The Top 12 DVDs of 2008

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Everything gleams like sin on the Dark Knight BD (that's what they call a Blu-ray disc, get used to it). From the man in the Bat suit (Christian Bale) to the Joker in cracked clown makeup (Heath Ledger), the movie is a potent provocation decked out as a comic book. And oh, boy, is it a looker. If BD is the future of home-theater viewing, then The Dark Knight shows you why. Images pop, the sound surrounds, and the result is total immersion. Factor in BD-Live, which connects your Blu-ray player to the Internet, and countless hours of BD extras, and you'll never need to go out again. Director Christopher Nolan builds on his 2005 Batman Begins by dodging computer effects and shooting this one for real on location in Chicago. Get a load of that chase sequence with the Joker in a truck and the Caped Crusader on his Bat-pod. The hot precision of these visuals will singe your eyeballs. In this age of technical miracles, The Dark Knight earns the number-one spot by raising the bar.

HOT BONUS: Two discs' worth, with standard audio commentary replaced by focus points, which really get the job done. Thanks to BD technology, you can watch, say, the Joker's entrance and then get a picture-in-picture special feature that shows instead of tells how it was handled. One quibble: The disc cries out for but fails to deliver a tribute to the brilliant performance of the late Ledger. Bad form if that's being saved for a later edition of the BD.

KILLER SCENE: Tons of exciting action sequences to choose from, but the opening bank robbery, with baddies in Joker masks sweeping down on wires, guns blazing, is a classic of its kind. And the bonus material on how the FX team used huge IMAX cameras to shoot it will spin your head around.

Clip courtesy of Warner Bros.

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Click above for a clip from WALL-E

Pixar's animated gem gets primo BD treatment. WALL-E is a tiny, beeping, binocular-eyed robot who scoots around compacting trash because the Earth, 700 years hence, is a garbage dump. He falls for EVE, a spiffy robot who looks like an iPod, and out of that romance director Andrew Stanton hits new levels of creativity that come through thrillingly on three discs.

HOT BONUS: The best extra is on Ben Burtt, who does the beeps for WALL-E and whose sound design is a true art form.

KILLER SCENE: The virtually dialogue-free first half hour is jaw-dropping perfection, but to see WALL-E and EVE dance and later kiss is the essence of movie magic.

Clip courtesy of Click Communications

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Go ahead and bitch. I also wondered how many special editions of Francis Ford Coppola's mob masterpiece the market could bear. Well, this one tops them all. The BD liberates the trilogy, especially Part One, from what looks like layers of grime on previous versions. It just floored me.

HOT BONUS: "Emulsional Rescue": Robert A. Harris discusses his frame-by-frame restoration.

KILLER SCENE: The moment when Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) avenges his father (Marlon Brando) by gunning down his enemies in an Italian restaurant is now redoubled in urgency.

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Robert Downey Jr. jump-started his stalled career by bringing juicy life to the Marvel Comics hero. The BD makes every moment shine. And the sound can blow your roof clean off.

HOT BONUS: A two-hour look at the making of the film, and it never bores. Even if you know diddly about the character Marvel built in 1963, Downey and director Jon Favreau will get you up to speed.

KILLER SCENE: Downey putting on the metal and taking flight.

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The rock doc of the year roars to life on BD. Director Martin Scorsese shoots the Rolling Stones live in concert, and he keeps their music full-out. The Stones play to the audience, not the camera, but the setting is so intimate and Scorsese's focus is so intense that you experience the concert in three dimensions.

HOT BONUS: Songs cut from the theatrical release — "Undercover of the Night," "Paint It Black," "Little T & A," "I'm Free."

KILLER SCENE: Keith Richards pouring his lived-in voice into "You Got the Silver."

