Heat [Director's Definitive Edition] [Blu-ray] [1995]

I saw this film in theaters back in 1995; was surprised by this cast and the direction of Michael Mann. It’s still a milestone in modern cinema; and the blu-Ray release is an impressive one with amazing featurettes; especially “The Conversation”; which was on making the famous scene between Pacino & DeNiro in the restaurant.

This film is on my top 5 list of all time!!! And will remain there for an eternity. I first owned it on VHS back in the 90's, then picked up the bluray in 2011 from Bestbuy.com which I now gave to my father, and now had to have THE DEFINITIVE DIRECTOR'S EDITION.This is cops and robbers at its best. Best shootout scene to this day. Best drama, score etc... Also, the additional features and nice slipcover make this re-buy darn worth it!!!

After a fairly solid but troubled Blu-ray from Warner Brothers back in 2009, Michael Mann has given it another go and along with 20th Century Fox given us an excellent new release with the 'Director's Definitive Edition' as mentioned on the front cover. Heat is perhaps one of the most definitive cops and robbers movie ever made. A dark, realistic tale that not only gives us a very authentic look at heist crews and the detectives who take them down but the toll it takes on their personal lives. Al Pacino gives a startling and lively performance as an overworked cop named Vincent Hanna who is slowly losing touch with his family and possibly his sanity. Robert DeNiro in another one of his sterling roles as a professional but ultimately ruthless thief named Neil McCauley whose code of conduct is shaken a bit by the love of a designer named Eady (played by Amy Brenneman). Both men despite respecting each other in some aspects become hunter and hunted on the streets of L.A. as Vincent sees his marriage fall apart and Neil sees multiple betrayals and a number of his crew picked off as he pulls off a major bank heist. The supporting cast for this film is tremendous with great performances from Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Jon Voight, Ted Levine, William Fichtner and small but memorable roles for Henry Rollins, Tom Noonan and Hank Azaria who gets the brunt of Vincent's beratement. As mentioned before this film had been given a solid but flawed release before by Warner Brothers. Solid in that it had fairly good picture quality but flawed in that the audio quality was not up to par. Warner has a habit of setting the sound levels for voices a bit too low and then setting the sound for action sequences very, very high. Here thankfully this has been fixed. The audio sounds very good and much more balanced. Now dialogue is clear as ever and the action sequences still sound very explosive (especially the pinnacle shoot-out scene following the robbery which is still one the best scenes of it's kind ever filmed). The picture quality has been given a very good 4K upgrade over the first Blu-ray, eschewing the more colder, grayer look for somewhat warmer and more realistic-looking skin tones and natural looking lighting. Don't worry, it's still a dark, shadowy picture though but the scenes in daylight look like scenes in daylight and scenes at night are much more refined and natural looking. Also the film does look a bit more detailed than the previous release did and given this is a 2-disc release the new transfer is housed on it's own disc with the special features on the second disc so compression is pretty much non-existent here. The special features for the most part are the same from the previous release with several documentaries, deleted scenes and commentary by director Michael Mann. The new stuff though is very good with a new hour-long Q&A segment from last year's Film Academy screening with most of the major cast included and a thirty-minute Q&A with Mann from 2015's Toronto Film Festival screening. Also have to commend 20th Century Fox for their new, excellent box art. Instead of the usual "floating heads over explosion" with a lot of movie covers they went with a more minimalistic and blue-colored view of L.A.'s skyline which looks absolutely gorgeous especially on the slipcover. I should also note though that this Blu-ray is like the previous one based off of Mann's changed version of the film which omitted the "Ferocious, aren't I?" line from Pacino's scene with Hank Azaria. Why this is still left out I'm not certain of although no further changes seem to have been made to the film that I can see. Overall this release lives up to its subtitle and hopefully will see a 4K UltraHD release in the near future so both Blu-ray enthusiasts and 4K enthusiasts get what they want. I'm personally happy previous issues have been corrected and can say this release is highly fabulous and recommended.

