More than any other holiday, with the debatable exception of Christmas, the Halloween experience is very much defined by the films we associate with it. The Halloween season lasts for about a week — it's one of those "it's that time already?" holidays — but it's almost required that during that week you watch at least a couple horror movies. After the costumes and the trick-or-treating have gone, it's the horror films that make Halloween, “Halloween.”

So what are you going to watch this week, when you realize there's no way The Shining, The Exorcist and, if you're of my generation, Hocus Pocus are still on the shelf at your local video store? Let me tell you.

The special features section of popular DVDs has become a place for a film's creators to advance an argument for the quality of their film. The behind-the-scenes features and exclusive interviews are little more than propaganda, insisting sometimes despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary that the film you have purchased or rented is worth your time and money.

Steven Spielberg does more than his share of evading, equivocating and fibbing on the new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls disc. In the special features Spielberg doesn't seem to realize what he's admitting when he tells the story of how George Lucas approached him with the idea of "Indiana Jones vs. Aliens" in the mid-nineties. According to Spielberg, he didn't like the idea, and dismissed it entirely after enjoying the alien-based Independence Day. He was done with the franchise: "There's a reason I had Indy ride off into the sunset at the end of the third film," he admits.

There was once a video game known as Captain America and the Avengers for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Game Systems. Playing the game as a child, I always chose the stalwart Avenger Iron Man and despite my professed dorkiness, this was the extent of my experience with the character of Tony Stark/Iron Man before I saw Jon Favreau's Iron Man. So, unlike most of my analyses of superhero media, my perspective on Iron Man was rather neutral: I was, for once, a normal moviegoer, an unbiased observer. And I have to say, I didn't like it that much.

Have you ever been to a party and hovered awkwardly around a group of the party-goers, trying to engage in the conversation but feeling completely left behind, without anything resembling a frame of reference by which to understand the particulars of language, gestures, euphemisms, and the very subjects of their talk? That's what Sex and the City: The Movie was for me. While watching it, I felt excluded, like I was standing at a party to which I was not invited: not bored, really, just uncomfortable.

It has often occurred to me that there existed a time as recently as my early adolescence when television shows were not regularly released in DVD box sets. I wonder how people survived in the days before you could sit down for five or six hours with your favorite TV show without commercial breaks and before you were able to skip the intro you've seen a million times — back when you had to start watching your show at precisely the same time each week.

Bigger releases (i.e. films that you remember being in the theaters) this week include Tina Fey's venture into movie stardom, Baby Mama, and Jackie Chan and Jet Li's collaboration The Forbidden Kingdom. The consistently disappointing and yet never-ending Smallville sees its seventh season come out today, along with David Caruso's latest operatic television masterpiece CSI: Miami, which has also somehow made it to a seventh season and beyond.

Assuming you're not into CSI (and all apologies if you are), this week offers a couple choices for the discerning video renter. First up is The Fall, directed by Tarsem Singh, one of the many people with only one name who seem to be drawn to the arts. As Tarsem explains in the rather terrible making-of feature on the disc, he doesn't care if his movie is "the biggest piece of shit you've ever seen," as long as he and his crew have fun making it. Whether or not this is a healthy attitude for a filmmaker to have doesn't seem to have bothered directors David Fincher or Spike Jonze, who "present" The Fall which assumedly means they footed a lot of the bill for it.

In autumn, Tuesdays are exciting as summer blockbusters, Cannes and Sundance films, and straight-to-video horror titles all find their way to DVD. But autumn is still a few weeks away and some weeks, like this one, are pretty dry. Sure, Season Four of The Office is out today, but as much as I'd like NBC to convince me that Jim and Pam aren't just the Ross and Rachel of the 00s, my busy schedule doesn't allow for the dedication a TV show requires. Besides, I'm in the middle of The Wire and Battlestar Galactica.

So if you're not waiting for something to break up Jim and Pam (it's going to happen, trust me, and I will hate them for doing it), this may be the week you catch up on the Criterion Collection. If you're not familiar with the Criterion Collection, you are clearly not a cinephile. A self-dubbed "continuing series of important classic and contemporary films on DVD," Criterion lives up to all of its proclaimed adjectives and modifiers, releasing multiple beautifully transferred discs of excellent and important films each month.

An interesting thing I noticed while going through this week's DVD releases: although this last TV season was shortened by the writer's strike, television on DVD is as expensive as it ever was. Thus you can own 10 episodes of The Shield for $59.95 or 18 episodes of the resurrected One Tree Hill for the same price. Considering the addictive nature of television, it's not surprising that the studios would try to crank up these prices as high as they can, but $6 for one episode?

Those are crack prices.

Heroes' abbreviated second season is also out on DVD today, as Producer Jeph Loeb continues his quest to make traditional cult material into the stuff of boring prime time soap operas. There is something about Heroes that is unappealing to the full-time nerd, or at least this one, in the same way that Loeb's Smallville show has always been. Here's looking forward to Joss Whedon's return to cult television with Dollhouse, which will surely be canceled after a season and a half but will live forever in our hearts and hotel convention rooms.

August is looking to be as bleak a month for new DVDs as it traditionally is for theatrical releases. This coming week's new DVDs are, unlike our theaters, blissfully Brendan Fraser-free, but don't get excited. Mr. Fraser's participation in two of the country's top five movies means that there is a week somewhere in the near future during which we will once again be berated with family friendly one-liners from the immediate classics Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D and The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Crystal Skulls or whatever it's called. And despite his absence from our video store shelves, not a whole lot else is happening on them.

Critically and commercially, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is turning out to be the biggest hit of the year, maybe of all time. Both the amount of box office records it has broken and its staggering 94 percent rating on rottentomatoes.com has surprised nearly every industry analyst; no one expected it to be so good or so successful. It is a very lengthy sequel to a moderately successful (in the world of superhero movies, anyway) reboot of a franchise based on a character who had already had six films based on him — eight if you count the 1940s serials. Everyone knew it was going to be big, but it had enough working against it that no one thought it would be this big.

Watching Wanted a few weeks ago, I was amused and surprised to see a bar I have passed every day on the train during my summer in Chicago featured prominently. I chuckled aloud in the theater, only to see heads turn my way, the faces expressing their disdain for someone so easily excited by familiar sights on the big screen. I realized that people from Chicago must see stuff they recognize all the time in films and that it was totally not cool of me to think anything of it.

I can't help it, though: I'm from Champaign-Urbana, which somehow ranks below Peoria and Decatur on the "Illinois towns people recognize" rankings. On the rare occasion we get mentioned in a film, we throw parties, like the birthday party for the HAL 9000 that kicked off Ebertfest ten years ago. So here I present a list, albeit a short one, of films that make me go, "Hey! I'm from there!"