'ATONEMENT'

4 stars = Outstanding
Ratings explained

In another time, after another Oscar race, "Atonement" would have arrived on DVD trumpeting its many Academy Awards rather than its lone statue, for Dario Marianelli's score.

I still don't understand its fall from grace -- it was too old-fashioned, detractors suggested. On April 15, the last of the five Best Picture nominees will be out ("Juno" arrives that day and "There Will Be Blood" is due April 8) and you can play armchair quarterback, deciding which picture or performer deserved the gold.

"Atonement" (Universal Studios Home Entertainment, $29.98), based on the Ian McEwan novel of the same name, is a sweeping tragic romance starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy as lovers caught in the crossfires of a single shocking lie and World War II. The cast also includes Saoirse Ronan, Brenda Blethyn, Vanessa Redgrave and Romola Garai.

DVD extras include a feature commentary by director Joe Wright and a half-dozen deleted scenes, all dispensable although an alternative start to a Dunkirk sequence shows a soldier vomiting after seeing a dismembered leg blown into a tree.

One disappointment: No sign of scenes shot for the movie's ending (a party, as in the novel, and featuring Redgrave) and not used for its theatrical release. Screenwriter Christopher Hampton said in an interview in September that they were filmed but edited out, to get to the ending faster.

Better than usual are two short features, one on the making of the movie, including its bravura five-minute tracking shot and Knightley's gorgeous green dress, and the other on adapting the book. That meant turning a 130,000-word novel into a 110-page screenplay with maybe 25,000 words, a task brilliantly executed by Christopher Hampton.

McEwan says in one of the featurettes, "I've decided that it's best not to do your own screenplays. Best to move on," rather than hanging around like a bad conscience saying you've ruined my vision. He ended up as producer on a film that enhanced his vision and brought it to remarkable life.

-- Barbara Vancheri, Post-Gazette movie editor

'I AM LEGEND'

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

"But the end of the world, as we know it, could have used a better ending."

That's what this paper said when the sci-fi thriller hit theaters in December. Did you agree that the conclusion was too abrupt, too explosive?

No worries. Just pop in Disc 2 and you get the whole movie with a drastically different outcome. It's a good deal less believable -- come on, how much reasoning can one do with a maniacal zombie cannibal? -- but I'll go on the record as liking it better.

In this update of "The Omega Man," Will Smith stars as a military virologist who has the overgrown streets of New York all to himself when everyone else dies of a wicked virus. He roams the streets, lonely and heavy-hearted, with his German shepherd, shooting at deer and shopping for DVDs in a store he filled with mannequins. (Somehow, DVD stores still exist in 2012.) By sundown, he hurries home to his underground lab, lest he become dinner for the mutant undead -- feral, ravenous creatures with badly translucent skin. Not pretty at all.

"I Am Legend" is slow-moving but keeps you on the edge of your set, especially if you can't resist these last-man-on-Earth scenarios. Who can? As usual, Smith is a good actor to spend 100 minutes with -- or 104 minutes, depending on your choice of endings.

For whatever reason, you have to get up off the couch and put the discs into a DVD-ROM drive to get the extras. But do it! The ball is handed to four animation artists, who trace the virus to other locales with comics that are scarier, more disturbing and more artistic than the original film. Also for the PC are a making-of feature and a featurette on real-life viruses.

-- Scott Mervis, Weekend Mag editor

'ENCHANTED'

3 1/2 stars = Very good
Ratings explained

The Disney-fication of New York is complete from the moment Amy Adams emerges from a Times Square manhole, dressed in a poufy princess gown and ready to win the hearts of even the most hardened city dweller.

What makes "Enchanted" work is Adams' whole-hearted portrayal of the effervescent Giselle. James Marsden matches her as the true blue but confused Prince Edward, and Patrick Dempsey is fine as a dreamy but cynical New Yorker whose world is about to be turned head over heels.

"Enchanted" creates a whole new world in the real world, where birds, mice and even cockroaches help clean an apartment to a Stephen Schwartz-Alan Mencken "Happy Working Song." In the "Fantasy Come to Life" featurettes, you see how that scene "really incorporates all the disciplines," says director Kevin Lima. Adams, who was acting at times with nothing around her, admits, "You felt kind of mad at times."

My favorite feature is on the gigantic "That's How You Know" musical number in Central Park, which includes up-and-comers from the New York performance scene with old-timers such as Harvey Evans, a chimney sweep in the 1964 film "Mary Poppins." "I know that Golden Era of musicals," says a still spry Evans, "and this is it, back again."

Other features of note are on the spectacular finale, with Susan Sarandon's evil sorceress turning into a dragon (echoes of Disney's "Sleeping Beauty"), a Carrie Underwood video to "Ever Ever After" and, for the young ones, the animated "Pip's Predicament: A Pop-up Adventure," about the chipmunk who helps Giselle find her destiny, with Disney magic clicking on all cylinders.

-- Sharon Eberson, Post-Gazette entertainment editor

"Love in the Time of Cholera"

3 1/2 stars = Very good
Ratings explained

Javier Bardem leads the cast of this adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel about a man who waits for more than half a century to claim the hand of the woman he loves. Although Bardem makes a valiant effort, this excessively melodramatic adaptation catches the novel's flavor without catching its soul, and at 139 minutes, it's a double stretched into a triple but thrown out at home.

"The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising"

2 1/2 stars = Average
Ratings explained

Alexander Ludwig is a 14-year-old warrior fighting the forces of the Dark in this abridged, Americanized version of Susan Cooper's fantasy novel. The movie is probably too intense and scary for anyone younger than a tween. The special effects are a mixed bag and the movie seems starved for a dollop of humor.

"Southland Tales": A comedic spin on the apocalypse with a large ensemble that includes Sarah Michelle Gellar as an adult film star developing her own reality TV project and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as an action star with amnesia.

"Go Diego Go!: Moonlight Rescue": In this full-length movie, Diego and friends set out in a race against time to help repair Luna the moon before baby sea turtle eggs hatch.

Baseball flicks: "Bull Durham (Collector's Edition)"; "Eight Men Out (20th Anniversary Edition)"; "The Pride of the Yankees (65th Anniversary)."