Okay, Heat (as a movie) is simply amazing. If you're reading this review and you haven't watched the movie yet, just do it any way you can! Pacino vs De Niro is truly a sight to see, and the allstar ensemble cast is stellar. But I'm not here to review the movie, I'm going to review this particular bluray release of the movie. So without further ado... The long (and somewhat pretentious) superlative for this version, the "Director's Definitive Edition", is so named because it is a a new transfer and restoration supervised by the director himself. If you can't tell by the cover, Mann likes to use darkness to great effect in his films, and Heat is no different. This new transfer brings out many details (particularly in those dark night scenes) which were lost in previous releases and it looks amazing. Unless they do a new transfer for a 4K UHD release, I don't see how they could get much more out of the original film on which this was recorded. The sound is likewise supposedly an upgrade from the previous bluray release, with DTS-HD Master Audio in 5.1 in this new version; however, I couldn't tell a difference as my receiver cannot decode DTS, so I got the same standard 5.1 and it still sounded great. Dialog was clear and easily intelligible, with sound effects (gunfire!) spanning all the surround space nicely. As for extras, this is actually a 2-disc set: the first disc contains the movie with an optional commentary from the director (Michael Mann) and the second disc contains a bunch of extras, including a couple panels and a "making of" featurette -- those three features alone total more than two-and-a-half hours! And some of these extras have not been released previously, so that's an extra bonus. When taking into account all of the above, I can honestly say that "Heat, the Director's Definitive Edition" is definitely one bluray release which lives up to it's name!

VIDEO: Inkier blacks & greater detail compared to the DVD version. There is some blurring in certain scenes but it looks like that's due to how the movie was sho because it occurs on the DVD, blu-ray & digital HD versions. There is subtle grain too but again I think that's how the movie was shot because I've run into this with other titles as well. Overall it is a great quality transfer. None of these things take away from the movie. AUDIO: On DVD you see the train in the opening sequence but on the digital version you can actually hear it too. Other great scenes like the car windows shattering from the explosion in the armored car scene to the bank robbery "battle" & airport scene at the end all have great atmospheric effects. The echo of AR fire in the bank robbery street shoot out scene is hauntingly realistic. OVERALL: If you love this movie & have it on DVD then it is well worth upgrading to. Especially since you can quickly stream the digital HD version to jump to a favorite scene. But hey... you do what you gotta do... I do what I gotta do...

I'm 31 and growing up I remember my older brothers/friends/family talking about HEAT. I found this version which is the best physical version of the movie quality wise and man was it a treat to watch. I also bought the VUDU 4K UHD version and the difference between 4K digital version of HEAT and the recently redone Director's Definitive Edition Blu-ray version of HEAT are pretty on par with each other. I'm not sure which I'd give the edge to picture quality wise because its splitting hairs. Maybe the 4K digital is a tiny bit better, but with the Blu-ray you get all the extra features/deleted scenes, commercials, commentary, reunion gatherings with the original characters/director and more making this HEAT Blu-ray an excellent value beyond just the original movie. I highly recommend it and it definitely lived up to the hype.

Great film by the solid director Michael Mann. He had personal oversight on the mastering of this version of the film. The visuals are even better than the standard Blu-ray, and the sound is much improved upon! He even added a couple of very short little scenes (more like shots) that weren't in the original Blu-ray. I would highly recommend this to anyone who can appreciate the instant classic heist film that set the standard for many that came and will come after it.

It's a classic heist film with several parallel subplots. While it's long, it gives the main characters greater purpose than the cat-and-mouse chase the main plot ultimately is. Pacino is a bit too hammy in his role, but De Niro kills it in what is one of his best non-Scorsese roles. If you're looking for an action movie, I recommend looking up the post-robbery shootout on YouTube. If you want one of the best of the crime/heist genre, I definitely recommend picking this up.