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.

This HD Blu-ray of Heat is a replacement for my DVD version. It's a well paced thriller with an excellent script and involving characters. The up-tick in video and audio quality over the DVD version is not just noticeably improved but exemplary. The black levels are deeper/richer and the color palette is much more tuned to the mood of the film. The soundtrack carries good punch and impact.

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!

The blu-ray comes with 2 discs - the movie and the special features and the special features are great because they go into detail of the guys who Neil McCauley (De Niro) and Vincent Hanna (Pacino) were. It has interviews of everyone in the film. Really in depth making of the film. It you want to know the background of the film and are interested in the director commentary this film has that too. The movie itself is great. The epic shootout at the end really is cool.

One of my all time favorite movies! This edition is a must have for any movie buff or collector. Found out so many new things about the movie I never knew about! Best bank robbing movie of all time!!

Good seller, arrived in good time, good condition, no problem. The only question left is whether it's a good movie. When you ask me to review a product, you don't know that we're talking about a movie on a disc. I'm not a movie critic or reviewer. You have to learn from experience. It doesn't cost much. Some people, including me, don't hear every word in movies. You can't easily get subtitles. I get information about a movie and read scripts or screenplays. That goes for all such discs. I give it five stars because that's just the way it is. No-one is to blame. That said, this movie might be a little complicated. There are quite a few characters. But I'm happy to have it in my collection. You can play it over, go to any part and learn at your leisure. The acting is excellent by everyone in it.