It’s been well over a decade since director Henry Selick enthralled audiences with The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. He’s back stronger than ever with his most ambitious project to date: Coraline.

Coraline is a 3-D stop-motion animated film about a young girl who crawls through a secret door in her new house and enters into a parallel universe where things are not what they seem. With touches of Alice in Wonderland, A.I.: Artificial Intellignce and The Wizard of Oz, Coraline is a wonder to behold from start to finish. Nicely voiced by Dakota Fanning as the girl, Teri Hatcher as both her mother and her “new mother”, Keith David as a cat who can talk only in the parallel universe and Ian McShane as a bombastic showman and many others, the film is a treat for young and old.

Coraline is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. The Blu-ray package contains a bonus disc of the standard DVD. Both the Blue-ray and standard DVD come in two versions, 3-D and the standard 2-D. Four sets of 3-D glasses are provided with every copy sold.

It’s been twenty years since Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee’s seventh film, which made him a household name. Taking place in Brooklyn’s racially-mixed, tension-filled Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood on the hottest day of the year, tempers boil over and all hell breaks loose as nobody does the right thing. The film’s exceptional cast includes Danny Aiello in an Oscar-nominated performance as an Italian restaurant owner, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Giancarlo Espostio, Bill Nunn and Lee himself.

The 20th Anniversary Edition of Do the Right Thing is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

While Lee received almost unanimous acclaim for Do the Right Thing, his latest, Miracle on St. Anna met with almost unanimous pans. Why? The film may, at 166 minutes, be too long for its own good, but it is an engrossing tale of a black infantry division in Italy toward the end of World War II. While not nearly as accomplished as the war films of such Lee contemporaries as Steven Spielberg or Clint Eastwood, it is an ambitious project that tells an unusual story, and unlike Do the Right Thing with its despairing ending, ends on a note of great triumph for one of its characters and hope for another. The acting, especially by Derek Luke and newcomer Omar Benson Miller, is excellent. It’s a film that is definitely worth your time.

Miracle on St. Anna is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

An unusual film that slipped under the radar earlier this year, Sean McGinly’s The Great Buck Howard was produced by Tom Hanks and provides Hanks’ son Colin with his biggest role to date as the road manager of a has-been mentalist on the comeback trail.

John Malkovich, who is no stranger to offbeat roles, gives one of his best performances as a character patterned after the Amazing Kreskin. Like Kreskin, Malkovich’s character is best known for his “many appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson”.

Emily Blunt co-stars as the younger Hanks’ love interest and the elder Hanks has a few scenes as his dad in this comic charmer.

The Great Buck Howard is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Aaron Spelling was one of TV’s most prolific producers, first in partnership with Danny Thomas and then on his own. Among the many shows he produced were The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Dynasty and Melrose Place.

In 1983, great fanfare surrounded Hotel, the then-latest of Spelling’s concoctions, based on Arthur Hailey’s best-seller that had previously been made into a film in 1966. James Brolin, who until then had been best known as Robert Young’s sidekick on the long-running Marcus Welby, M.D.,was to star along with a bevy of newcomers including Connie Selleca as his assistant. The show would most closely resemble Love Boat and Fantasy Islandin that a series of guest stars would be featured each week interacting with the regular cast in a set location. The big news, however, was that screen legend Bette Davis would play the hotel owner who would make a few appearances in each episode.

The pilot was filmed and telecast to a large audience. Davis had little to do, but her name was still an enticement, especially to older viewers. Then before the series began filming its regular episodes, Davis suffered a stroke and had to be replaced. Who could possibly replace the legendary Bette Davis? Ah ha! Why not Anne Baxter who famously went after Davis’ job in All About Eve and who had successfully replaced Lauren Bacall in Davis’ role in the Broadway musical version Applause? Why not, indeed! Baxter was brought in and given an even bigger role than Davis had! What’s more, she proved to be a better fit, a big name star, but not such a big name that her every appearance brought expectations that she couldn’t live up to in what was, after all, an hour-long ensemble piece. The show was a hit and then, irony of ironies, just before Christmas, in the show’s third season Baxter suffered a stroke while shopping on New York’s Madison Avenue. Unlike Davis, however, she did not survive. Neither did the show. It sputtered along for another season, but it wasn’t the same without Baxter.

Hotel – The First Season is now available on standard DVD.

Eventually I suppose, all major films will be released on Blu-ray, but home video’s latest and greatest software release patterns are ridiculously convoluted.

Standard DVD has eight regions numbered from 1 to 8. Discs are coded only to play in specific regions, with a ninth region, Region 0, designated as region free and playable everywhere. Blu-ray discs are similarly coded with letters beginning with A, but unlike standard DVD which generally see Region 1 releases simultaneously in the U.S. and Canada, there are a number of high profile Blu-ray Region A discs that are Canada-only. I’m not talking about Canadian films, which may or may not make sense, but big budget Hollywood productions and award winners, mostly from Miramax.

Among the titles that are Canada-only releases are The Pianist, Good Will Hunting, The English Patient, Cold Mountain, 21 Grams, Chasing Amy, Seven and Traffic. These discs, which are playable on U.S. Blu-ray players, are available online through Canadian distributors including Amazon Canada and occasionally Amazon U.S.

-Peter J. Patrick (July 28, 2009)