Cineluxe picks some old and new films that showcase all that a high-end home cinema can do.

Rather than give you a list featuring the same old demo clips — Ready Player One, A Star is Born, Mad Max: Fury Road, Unbroken — we thought we would suggest some titles you hadn’t considered with a mix of old and new that all look and sound great in a luxury home theater!  

For more recommendations, check out Cineluxe’s list of 4K HDR Essentials and Great Dolby Atmos Demos.

Dune (2021)

The 4K HDR presentation is the very definition of reference-quality, with the most effective application of high dynamic range grading to date. And if you’re a Dolby Atmos junkie who keeps a mental running tally of how frequently your surround and overhead speakers — and subwoofers — are pushed to their limits, you’re going to be in absolute aural heaven here. Read the Cineluxe review.

 

The Empire Strikes Back

Fully restored and taken from a 4K digital intermediate, Empire has never looked as good as it does here. And the Atmos soundtrack does an equally impressive job of bringing the film up to modern sonic standards, with the mixers taking every opportunity to have ships and objects flying or rumbling past overhead. Read the Cineluxe review.

Kong: Skull Island

This movie is a great way to show what a Dolby Atmos mix can do, with something almost constantly going on — including big dynamic effects, lots of flyovers, and tons of ambient jungle sounds like bugs and wind rustling leaves in trees. All around, Skull Island is a surprisingly fun time that makes for a great-looking-and-sounding event in your home theater. Read the Cineluxe review.

 

The Shining

One of best 4K transfers to date, if not the best. This is the way the movie looked in theaters the day it opened, with many of images having an almost 3D quality that helps enhance the uncanny sense of being trapped with the characters in the Overlook Hotel. Read the Cineluxe review.

The Wizard of Oz

Not the first film you’d think of as demo fodder, but one that’s likely to be in a lot of people’s collections. The 4K transfer allows the movie to reclaim its original color palette, which means bold Technicolor highlights like the Wicked Witch’s green face and Dorothy’s ruby slippers and the more subtle range of the Lullaby League’s pastels both ring true. Read the Cineluxe review.

 

Encanto

Computer animation certainly lends itself to HDR and to delivering bright, vibrant, beautiful images, and Encanto has vibrant tropical colors that burst off the screen, with tons of detail such like small frays in rope, stitches in fabric, the texture of stone or tile, and literally individual grains of sand. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s original songs are the sonic star of the Dolby Atmos soundtrack, with the mix giving singers’ voices space to spread across the front of the room and even up into the ceiling. Read the Cineluxe review.