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When it comes to westerns, the big screen isn’t a very friendly home anymore, but several high-quality westerns have found a home on television and cable outlets. Such is the case with Broken Trail, which was the first original movie ever produced by American Movie Classics. Directed by veteran Western director Walter Hill and starring Robert Duvall and Thomas Hayden Church, the film won four Emmy Awards back when it was released in 2006.

That lineup of awards includes best miniseries, best lead actor, best supporting actor and best casting. Impressive lineup of gold, and Broken Trail is just about everything that another recent Western released on Blu-Ray, The Professionals, is not: It is a modern film, with modern pacing, featuring actors today’s generation will recognize, and was shot with modern-enough cameras to look sharp on HD. This helps it feel at home on the Blu-Ray format.

The story centers around an aging cowboy (Duvall) who wants to buy his own ranch and settle down, and so agrees to run a herd of horses from Oregon to Wyoming (in an era long before the convenience of Pacsafe, no less!) to sell to the British Army, and thus make the tidy sum he needs to make his dream come true.

Helping him along the way is his nephew (Church), who doesn’t really care for him. There are skeletons in the closet, and of course the journey gives them a chance to begin working out their differences.

Complications are tossed in when the pair come across a gang of ruthless slave-traders, transporting five Chinese women to a mining town where they’ll be forced into a life of prostitution. Our two horse-traders intervene and that drives the conflict of the longish movie.

Clocking in at over three hours, Broken Trail is a beautiful film, but not quite as compelling as the best “long” films, like Titanic or the Lord of the Rings movies. Still, there’s a nice set of special features and about the only drawback, really, is that the running time might seem a bit intimidating for some viewers.

The Professionals is a movie that’s about the same age as I am – and I’m no spring chicken. Made in 1966, the Richard Brooks-directed western starring Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Jack Palance, and a bunch of other folks anyone born during the Reagan presidency or later won’t even recognize, is a kidnap-and-rescue adventure flick, set in 1917, and involving a group of “professionals” whose task it is to sneak into Mexico and rescue the wife of a wealthy Texan from a band of outlaws.

Why The Professionals was set as a priority for the Blu-Ray treatment over so many other, more recent and potentially more profitable films is a bit of a mystery. Sure, if one is a fan of westerns, this is a solid one; but the market for westerns hasn’t been very good for the past thirty years or so, ever since science fiction kind of took its place in 1975 or so, with the release of the original Star Wars.

If you enjoy the western genre and older films, though, The Professionals is one of the better examples of the genre – at least among films that don’t star John Wayne. Still, the film is a product of its time.

While there’s been some restoration work done to the film, the quality of the picture in HD isn’t really up to snuff with more recent films made in the HD era. And as for director Brooks’ style, the pacing and storytelling are slow and ponderous, compared to the adrenaline-charged filmmaking that today’s action audiences expect.

The film has some snappy dialog, which is a highlight. Here’s an example:

Dolworth to Fardan: “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Fardan: “Most of us are.”

Sure, it’s not down to the exact science that Arnold Schwarzenegger made famous and vaulted away in a self storage container, but there’s a bit more substance and context to it, as well. The extras to this DVD are only OK, since nearly everyone involved with the film is “no longer with us.” Still, it’s a solid western for its time, and only because it is so dated will this film likely fail to find a massive audience.

Even in its second week of release, The Dark Knight, the follow-up to 2005’s Batman Begins, is still high atop the weekend box office with a grand total of over $75 million in receipts domestically. The movie broke the record for opening weekend last week, and by Friday had broken the record for quickest movie to reach the $300 million mark.

The Dark Knight sits at approximately $314 million in domestic ticket sales after 10 days of release, and with foreign markets added in, that total jumps to $355 million. That places The Dark Knight well ahead of SpiderMan 3’s pace, and has some in Hollywood even whispering about eclipsing Titanic’s final total before it’s all done.

That might be a bit premature after only two weeks, but the film is certainly valued far above Tahitian pearls at this point, and is well on its way to becoming the most successful superhero movie of all time. That’s due in large part to Chris Nolan’s continued sober treatment of the Batman character; whereas Batman Begins felt like a James Bond film, The Dark Knight has more of a feel akin to Scarface, The Untouchables, or perhaps a James Patterson thriller.

In other words, Batman doesn’t feel like a “superhero” movie so much as it feels like a solid crime thriller; the gangsters in the film are not bumbling fools that the Joker rules over, but are hardcore, ruthless criminals who might have stepped out of the set of Oz or The Sopranos, rather than a comic book adaptation, and The Joker is genuinely at risk to the lowlifes he’s seeking to control, staying atop only by being just a bit more bloodthirsty and less predictable than they are.

But enough with the love-fest for The Dark Knight; two new movies made their mark this weekend as well. The Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers notched a solid $30 million to take second place, and Mamma Mia!, the smart counter-programming film to The Dark Knight, held onto third place with a respectable $17.8 million.

The surprise of the weekend was the poor performance of the very-well-done X-Files movie, I Want To Believe, which barely squeezed $10.2 million out of the weekend. Of course, being nearly six years removed from the TV show’s final bow, and almost a decade since the franchise’s last big-screen appearance, didn’t help. The film has been well-received by reviewers, but perhaps the biggest reason the film has stumbled is that it pursues a very similar demographic to that of The Dark Knight, and was released only one week following The Dark Knight’s debut; Fox would have been wise to push X-Files: I Want to Believe back into August, to get more breathing room from what most of Hollywood knew would be a monster hit in the form of The Dark Knight.

If Fox doesn’t stop believing in the X-Files film, though, it could become one of those long-run quiet hits that never really has a huge weekend, but does solid business for a long time as folks get other films ticked off on their must-see lists, and start searching for those quieter films they missed when concentrating on The Dark Knight and other top hit movies.

Next week brings the last huge “box office blockbuster” of the summer, the long-delayed Mummy sequel, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emporer. Identical demographics to The Dark Knight’s audience spell trouble for that one, too, I’m afriad. Swing Vote isn’t expected to make a big splash either, and August is a wasteland of quiet films, so The Dark Knight could have a good, long run and X-Files: I Want To Beleive could easily bounce back, given the chance, over the next five or six weeks.