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

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 is one of my all time faves. How can you go wrong with DeNiro and Pacino in their prime? A solid outing for Kilmer. It has that Miami Vice feel to it without the stupid clothes, which was also directed by Michael Mann. You should recognize most of the role players as well.

Al Pacino, Robert Dinero, and Val Kimer, all great actors made an awesome bank robbery movie. The storyline was great throughout. It keeps your adrenalin flowing and you glued to your seat for about 3 hours. Definitely one of my top 10 movies!

Heat is THE heist movie. It's a classic for a reason. I thought the directors definitive edition was good but to be honest I didn't notice the differences because I haven't watched the original edit recent enough to notice. I can say the HD picture looks good and upscaled with my LG 4k player to a 4k M series Vizo tv looked really good. (most Blu-ray's upscale well with my setup but not all). I won't bother talking about the plot, it's 2019, hit up IMDB for that information. But the quality of the specific item, purchased from Best Buy was good, the disk was not loose and floating around, the plastic case wasn't broken and I did store pick up that was ready within a hour or less. I think I also got it on sale for a pretty good price (under 10) so well worth getting the upgraded HD version and director cut if you're even a slight fan of this movie.

What can I say. Heat is one of the greatest movies of all time hands down. The film is great and the added bonus features really are awesome. The group panel with the director and stars is awesome and the origin are both great to watch. Definitely recommend.

10 years after the release of Michael Mann's epic crime tour de force, Heat is still an absolute masterpiece. Originally a screenplay which sat on the shelf for almost twenty years before being greenlit, Heat is the perfect character driven crime drama. Mann pits Al Pacino and Robert De Niro as a dueling cop and crook whose lives bear stunning resemblances to themselves. Vincent (Pacino) becomes obsessed in his case to help escape the reality of his failing marriage, while Neil (De Niro) is a cool, calm, collected and disciplined master thief who, with his skilled team (including Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore) are planning a heist which will change everyone involved forever. This portrait of these people and their failing personal lives sacrificed for their obsessive careers makes Heat the best film to come from Mann, and undoubtadly the best big budget crime drama to come out of the 90's. The face off between Pacino and De Niro is a film buff's dream, and the climactic LA shootout is possibly one of the best action sequences in cinematic history. The rest of the cast, which includes Jon Voight, Diane Venora, Natalie Portman, Amy Brenneman, Ashley Judd, Mykelti Williamson, Wes Studi, Ted Levine, Kevin Gage, Denis Haysbert, William Fichtner, Danny Trejo, Henry Rollins, Tom Noonan, and Hank Azaria, does brilliant work.

I rate it as Mann's best. It's his most kinetic, vibrant and brilliant film. I just goes to show how powerful a simple, straight story can be. This is a film about men - strong men - and the supporting role that he women of the film have on them for better or worse. Take Pacino as good cop Vincent Hanna: one of the most intense characterizations of the tragic hero that I have ever witnessed, as he laments the demise of his third marriage to a looser wife. A fact which he discusses with his archnemesis (De Niro) in what history will regard as one of the most frenetic scenes in the history of film. The dialogue in this scene (at the very end of the first tape, if you own the VHS version) sets up the last half of the film beautifully, as our two rivals come to the joint realization that they have no hand in choosing the paths that will lead them to their ultimate confrontation: their very natures so define their respective actions that any attempt to do otherwise would simply be a waste of time. While I have heard others say that Heat drags in places, I will concede that there are moments in the film that require more than the cursory attention. There are poignant developments of character in Heat that many would casually disregard. I am thinking of the interaction between the ex-con who finds conditional employment in a diner with an opportunistic scum of a boss, and whose girlfriend is so proud of him for swallowing his pride and not simply giving the crum a good pummeling. But there is a catharsis that I felt for that same ex-con when De Niro's character presents him with the opportunity to take just one more score, for old time's sake. Who doesn't feel for this guy - this minor character in a film with big-time heavyweights who gets to shine for a few brief moments. That's what Heat is really: a series of brief moments, some touching, others traumatic, and still others incredibly horrifying in the feelings that they inspire in the romantic who, like me sees not black or white portrayals of protagonist and villain, but a montage of grays that combine to create a vivid spectrum of film characterization that could not be found in hundreds of films combined. One of my five favorite films of all time, Heat is a cinematic banquet of intense imagery and pulse-pounding action.