Blu-ray

Battle: Los Angeles desperately wants to be the Hurt Locker of alien invasion movies. Unsurprisingly, it isn’t. Despite all of the attempts at cinema vérité-style naturalism on show here (shaky-cams and crash zooms abound) there’s none of the intelligence of Kathryn Bigelow’s film at work here. Instead what we have is a traditional gung-ho action flick that feels more like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare - The Movie, only replacing fictional Middle Eastern-types with equally fictional extra-terrestrial invaders. That’s not to say the film isn’t fun. Behind all of the lazy characterisation and obvious plotting lies 116-minutes of enjoyable action and spectacle – just the thing then for those of you who have got bored of spinning ID4 on Blu-ray over and over again.

The second of the BFI's 'The Soviet Influence' releases is notable for marking the UK HD debut of that best-known of all Soviet films – Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. While still riddled with damage, the stability and clarity of the 1.33:1 image (encoded at the authentic 18fps) is pretty special. Joining …it is Drifters (shown below), a UK film about a fishing fleet that draws visual inspiration from Eisenstein's classic, plus three extra short films (all also restored in 1080p). A booklet of essays is also included that helps put the films in context.

Oscar-nominated indie film that's either a heart-warming piece of fantasy-drama or a cynically romanticised look at black rural poverty, depending on your point of view. Here at HCC we're caught somewhere in the middle. While the 16mm source hardly makes for the glossiest hi-def experience, those who take to the film's pop music video aesthetic will find plenty to admire in the accuracy of the textured, grainy AVC 1.78:1 1080p encode. The DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix is far more cutting-edge, bringing the film's reanimated prehistoric creatures (seriously) to life with relish. Extras include a 22-min Making of..., a 15-min featurette on the cast, nine deleted scenes with optional commentary, the trailer and a 26-min short film.

Beauty and the Beast ranks up there amongst Disney’s animated crown jewels. A critical and commercial smash, this charming film even held the distinction of being the only animation to be nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award until Pixar’s Up got the nod earlier this year.

This tense psychological thriller stars Toby Jones as an English sound engineer working on the audio mix for a horror film in '70s Italy. Heavily indebted to the films of Argento, Fulci and their ilk, it's an impressive homage, albeit one that can't quite deliver a suitably grandiose pay-off to its escalating build-up. The BD offers satisfyingly rich and warm AVC 1.85:1 1080p visuals, plus plenty of extras, but (fittingly) the real star is the DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack, with its almost fetishistic attention to detail and uncanny ability to unsettle in a way visuals rarely manage.

Boy genius Hiro Hamada is content to while away his talents building robots to compete in illegal brawls until his older brother Tadashi invites him along to see the work he's been doing at the 'Nerd Lab' at San Fransokyo Tech. There he introduces Hiro to fellow students Go-Go, Honey Lemon and Wasabi, as well as Baymax, a cuddly nursing robot he has been working on.