Its not uncommon that you will have black bars on the top and bottom of some movies particularly movies shot in 2:35 to 1, and 1;85 to 1, but your also having black bars on the side. This means you ether have not configured the dvd players menu that your displaying on a 16:9 TV. or you have the TV's aspect ratio set to 4:3. Most of the remote controls have a button to adjust the picture for different size screens, as well as stretch modes. Highly recommend not using stretch modes as your not going to get the best picture quality. Set it to the setting that displays full resolution of wide screen video images.