Warner Bros. Pictures has as rich a history as any movie studio and, thanks to decades of savvy acquisitions and partnerships, the company's home video library isn't even close to being rivaled. With the present of home video cloudy and the future fraught with uncertainty, no one can blame Warner Home Video for choosing to celebrate the studio's 90th anniversary this year instead of waiting another ten for centennial releases.

Beginning with the 100 Film Collection DVD and 50 Film Collection Blu-ray sets issued in January, Warner has reminded us both just how full of cinematic treasures its catalog is and just how full your collection is of Warner movies. Those pricey big box sets and the numerous smaller collections that have followed seem best suited for those who somehow missed out on the millennial DVD boom or are just now getting into Blu-ray. Those who maybe have been trying to consolidate or bolster collections should also find value in these sets that require much less shelf space (and money) than buying the equivalent number of movies separately on their own.

Even when limiting themselves to a single genre and to films originally distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures (or its subsidiary New Line Cinema), as they do in Best of Warner Bros.: 20 Film Collection - Thrillers, the company is easily able to assemble some of the most highly regarded films of all time. This 20-disc DVD set includes some of the finest work of both the greatest directors and biggest movie stars in history.

The chronologically-arranged selections do not accurately convey the full breadth of the Warner library; only five of the twenty chosen thrillers predate 1970 and more than half are products of the 1990s and 2000s. That design unquestionably heightens commercial appeal, an important consideration for any release with a suggested retail price of nearly $100. The word "thriller" is applied to a wide variety of films. Instead of just sticking to works of suspense and near-horror, Warner has included a number of titles you are more likely to describe as dramas or action movies. The result is an agreeably diverse supply of films that mostly range from very good to outstanding.

Two of the few popular Alfred Hitchcock thrillers that fall outside the reach of Universal Studios -- Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest -- provide an appealing taste of the master's enduringly effective suspense, one a dark black & white tale of random people committing murders for one another, the other a wrong man mystery in color and with a more prominent sense of humor.

The set interestingly altogether skips over the 1960s, a decade that brought dramatic change to Hollywood. The 1970s are limited to two movies. Dirty Harry, the debut entry to Clint Eastwood's longest-running series, is curiously the only contribution to this set from Warner's most loyal and enduring marquee star. An interesting counter to that film celebrating a tough, hard-nosed cop is Dog Day Afternoon, Sidney Lumet's arresting drama about a summer Manhattan bank robbery that features one of the last great understated performances from Al Pacino fresh off the first two Godfather movies (though it's his most explosive scene that everyone remembers).

The 1980s are limited to two films from late in the decade that launched Warner's two biggest franchises of that era. Viewed today, Tim Burton's Batman, the runaway #1 film of 1989, is silly at times (particularly when utilizing original songs by Prince), but it unquestionably kept the superhero movie alive, bridging the genre's gap between the diminishing returns of the Christopher Reeve Superman series' good-natured fun and the Spider-Man-led revival of the early 21st century. Lethal Weapon, meanwhile, represents the kind of buddy action comedy that has mostly vanished, despite being paid the occasional homage.

The demographic traditionally having the most disposable income, the long-coveted 18 to 34, grew up in the 1990s. As such, it's probably no coincidence that a staggering eight inclusions hail from that decade, whose output is starting to be seriously celebrated with some frequency. This stretch begins with Goodfellas, a defining work in the illustrious career of Martin Scorsese and a brilliant piece of true crime drama.