"Lovingly restored and featured on a disc with a bevy of solid extras, this 20th Century Fox Special Edition of The Hustler could be used as a template for releasing other classic movies on DVD. Listed at a budget price, the disc features a pristine widescreen anamorphic transfer that shows off Eugene Schuftan's starkly beautiful black-and-white Oscar-winning cinematography. Paul Newman should have won an Academy Award for his typically exceptional performance in The Hustler and he's featured in both the engaging audio commentary track and in a much better than average making-of documentary entitled ""The Huster: The Inside Story."" The kind of gritty, tough yet humanistic movie that mainstream Hollywood just doesn't make anymore, both the commentary track and the documentary about The Hustler should be of interest to filmmakers, students, and fans alike. The DVD also contains a featurette on how to do the trick pool shoots that are contained in the movie and the good people at 20th Century Fox have close-captioned the disc for the hearing impaired. The Dolby Digital 2.0 audio track comes in both stereo and mono (the original film was released in mono) and the track sounds clean and well balanced in either version. This quality disc is worthy of the upscale Criterion Collection, yet the extremely reasonable list price on The Hustler disc is less than half of what consumers so often pay for lavishly produced DVD reissues such as this. If only the major studios treated all of their classic films in the same loving manner which they've treated The Hustler."
