June was a rough month for This Week in Blu-ray. Only a few of you actively missed it, judging by the emails, but I’m sure that even more of you felt a hole in your very souls due to the lack of weekly Blu-ray buying advice. By my count I am four weeks behind as of today, four weeks that each had worthy releases — some of which you may have purchased already. So in an effort to be brief, I’ve selected the most prominent releases and mixed them in with the Blu-rays hitting shelves this week. It’s my way of smashing four weeks of release together and wiping away the blood. In the end, it should give you a good road map for what you should have been doing all along.

Sexy Japanese nurses! Bloody revenge! Teens with lascivious split personalities! An overdue library book lost in the apocalypse! More bloody revenge! Not MacGruber! Jews and Aussies! Rip Torn’s poop-covered buttocks! And a romantic comedy from the director of Daredevil!

Yesterday, Variety published the list of films that have made the cut of 20 for the race to get the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Allow me to break this down for you…

Before I made my trip to Park City, Utah for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival I gave you a list of the 13 films I was most interested in seeing. And now that I’ve come and gone, surviving another year in the hustle and bustle of America’s great festival, it is my duty to bookend my coverage with a list of the best films of this year’s fest.

The first trailer for Adam Elliot’s brilliant claymation film Mary and Max, which was chosen as the opening film for this year’s Sundance Film Festival, has arrived online.

The idea behind arriving to Park City two days prior to the start of the ’09 Sundance Film Festival was to rest up and get comfortable. Unfortunately, that didn’t exactly happen as planned. However, the movies have begun and Sundance is off to a wonderful start.

It seems fitting that the 2009 Sundance Film Festival would open with a film like Adam Elliot’s Mary and Max. It is a film festival built on the celebration of unique and innovative films, and in that regard this year’s opening night selection is right at home.

To showcase the diversity of contemporary independent cinema, the Sundance Film Festival Premieres section offers the latest work from American and international directors and world premieres of highly anticipated films.

If there is one thing that I love about the coming of the cold and the snow in the late fall here in Ohio, it is that it reminds me that the Sundance Film Festival is just around the corner.