This excellent DVD release of Clint Eastwood's 1971 directorial debut Play Misty for Me will please newcomers and longtime fans alike. Loaded with DVD extras, the movie's print has been cleaned up and returned to its original aspect ratio with a good anamorphic widescreen transfer. Beautifully filmed on-location by master cinematographer Bruce Surtees, the movie also serves as a love letter to the rugged California coastal town of Carmel. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono audio track is excellent and the scenes set at the Monterey Jazz Festival are given new sonic life on this disc. There are numerous disc extras to select (though some of them are too slight to be worth mentioning), but by far the best is the hour-long look back at the making of the movie. Entitled "Play It Again: A Look Back at Play Misty for Me," it's full of interviews with Eastwood, female lead Jessica Walter (in an excellent, star-making performance), key producers, writers, and others. This documentary makes plain that Play Misty for Me set the stage for Eastwood's career as a talented, individualistic director who refuses to get sucked into Hollywood power games or pointless power trips. After this film, Eastwood continued to use little or no makeup for actors, naturalistic lighting, real locations over sets, rich jazz scores, and tight budgets. Made for well under a million dollars, Play Misty for Me was a big mainstream hit with general audiences that also earned praise from indie film godfather John Cassavetes. The DVD also features a too short featurette on Eastwood and famed action-suspense director Don Siegel. A mentor and collaborator, Siegel was even amusingly cast as a bartender, mainly so Eastwood could get help from him on the first couple of days of shooting (he ended up not needing any). Besides better-than-average production notes and movie stills, the disc also features a montage of potential poster art that ends with the finished product. As a side note, the disc also makes plain that Eastwood considers Fatal Attraction to be an uncredited remake of Play Misty for Me.

After a rather lackluster release in 1999, William Shatner's directorial debut, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier comes to DVD once again, this time in an impressive, two-disc, collectors edition. The first disc features the film presented in a widescreen 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer that preserves the original theatrical aspect ratio. In addition, the English soundtrack has been rendered in both Dolby Digital 5.1 and Dolby Digital 2.0 with a dubbed French soundtrack available in Dolby Digital 2.0. Bonus features on the first disc include a feature-length audio commentary by Shatner and his daughter Liz Shatner, author of Captain's Log: William Shatner's Personal Account of the Making of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, and text commentary by Michael Okuda and Denise Okuda, co-authors of The Star Trek Encyclopedia. The second disc is composed completely of supplemental features, including eleven featurettes, deleted scenes, theatrical trailers, and television spots.

After the back-to-back smashes of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg tried his hand at comedy with this loud, chaotic wartime comedy. The end result has long been dismissed as the blackest mark on the director's record. This DVD edition from Universal will allow people to judge for themselves. The film, a restored director's cut clocking in at two hours and 26 minutes, looks great, presented in a widescreen format with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Spielberg expertly captured the tone and look of 1940s California, and this DVD lets viewers luxuriate in it; however, they can't relax for long, as the sound has been remixed to a ground-shaking Dolby Digital 5.1. Every crashing plane, roaring anti-aircraft gun, and collapsing house sounds as if it's happening next door. Where the disc really takes off is with the extras. First up is an encyclopedic documentary that runs 100 minutes and gives every detail of the film's making. There are loads of anecdotes (including John Wayne's and Charlton Heston's refusal to act in the film, seeing it as unpatriotic), Spielberg's own home movies, and some reflections on the end result by the film's creators, many of whom (such as Robert Zemeckis ) went on to great success. Also included is a collection of promotional artwork and selected reviews from critics (few of which are favorable). Additionally, there are deleted scenes, trailers, production photographs, and production notes. One feature that deserves mentioning, only for how odd it is, is titled "Comic Relief" -- a collection of production stills with (supposedly) humorous voice balloons drawn over them. It's certainly one feature they could have left out. Overall, fans of 1941 and Spielberg completists will want to have this in their libraries.