I’m not looking for movie recommendations per se, but recommendations for movies that look especially good in 1080p. What films look awesome on Blu-Ray?
I’ve heard good things about Dark Knight and the recent Bond films. What else? Is there a good website for these things? Is the conversion to Blu-ray of films like Heat any good?
The Dark knight looks good during the IMAX scenes.
Both new Bond movies
Iron Man
The Incredible Hulk
I, Robot
Inglourious Basterds
Star Trek
This Is It
Watchmen
Zombieland
I use Star Trek to show off my projector and HD audio to people that have never seen Blu-ray. This Is It has some of the best sounding music I’ve ever heard reproduced at home from a “movie.”
Ford has a great list. Also, animated movies look amazing. Also:
Planet Earth (BBC documentary)
Baraka
Blu-ray.com has reviews of almost everything, with screenshots.
Wild China, from the makers of Planet Earth, is awesome. And North By Northwest looks amazing for a 50-year-old movie.
I can recommend http://www.highdefdiscnews.com/ as a great place for blu-ray reviews. They review the movie, then they review the video and audio. Both the arts and the tech reviews are fairly in-depth, with time taken to explain the terminology.
I saw most titles in bluray as they came out, and there’s never been a more breathtaking transfer than John Ford’s The Searchers. Stands up to even the highest-end digital films of the last couple years.
Another vote for Star Trek - I’m up to a couple dozen Blu-Rays now and that’s the one that I use to show off my AV system. There are a couple of space battle scenes with little pieces of debris going everywhere and epic music playing that really show off in a “DVD can’t do this” sort of way.
Up…
Or frankly anything animated. Animation is just beautiful in HD
Star Trek was the first Blu-Ray movie I got.
I also just finished watching, of all things, Speed Racer. If you’re looking for eyecandy, that movie has it in spades. So fun to watch.
Not a movie, but BBC’s Planet Earth is drop-dead gorgeous in 1080p. Worth having.
I forgot Wall-E on my list. Any Pixar movie though.
pardon the minor hijack, but can anyone recommend a decent/inexpensive Blu-Ray player?
Thanks for the recs everyone.
phungi, I was looking for the cheapest player that wouldn’t have obvious problems, and I ended up with a Panasonic DMP-BK60k. It doesn’t do a lot of the internet streaming (netflix, pandora etc.) which seems to be all the rage, but it does the basics really well. I haven’t watched enough movies with it to offer my personal recommendation, but it was the result I reached from my research.
I haven’t seen it in blu-ray yet, but I’m assuming that Sin City would be gorgeous.
I want to third this recommendation. If you can only own one film on Blu-Ray, this would be what you should get.
The “Band of Brothers” Blu-Ray only special features are so good, I kind of wonder what I did the many years I’d watched it before getting the discs. Amazing.
I love Band of Brothers. What are the special features?
If you’re a downloading kind of guy/gal, LG’s play mkv’s, avi’s, Netflix, and a bunch more formats. One caveat: I think the USB port only takes .fat files, so instead of plugging an external drive in, I have to transfer whatever I’m watching onto a thumb thumb drive. But mine’s an older model, may be improved now
Oh yeah, great on Bluray movie- Children of Men. It’s a very visually-detailed film, and bluray really makes it shine
There’s also the BD-P1590, which will connect to Netflix, Pandora, Youtube, and Blockbuster, but it won’t play video files like AVIs. When I picked it up after Christmas, it was $150.
Be wary of cheap Blu-Ray players, though. For some reason mine simply will not play the movie 9 (I tried with two different discs of the movie), and there may be others it locks up on. Other than that one oddity, though, it’s been great. The value in streaming Netflix to the BR player is not to be underestimated.
I’ve had good luck with my Magnavox NB530MGX model. Cost me 80 bucks, plays DVD and Blu-Ray, and even is smart enough to know widescreen from normal. It does need the firmware update, but once you do that, it’s fast, doesn’t freeze up at all, etcetera.
Doesn’t play Divx, but the old DVD player does, so there you go.