This sci-fi thriller from director Danny Boyle (28 Days Later) is set 50 years in the future at a time when the sun is slowly beginning to die out. As the Earth will soon meet the same freezing fate, a team of astronauts and scientists (including Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Fantastic Four's Chris Evans and Live Free or Die Hard's Cliff Curtis) journeys to the fading star to re-ignite it with a massive nuclear bomb. Embellishing its hard science story with a glowing palette of colors, Sunshine is one of the most entertaining genre entries we've seen in quite a while, calling to mind the razzle-dazzle effects and cosmic ponderousness of such classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner, not to mention the futuristic haunted-house appeal of Alien.

Shelf Talk: The only major (read: substantially budgeted) sci-fi flick scheduled for a January release, Sunshine received mostly favorable reviews upon its theatrical release and is sure to glow in its home entertainment incarnation. The striking box art is reminiscent of Michael Bay's Armageddon, playing up the crew's deadly mission rather than the sun-dappled wonders of the galaxy. Blu-ray consumers will be interested to know that Sunshine will be one of the first titles to offer picture-in-picture on that format, which, in this case, finds the filmmakers talking about the production in a separate video stream that runs concurrently with the movie.