New on DVD 7/24/08

"21"

Kevin Spacey offers a lesson to academics everywhere on how to beat the high cost of living. Spacey plays a brilliant, greedy Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who leads a team of math-whiz students (Kate Bosworth and Jim Sturgess among them), the gang developing a card-counting scheme to take Vegas casinos to the cleaners at the blackjack table.

"Doomsday"

Thirty years after a plague in Great Britain prompts authorities to seal off the island with a wall, the deadly virus emerges again. A military unit is dispatched into the quarantine zone to find a cure among the savage society that has sprung up among the British survivors. The DVD has both the R-rated theatrical version and an unrated cut adding more footage, plus a couple of background featurettes.

"The Mummy," "The Mummy Returns," "The Scorpion King"

Ancient Egypt joins the Blu-ray age as "The Mummy," its first sequel and the spinoff "The Scorpion King" arrive on high-definition discs in advance of the Aug. 1 big-screen release of "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor." "The Mummy" and "The Mummy Returns" pit Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz against mean old dead guy Arnold Vosloo, while "Scorpion King" turns Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's villainous character from "Mummy Returns" into a hero leading a band of freedom fighters against an evil warlord.