Movie Reviews

Atonement was easily one of my favorite movies of 2007 and I was actually surprised it didn't walk away with the Best Picture statue at the Oscar's this year. While this was an extremely strong year for great films and there was some great nominees I felt this film had the strongest overall arc in terms of production, story, acting and direction. It is rare that a film just nails every aspect as well as this one does, making it a must-see in my opinion.

This is the last HD DVD we'll see from the format's biggest backer, Universal. Like the majority of their day and date titles, Atonement looks wonderful on HD DVD and gets the attention a film of this caliber deserves. The cinematography on display is absolutely gorgeous and reminded me a lot of the director's last film, Pride and Prejudice. This includes lush English countryside, great eye for detail and a slightly overexposed look creating a bit of a warm tone including some "glow". Fine object detail is excellent and the image is completely devoid of compression artifacts and banding. Fine film grain is present through most of the film giving the image a very film-like look. Longer shots can be a bit soft at times but that was the case with the theatrical presentation as well. I don't think anyone will be disappointed with this video presentation.

Universal sticks with a Dolby Digital Plus soundtrack for this release which is a bit disappointing since we were seeing more Dolby TrueHD soundtracks from them lately. Hopefully we'll start seeing a steady stream of lossless support from Universal when they start releasing on Blu-ray later this year. The 1.5Mbps encode is still quite good though. This film won the Academy Award for best score and rightly deserved it. The score for this film is one of the best I've ever heard and is pretty much a key character throughout. This is a bit of a front heavy mix but I was surprised how effective some of the discrete surround effects where. Panning is also impressive at times. Dialogue sounds spot on in balance and timbre and imaging across the front soundstage is excellent. Dynamics are about average overall but play a key role with the score. Overall an effective mix that never disappoints.

I was surprised that Universal didn't include any "U-Control" features on this release. Instead we get a collection of deleted scenes, a look at the production of the film and a feature commentary. There is also an interesting look at bringing the novel to the screen with interviews.

I hope Universal doesn't take too long of a break before we start seeing some Blu-ray content from them. Until then this is a superb note to end on with one of the best films of last year and a great A/V presentation. Highly recommended!