. Based on Philippa Gregory's bestselling novel of the same name, The Other Boleyn Girl features an attractive cast and a familiar plot with some icky twists. Kieran McGuigan's cinematography is breathtaking and is as crucial to setting the film's tone as the dialogue. Actually, it fares better: Lines such as "Well? Did he have you?!" sound almost comical. But the sweeping shots of Henry's kingdom and the carefully framed close-ups of Portman and Johansson are breathtaking in their beauty and say what words simply cannot. --Jae-Ha Kim

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John Adams

Based on David McCullough's bestselling biography, the HBO miniseries John Adams is the furthest thing from a starry-eyed look at America's founding fathers and the brutal path to independence. Adams (Paul Giamatti), second president of the United States, is portrayed as a skilled orator and principled attorney whose preference for justice over anti-English passions earns enemies. But he also gains the esteem of the first national government of the United States, i.e., the Continental Congress, which seeks non-firebrands capable of making a reasoned if powerful case for America's break from England's monarchy. The first thing one notices about John Adams' dramatizations of congress' proceedings, and the fervent pro-independence violence in the streets of Boston and elsewhere, is that America's roots don't look pretty or idealized here. Some horrendous things happen in the name of protest, driving Adams to push the cause of independence in a legitimate effort to get on with a revolutionary war under the command of George Washington. But the process isn't easy: not every one of the 13 colonies-turned-states is ready to incur the wrath of England, and behind-the-scenes negotiations prove as much a part of 18th century congressional sessions as they do today.

The Godfather

When the Shooting Stopped," a fine study of post-production on The Godfather, with several surprising and fascinating facts. Among emerging details is an explanation of why Michael Corleone's scream toward the end of The Godfather III is silenced out. (Hint: it was meant to be the inverse of a sound effect in the first movie.) "Emulsional Rescue: Revealing The Godfather" talks about the painstaking work of restoring the first two films, beginning with a phone call from Coppola to Steven Spielberg (after the latter's DreamWorks studio became part of the Viacom family) asking if he'd request money from Paramount for restoration work. "The Godfather On the Red Carpet is a negligible series of fawning statements about the movie from hot young actors, while "Four Short Films" are brief and enjoyable takes on different aspects of The Godfather's impact on modern living. --Tom Keogh

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Kill Bill - Volumes 1 & 2 [Blu-ray] (Amazon.com Exclusive)

The Blu-ray discs of Kill Bill, Vols. 1 and 2 look and sound great. The colors--from the geysers of blood to Vivica Fox's candy-hued suburbia--are exceptionally vivid, as is the 48 kHz/24-bit uncompressed sound. The special features, however, are nothing special: they're in 480i standard definition and just the same ones that appeared on the regular DVDs. "The Making of Kill Bill" is a 22-minute documentary from 2003 in which Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman explain the creation of the Bride character, influences on the movie, working with The RZA, and discovering the 5,6,7,8s. Other interviewees include Vivica Fox, Lucy Liu, Julie Dreyfus, and producer Lawrence Bender. There are also two bonus performances by the 5,6,7,8s ("I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield" and "I'm Blue") and six Tarantino trailers. Vol. 2 has "The Making of Kill Bill" (26 minutes), one deleted scene of Bill fighting Chinese assassins while Uma Thurman's character watches admiringly, and a performance at the Vol. 2 movie premiere of the song "Malaguena Salarosa" by Chingon, the band started by Quentin Tarantino's friend and fellow director Robert Rodriguez. --David Horiuchi

Transformers (Two-Disc Special Edition + BD Live) [Blu-ray] (2007)

Fans of the earlier film and TV series will be thrilled at this cutting-edge incarnation, but this version should please all fans of high-adrenaline action. The actors, though clearly all supporting those kickass robots, are uniformly on-target, including the dashing Josh Duhamel as a U.S. Army sergeant fighting an enemy he never anticipated; Jon Voight, as a tough yet sympathetic Secretary of Defense in over his head; and John Turturro, whose special agent manages to be confidently unctuous, even stripped to his undies. But the film belongs to Bumblebee, Optimus Prime, and the dastardly Megatron--and the wicked stunts they collide in all over the globe. Long live Transformers! --A.T. Hurley

Babel (2006)

Brilliantly conceived, superbly directed, and beautifully acted, Babel is inarguably one of the best films of 2006. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu and his co-writer, Guillermo Arriaga (the two also collaborated on Amores Perros and 21 Grams) weave together the disparate strands of their story into a finely hewn fabric by focusing on what appear to be several equally incongruent characters: an American (Brad Pitt) touring Morocco with his wife (Cate Blanchett) become the focus of an international incident also involving a hardscrabble Moroccan farmer (Mustapha Rachidi) struggling to keep his two young sons in line and his family together

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Casino Royale (2-Disc Widescreen Edition)

Through the idyllic but war-ridden jungles of Vietnam strides Chuck Norris as Braddock, one-man army, killing the enemy in droves with every gun burst, hauling wounded buddies to safety draped across his shoulders like sacks of wheat. He doesn't wear a helmet because clearly his head is not a particularly vulnerable area. As he leaps upon a vicious Vietcong who's brutally bayoneting a buddy of Braddock's, he plucks the rings from two hand grenades--and wakes from a recurring nightmare. Haunted by his memories, Braddock joins a delegation sent to Vietnam to negotiate for the return of missing-in-action prisoners of war (hence the movie's title, Missing in Action)