DVDFile

Discs with Benefits

The year's best bonus features

Warner’s Maximum Movie Mode really brings their movies to life in fresh and inventive ways – Neville Longbottom (sorry: Actor Matthew Lewis) hosting Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One made for particularly nerdy fun – but for many of us, the real disc-supplement catnip of 2011 was included on the Blu-ray edition of Blue Velvet. David Lynch’s lushly bizarr-o movie supposedly ran six hours in its first cut (!), and while fans of the film have spent the last few decades hoping and praying that this wasn’t just urban myth, many of us were secretly resigned to the fact that this might be the case. But sometime earlier this year, almost ninety minutes of deleted footage from Lynch's bloated first cut were unearthed and the filmmaker (thankfully) agreed to let the end results be presented as a bonus on a high-definition disc release. It’s clear why it all was severed – most deleted scenes suffer a similar fate – but to be able to actually see Blue Velvet's throwoffs with our own eyes was a reason for cineastes to throw a big, weird party in 2011.

Runner-up: He never actually shows up, but The Tree of Life on Blu-ray comes with a surprisingly thorough interview segment with various participants of the movie talking about working with the camera-shy Terrence Malick, fueling newly-inflamed arthouse fanboy hopes that the guy might show up at the Oscars for a big win in February (we can dream, can't we...?).