The film I looked forward to seeing the most last year was War Horse, Steven Speilberg’s film based on a popular children’s novel.

The stage version, which takes a different approach than the film, won the 2011 Tony for Best Play and remains popular. The film, which uses live horses instead of mechanical ones to tell its story, looked to be an improvement on the story of a horse plucked from the English countryside to serve the war effort during World War I. Sadly it does not.

The problem is the structure. While there have been films about dogs, notably Lassie Come Home; donkeys, specifically Au Hasard Balthazar and numerous horses such as Black Beauty and Gallant Bess, Spielberg’s film does not present itself from the standpoint of the horse. Consequently we don’t feel any real empathy toward the animal. Instead the film focuses on the human characters the horse comes into contact with. All their stories are heartfelt and moving, but none of them lasts long enough to fully engage us.

We get the strapping teenage boy whose horse is snatched from him; the sympathetic lieutenant who keeps in touch with the boy until a bullet takes his life; the teenage German deserters who rescue and hide the horse but are tracked down and shot for desertion; the young French girl with a weak heart who adopts the horse as a pet only to have it snatched back by the Germans and so on. The boy’s reunion with the horse, though emotionally stirring, comes a bit too late to fully engage us. Technically, however, the film is first rate, with its beautiful, sweeping cinematography and majestic score by Spielberg’s most frequent collaborator, composer John Williams.

Blu-ray extras include several making-of documentaries.

Writer-Director Cameron Crowe first came to our attention with the ingratiating Say, Anything, then gave us two marvelous award-winning films, Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous. In the dozen years since, however, his occasional films have been greatly disappointing. He redeems himself somewhat with last year’s We Bought a Zoo.

The film is reminiscent of another of last year’s family relationship drams, The Descendants in that it deals with a single father and his two children, a troubled teenager and a precocious pre-teen. In this case, the children are an older son and younger daughter. The father is played not by George Clooney or Brad Pitt, but by their Ocean’s Eleven co-star, Matt Damon. The story, which is based on a real-life British family, is moved from England to Southern California, where they buy a house which just happens to include a zoo, is great fun while it lasts but doesn’t really give us anything to remember.

Blu-ray extras include audio commentary by Crowe and others; deleted scenes and a gag reel.

Second generation Hungarian director Ladislau Vajda’s 1955 Cannes Film Festival winner, Miracle of Marcelino is a lovely, unpretentious gem about a five year-old foundling, raised by monks, whose best friend is invisible and who longs to meet the mother he never knew. Left on his own, he discovers a fearsome life size wooden crucifix hidden in an attic in the monks’ house and entices the wooden Christ to come down from the cross with offerings of bread and wine. The film’s resolution is an emotional stunner.

Blu-ray extras include a discussion of the themes and meaning of the film and a reflection on modern miracles.

Chinatown, which Oscar winning screenwriter Robert Towne describes as being about the futility of good intentions, was Hollywood’s gift to film buffs who longed for a modern film noir. They got it in spades in this 1974 classic which takes place in 1930s Los Angeles.

Unlike the classic films noir of the 1940s and early 1950s, this is not a black-and-white standard theatrical ration film, but a big, widescreen, color movie. Atypical of the film noir genre, it does no take place almost exclusively at night. Although there are night scenes, most of the action takes place in broad daylight. And what action! Private eye Jack Nicholson is slowly drawn into the mystery surrounding the death of a man whose wife (Diane Ladd) hires him to investigate his alleged philandering, only to discover that the woman is not the wife, that Faye Dunaway is, and may have had something to do with his murder. Then again, maybe it was her father, John Huston. Nicholson, Dunaway and Huston are all superb as is just about everything about this spellbinding film directed by Roman Polasnki at his best.

Blu-ray extras include commentary by Towne and David Fincher.

I gave up any notion I may have had of becoming a novelist after reading John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath because I realized I could never write anything as profound.

Steinbeck’s 1939 novel about the dissolution of family centers on the migrant Joads dispossessed from their Oklahoma land, looking for farm work in California during the Great Depression. It is filled with despair, painting such a negative picture of the migrant work camps that the book was publicly burned in several California cities and towns including Steinbeck’s native Salinas. It ends with the Joads’ daughter, Rosaharn, giving birth to a stillborn baby, which her Uncle John puts in a box and floats down river. She then breast feeds a dying man. No Hollywood studio would touch it. No studio, that is, except Twentieth Century-Fox under the stewardship of Daryl F. Zanuck.

Zanuck hired John Ford to direct and Nunnally Johnson to write the screenplay. Ford and Johnson wanted Henry Fonda for anti-hero Tom Joad and Beulah Bondi for Ma Joad, but Zanuck balked because neither was a Fox contract player. He wanted Tyrone Power and Jane Darwell. He relented, but only if Ford could convince Fonda and Bondi to sign seven year contracts. Fonda reluctantly agreed, Bondi did not and despite assurances from Ford that she had the part, Zanuck refused to give it to her.

The film is as faithful an adaptation of the 850 page novel as was possible with two major exceptions. In the novel the Joads’ first experience with a farm camp is a nicely run government camp, with subsequent encounters becoming more and more bleak. In the film the order is reversed, giving the impression that things are getting better. The novel’s ending with the baby in the box and Roseasharn breast feeding a grown man could not be filmed so Ford ended the film with Tom walking down the road after saying goodbye to Ma. Zanuck, feeling the ending was too abrupt, added the closing scene with Ma’s optimistic “we’re the people” speech which had been in the novel in an earlier scene. Ford agreed to the ending, but refused to come back to the studio to direct it, so Zanuck directed it himself.

Ford and Darwell won Oscars, but Fonda lost to best friend James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story and the film itself lost to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca.

The superb Blu-ray upgrade of the film will have its general release in June but is available now through Screen Archives. It contains several extras including a recent Fox Movie Channel essay on the book and film and the 1995 A&E Biography of Zanuck.

Screen Archives has also released an equally superb Blu-ray upgrade of Zorba the Greek which Fox will also officially release in June.

Filmed almost entirely on the island of Crete, where it takes place, Michael Cacoyannis’ film of Nikos Kazantzakis’ acclaimed novel, Zorba the Greek was a world-wide phenomenon following its late 1964 release thanks mainly to the phenomenal success of its infectious soundtrack by Mikis Theodorakis. Anthony Quinn’s larger than life portrayal of the title Greek peasant re-energized his career which lasted another twenty-seven years until his death at 86.

The film was a triumph as well for Alan Bates as the sensitive writer who hires Zorba as a companion; Irene Papas as the tragic widow with whom he has a brief liaison, and Lila Kedrova who won an Oscar as the dying prostitute Zorba comforts. Kedrova would win a Tony for the 1984 revival of the 1968 Broadway musical based on the film.

Blu-ray extras include commentary by the director and the A&E biography of Anthony Quinn.

This week’s new DVD releases include The Iron Lady and the Blu-ray debut of the 1951 classic, A Streetcar Named Desire.