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Angelina Jolie is pure sizzle as a tattooed hottie who motors around Chicago (OK, it was shot in Prague) firing away with a scary, steel-eyed squint. Her job is teaching James McAvoy how to kill. And Kazakhstan-born director Timur Bekmambetov makes sure she looks great doing it. You'll be showing off what this BD can do for weeks, as sights and sounds are superpumped.

HOT BONUS: BD-Live enables you to access special features by connecting your Blu-ray player to the Internet. There have been bugs in the system, but Wanted says those bugs are squashed. Try it.

KILLER SCENE: If there's such a thing as an action orgasm, you'll get it by locking your sights on our heavily armed assassins stalking a target from the top of a speeding train.

EXCLUSIVE: Watch additional clips from the Wanted DVD, only available on RollingStone.com

Exclusive clips courtesy of Universal Studios Home Entertainment

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The year's best documentary details the illegal and exhilarating stunt performed in 1974 by French daredevil Philippe Petit when he walked a tightrope between the towers of New York's World Trade Center. Petit filmed his years of prep work, and that footage, gorgeously captured, generates spine-tingling suspense worthy of Hitchcock.

HOT BONUS: James Marsh's film never mentions what happened to the towers on 9/11, but your own memories will supply a resonant subtext to every frame.

KILLER SCENE: The no-net moment when Petit stops midway and lies down on the cable.

Clip courtesy of Magnolia Home Entertainment

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Even if the ending makes you crazy (as does the BD cover art, which gives away a big plot secret), you will be amazed at the way this unrated disc makes sweet love to your home theater system. Will Smith twists his nice-guy image as John Hancock, an amnesiac, grab-ass, booze- swilling superhero who flies under the influence and disdains the citizens of Los Angeles for thinking he's a superjerk. Jason Bateman is deadpan hilarious as Hancock's publicist, and a stellar Charlize Theron springs her own bolts from the blue as the PR guy's wife. But it's the stunts you'll want to keep watching.

HOT BONUS: The making-of feature really shows you how the FX wizards do the impossible.

KILLER SCENE: You won't believe what Dolby Digital 5.1 sound can do when Hancock swigs from a bottle and takes to the skies.

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Criterion gives the class-act treatment to the 1996 movie that put director Wes Anderson on the map. It's a comic caper about Dignan (Owen Wilson, Anderson's co-writer), a slacker who springs his pal Anthony (Luke Wilson) from an asylum so they can do burglary jobs for Mr. Henry (James Caan). The movie, expanded from a short, looks definitive on BD, capturing a complex color scheme that changes as the friends bungle one robbery after another.

HOT BONUS: Check out the 11 deleted scenes and the original 13-minute black-and-white short from 1992.

KILLER SCENE: The first heist is comic absurdism to the max.

Clip Courtesy of Orange-MR

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BD doesn't just do justice to the first James Bond movie, it brings it back to life, as Sean Connery scores as 007 for the ages.

HOT BONUS: The 007: License to Restore featurette shows how the miracle was accomplished.

KILLER SCENE: The spider attack sticks in the memory, almost as much as Ursula Andress emerging from the water. On second thought, forget the spider.

Clip courtesy of Click Communications

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Look, the movie is junk, a lazy update of Jules Verne's 1864 novel with Brendan Fraser as the guy journeying to nowhere. But it's fun junk. And getting the chance to watch the BD at home with 3D glasses (there are four in the package), well, that's just impossible to resist. Yes, the colors fade and wobble when you put on the red-and-green specs. But this is the future, dudes. The 3D will get better, maybe even good enough to have those Beverly Hills Chihuahuas nipping right at us in three dimensions.

HOT BONUS: Where the hell is the stuff on how the 3D works? Points lost for that one.

KILLER SCENE: Put on those glasses and you get toothpaste spat in your face, a T. rex breathing up your nostrils and maybe the longest fall in movie history.

