If you were lucky enough to see The Dark Knight in an IMAX theatre earlier this year, you probably noticed an interesting effect whenever the movie shifted to one of its big set pieces. As director Christopher Nolan shot many of the film’s most memorable sequences in the supersized IMAX format—a first for a Hollywood blockbuster—the aspect ratio of the film would actually change to accommodate the squarer IMAX screen. The picture would seem to actually grow, emphasizing the epic feel, and the fact that Nolan seemed to do his best to minimize the CGI special effects also contributed to the movie’s prestige blockbuster feel.

The neat thing is, if you watch the movie on the Blu-Ray disc, which comes out this week, it keeps the IMAX trick intact, which is a bold choice, and one that only really makes sense if you have a widescreen HDTV (although if you have a high-definition player and a regular definition TV, you’re doing something wrong). Most of the film is letterboxed, though not dramatically, except for the IMAX stuff, which pops into full 16:9, and it works as well at home as it did in theatres.

Now that the excitement of the summer movie season has died down, the film largely holds up. Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker still stands up as one of the truly great modern bad guy roles, and those above-mentioned set pieces look and sound amazing. For the most part, it’s very good filmmaking, though the self-seriousness wears a bit thin, and the two-and-a-half-hour running time feels long; do we really need to see Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) argue about cell phone privacy in the last act of the movie? It’s a bit overstuffed—but still pretty awesome.

If you missed the Duplass Brothers’ experimental mumblecore horror-comedy Baghead in theatres earlier this year (and let’s face it, you probably did), you can now check out this strange and funny little movie on DVD. Worth a watch.