I've found that the sound quality of movies is often a mixed bag as well, even with fairly recent releases.
Most are quite good but for some reason dialogue is sometimes hard to follow because ambient type sounds (L, R & LFE) are simply mixed at too high a level. Why I don't know because some movies exhibit just the right balance. With a HT setup, it is easy to bump up the CC a couple of DBs in your AVR if required to make the dialogue stand out more.
From what I've read elsewhere, & my experience seems to bear this out, in the last few years the CC has been taking on much more importance in the mix whereas the L & R are more for ambiance & are often just idling while the CC does most of the work. That is why I upgraded to the more powerful VP160 from a VP100 in my system...
TAM
