If you have never seen The Graduate, you can’t really call yourself a film buff. This astounding 1967 movie, directed by the late, great Mike Nichols, co-written by Buck Henry, and starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, took the world by storm when it was first released. The bizarre love triangle – boy has affair with married woman, then falls in love with her daughter – is riveting, and under Nichols’s direction, the blend of comedy and drama are interwoven perfectly.

At first, director Peter Jackson’s decision to split his screen adaptation of “The Hobbit” into three films seemed like an excessive attempt to milk cash from a project better suited to a single 150-minute feature. In retrospect, it is obvious that Jackson was less interested in a straightforward screen adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien novel than an epic prequel to his “Lord of the Rings” saga. 

For whatever reason we turn to fantasy, whether the genre’s commercial bubble--if it is, indeed, a bubble--"pops" within the next year or the next decade, society will most likely continue turning to stories of the inexplicable and marvelous regardless of the frequency with which new fantasy films are being produced. Because as long as there as there are fears to be solaced, through disillusionment with technology, politics, or otherwise, humans will probably always be a little quixotic, longing for a time in which something like the strangely beautiful, strangely gleaming iPod could simply be chalked up to good, old-fashioned magic.

By most accounts, 2012 was a good year for movies. Not only were there more quality theatrical releases than normal, the home video offerings were very impressive. The past year was particularly strong when it came to DVD and Blu-ray boxed sets. That’s important because it’s these collections that stand apart and have the potential to convince consumers that DVDs and Blu-rays still have advantages over the increasingly popular digital download. Following are five 2012 boxed sets that rank among the best of the best.  

The  much-admired (and emulated) Martin Scorsese, for one, is an outstanding auteur and easily one of the best directors  working today, yet he cannot rightly be ranked alongside the titans of the golden years when cinema was emerging as a serious art form: Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Jean Renoir, and the list goes on.  These masters were, and remain, larger-than-life legends.