New on DVD

The saw is family in Tobe Hooper's brutal, brilliant debut film, a grungy, grisly horror about a perverse Texas cannibal clan (inspired by the story of Ed Gein) and the teenagers who wander into their home (decorated in furniture constructed from human bones) and wind up on their meat hooks and in their freezer. Shot on the cheap with a primitive look that belies the craft put into it, the film earns its garish title and notorious reputation, notably with the almost pure savagery of the film's poster boy, Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), the devoted mute son who wields the chain saw under a mask of human flesh. It's unrelenting and unforgettable, and its raw gore remains its strongest element. Along with "Night of the Living Dead" and "The Last House on the Left," it ushered in the modern age of horror in the 1970s.

The Blu-ray release of this grunge classic poses a legitimate question: What should a high-definition transfer of a grainy, 16mm indie film from the '70s look like? MPI gives a satisfactory answer with this release. While there are some scratches and a few film jumps and jerks that could (and surely should) have been digitally corrected, MPI's master preserves the original look of the film: the grain, the drab '70s colors, the gloomy darkness of the house as I remember it from the 35mm blow-up prints that played in theaters. The Blu-ray disc features all of the major supplements from MPI's earlier "2-Disc Ultimate Edition" plus a new interview featurette with co-star Teri McMinn (the girl on the meat hook and in the freezer). The previously available supplements include two commentary tracks featuring director Hooper and actors Hansen, Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain and Allen Danziger (among others); two feature-length documentaries; deleted scenes; outtakes; and a tour of the family home (before and after remodeling) conducted by Hansen. The Blu-ray menu is well designed and easy to use, which is noteworthy -- some studios still can't get it right.

"It's not personal. It's strictly business." Is it overkill to claim that "The Godfather" on Blu-ray is a sign of the format coming to maturity? Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Mario Puzo's best-seller remains the great American epic of the immigrant dream turned family business. Al Pacino stars as Michael Corleone in this dark side of the American Dream story, rising from clean-cut son of New York godfather Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando in an Oscar-winning performance) to ruthless mob leader to modern American businessman trying to pull his family's tentacles from the criminal world. "The Godfather" (1972) has become the great evocation of the dark side of the American Dream ("I believe in America," it begins) and "The Godfather: Part II" (1974) is less a sequel than a further exploration of the family business that both reaches back from and looks beyond the story of the first film, contrasting Michael's increasingly ruthless rise with the life of young Vito Corleone (played by Robert De Niro, who won his first Oscar for the role). Both films won multiple Oscars, including Best Picture, and Coppola picked up a Best Director award for "Part II." Separately the films are masterpieces. Together, they are a landmark work of American cinema. Sixteen years later, Coppola returned to the Corleone clan with "The Godfather: Part III" (1990), a somber look at Michael's efforts to find redemption and pass the torch to the next generation.

Coppola oversaw the restorations and remastering of this new DVD special edition, which is sure to incite message board controversies because it embraces the film grain and purposeful "imperfections" of Gordon Willis' photography. The four-disc Blu-ray set also features the new half-hour "The Masterpiece That Almost Wasn't" and the restoration overview "Emulsional Rescue" among the new supplements (all high-definition). They make a marvelous complement to the previous supplements from the original landmark special edition: Coppola's commentary on all three films, deleted scenes and other archival goodies, and the beautiful, feature-length documentary "The Godfather Family: A Look Inside" (1991), a combination "making of" and rumination on the "Godfather" films and one of the best behind-the-scenes documentaries ever made. Also available on a five-disc standard DVD set.

"Cool Hand Luke" may not be the greatest prison film ever made, but it is the coolest. Paul Newman is the decorated veteran turned small-time hood one inebriated evening, and he's sentenced to a Southern chain gang where he evolves from easygoing eccentric to nonconformist hero, a man who refuses to bend in the face of authority. There's more than a bit of Christ allegory in the imagery, but it's the character of the scruffy prisoners in the impoverished prison, where the guards try to sap the will of their charges in the grind of the chain gang, and the resilience of Newman's grinning nonconformist, who can't win but will never stop fighting, that gives the film its juice. Nominated for four Academy Awards (including a Best Actor nom for Newman), it earned a Best Supporting Actor statuette for George Kennedy as the prison yard boss who takes on the upstart Luke in a boxing match. But it's Strother Martin who utters the film's immortal line: "What we have here is & failure to communicate."

The 28-minute retrospective featurette "Natural Born World Shaker: Making Cool Hand Luke" revisits the production with an impressive collection of new interviews, including director Stuart Rosenberg, screenwriter Frank Pierson, novelist Donn Pearce, composer Lalo Schifrin, and co-stars Kennedy, Ralph Waite, Clifton James, Anthony Zerbe and Lou Antonio. They even bring in Joy Harmon, infamous as the girl who made a spectacle of washing a car. The glaring omission is Newman, who is sorely missed in the laid-back production. Newman biographer Eric Lax offers a more substantial (if somewhat less entertaining) production history in his commentary track. The supplements are also available in the new DVD special edition.

Back in the days of the hi-def DVD wars, Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg both came out in support of Blu-ray as their home video format of choice. The problem was that their films were being released by Paramount, which had aligned with HD-DVD. Well, HD-DVD lost the war and "Transformers" gets its Blu-ray release. The Transformers (robots that fold themselves into all sorts of vehicles like mechanical origami) were originally created as a line of toys before becoming stars of an animated TV series that collapsed the distance between program and commercial. Director Bay turns the premise into a screeching-metal, smash-and-crash, extreme action movie of really big robots at war. Shia LaBeouf heads the human side of the cast as the high-school goofball who may just save the planet from a mechanical makeover, with the help of a mechanically minded high school hottie (Megan Fox) and, of course, his high-performance bodyguard (disguised as a beat-up Camaro) and the morph squad of supersized Swiss Army knives. Bay and producer Spielberg take this pulp premise seriously and have a blast with the absurdity of it all at the same time.

The Blu-ray edition features all the supplements of the DVD release: commentary by Bay ("So I get this phone call, July 30, 2005, from Steven Spielberg. He calls me up in his jovial self and says, 'Michael, I want you direct this film, "Transformers"& '"), more than two hours of exhaustive making-of documentaries (all remastered for HD) and production galleries. From the original HD release comes the "Transformers H.U.D. (Heads Up Display)" viewing mode, which supplements the film with pop-up trivia and picture-in-picture video of behind-the-scenes footage and bonus interviews with Bay, Spielberg, the cast and other participants. But the real selling point is the crisp, sharp Blu-ray transfer and the dynamic sound.