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Paul Newman died on September 26th, and movies lost an actor of noble, no-bull talent. Watching the gloriously crisp BD of 1967's Cool Hand Luke is a fitting way to pay tribute. As Luke Jackson, a rebel sentenced to a chain gang in the Deep South for drunkenly destroying a row of parking meters, Newman gives a performance brimming with his virtues as an actor. You can see the sweat on Luke's brow as he wipes it off under the command of a sadistic boss (Strother Martin is nasty perfection), whose mantra is "What we've got here is failure to communicate." Newman communicates forcefully, especially lying in his bunk singing, "I don't care if it rains or freezes/Long as I've got my plastic Jesus." Newman, at the peak in looks and effortless cool, became a rebel icon with this movie.

HOT BONUS: A behind-the-scenes feature gives us a few teasing glimpses of the actor at work. Newman offers no commentary, but everything you need to know about Luke is there in his performance.

KILLER SCENE: It's great to watch Luke battling guards and outrunning bloodhounds. But the image that burns in the memory is Luke betting his fellow prisoners that he can eat 50 hard-boiled eggs in one hour. Some see religious symbolism in the contest, with a Christ-like Luke swallowing the sins of the world. Maybe. I see it as Newman taking on the system and defiantly laughing at it, doing it his way. For another 40 years, Newman the actor fought a war against a Hollywood that thought it could tame him. Newman won.

Clip courtesy of Warner Bros.

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Best of TV on DVD
The top shows that deserve first and second looks

Mad Men |Season One
Matthew Weiner's look at advertising guys in the 1960s won the Emmy as best drama series. The Emmys were right. Jon Hamm gives a starmaking performance as the king of Madison Avenue. But the period details are stars of their own, and they shine brilliantly on BD.

The Sopranos |The Complete Series
Ba-da-bing is the sound your wallet makes if you pony up the $399.98 (unless you hunt down discounts) for a lifetime supply of Tony Soprano. The box set of 33 discs, plus three and a half hours of new bonus material, weighs 10 pounds, but it might just be an offer you can't refuse.

John Adams
David McCullough's bestselling bio of our second president comes to vivid life on this HBO miniseries. It looks even more vivid on three discs that enhance the story's scope and Paul Giamatti's tour de force as Adams.

The Wire |The Complete Series
Some say it beats The Sopranos as the best crime series ever on TV. It sure as hell is the most underseen and underappreciated. Dig in.

Gossip Girl |Season One
Most guys think they're way too macho to waste their time and testosterone on a CW series with a title that girly. Big mistake. You are missing the most stylish rogue on the tube in Ed Westwick's ab-fab Chuck Bass. Shot in Manhattan, the series offers the guilty pleasure of the rich kids enjoying their privileges. Given the advancing recession, how long is that going to last?

Clip courtesy of Warner Bros.

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Speed Racer
The Wachowski brothers follow up the Matrix trilogy with a relentlessly adrenalized take on the 1960s TV cartoon series about a racing family that feels the need, the need for speed. It flopped big time. But use it as a demo and the disc will work your home-theater system into an orgasmic frenzy. The colors pop like a whore's lip gloss and the wall-to-wall sound design shows no mercy.

Cloverfield
Borrowed inspiration, trite screenwriting and amateurish acting all in the service of a ballsy idea — that a horror movie could maybe, just maybe, have a soul. As it turns out, Cloverfield's virtues are all mechanical, but, hot damn, any Godzilla fan will be thrilled by the sight of a monster at war with Manhattan.

The Happening
M. Night Shyamalan's scare film about plants at war with humans for screwing up the environment was a dramatic shambles, but visually — as when construction workers leap en masse from a tall building — it takes your breath away.

Jumper
Director Doug Liman buries his mojo in this amped-up sci-fi chase flick. But watching Hayden Christensen jump (teleport) himself anywhere in the world, be it the clock face of Big Ben or the top of a pyramid, will pop your peepers.

X-Files: I Want to Believe
Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) make their second appearance on the big screen and nothing happens. Except the atmosherics, which glow cool and blue all over the screen and create a world to get lost in.