New to Blu: July 4-10

You can choose to spend your week with Marilyn Monroe, feuding werewolves and vampires, or sparring spies.

“A clean, clear image distinguishes the video transfer for My Week with Marilyn, which is practically devoid of grain, yet still possesses a warm, rich glow that suits the period 1950s setting well.”

“Unfortunately, the picture quality is hamstrung by some disastrous compression artefacts.

“The video encode is less than 15GB in size, and it shows in dark scenes or those with tricky gradations between light and dark, with obvious banding, blocking and some large patches of horizontal lines that live in the shadows.”

“Underworld: Awakening comes with top of the line 1080p presentation. Shot digitally with Red Epic cameras, the image is incredibly crisp, highly detailed and very dimensional.

“Even with the inherent darkness of a film featuring nocturnal creatures such as vampire and werewolves, the image continually pops and always impresses.”

“Sony’s DTS-HD MA 7.1 lossless soundtrack ranks amongst the very best the format has to offer … It’s big, aggressive, potent, and exceptionally immersive.”

“Shot primarily on film, We Need to Talk About Kevin has been transferred very well indeed to the digital format. There are no instances of manipulation or undue tinkering at play here.

“This simply looks like a recently made picture given a more than competent rendering in high definition.”

Wherever distributor Hopscotch has sourced its transfer from, “I doubt there is enough differences for the majority of viewers to make issue – the US Blu-ray is as adept, and maybe more so, than its worthy UK counterpart.”

“This Means War looks excellent on Blu-ray. The 2.40:1/1080p high definition transfer gives it that rough yet polished action flick look, with an image devoid of major defects.”

“If you can get past McG’s obvious attempts at making the movie look much sexier than it is with his over saturation then you’ll find a fairly nice high-def transfer awaiting.”

Also new: season four of The Tudors; the direct-to-disc Hard Boiled Sweets and Red Faction: Origins; documentaries IMAX Bears and The Wonder of It All; and the back-catalogue also-rans Dragonheart, Parenthood and Sea of Love.

For the music-minded, there’s Stone Temple Pilots: Alive in the Windy City and Hillsong: Cornerstone.