All DVDs discussed this week are Blu-ray upgrades of previously released films.

The centerpiece of this month’s Universal 100th Anniversary upgrade is 1973’s The Sting which was nominated for ten Oscars and won seven. The film, which has been restored to its original luster, really didn’t deserve all those Oscars – it beat The Exorcist for pity’s sake, but it is a good caper film nonetheless.

Ragtime music, which was introduced in the 1890s and hugely popular through the 1910s enjoyed a renaissance in the 1970s mainly thanks to its inclusion in this film which is set several decades after it went out of fashion in the 1930s. Somehow, though, it works.

Future Best Director winner Robert Redford received his only Oscar nomination for acting for his portrayal of the young con man who enlists the aid of an older grifter (Paul Newman) in outsmarting the bad guys. The two actors are in fine fettle, though second billed Redford is the real star of the film. Robert Shaw, Charles Durning, Ray Walston, Robert Earl Jones and Eileen Brennan are along for the ride.

Blu-ray extras include a three-part documentary, The Art of the Sting, which contains interviews with Oscar winning director George Roy Hill; Oscar winning composer Marvin Hamlisch and stars Redford, Newman and Walston, is from a prior DVD release of the film.

Newman shares top billing with Tom Cruise in Martin Scorsese’s 1986 film, The Color of Money, for which the long time popular star finally won an Oscar reprising his character from Robert Rossen’s The Hustler a quarter century earlier.

The Hustler, which provided Newman with one of the signature roles of his career, was both a fascinating look at the life of a young pool hustler as well as a fine character study which provided strong characterizations, as well, for Piper Laurie, Jackie Gleason and George C. Scott, all of whom, along with Newman, received Oscar nominations. While the follow-up film received critical huzzahs for Cruise and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, the film’s only real interest is in satisfying the audience’s interest in what became of Newman’s Fast Eddie Felson character. The short answer is he became a liquor salesman, who mentors a new hustler (Cruise) in the game. Newman is as charismatic as ever, but one wonders if the actor, whose seventh acting nomination it was, would have won had he already been the recipient of the gold statuette. He had won a career achievement award the year before and would go on to win the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy as well as receive two more acting nominations, but this was the only competitive win for the actor who was also nominated for Best Picture, having produced the 1968 nominee, Rachel, Rachel which he also directed.

The Color of Money Blu-ray has no extras other than a couple of trailers for other Disney Studio films.

Another actor who received a long overdue Oscar was Al Pacino. One of Hollywood’s four biggest stars of the 1970s and 80s, along with Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro, each of whom won Oscars in both those decades, finally won his only statuette on his eighth nomination in 1992 for Scent of a Woman.

Martin Brest’s film, a rather long, obvious character study about a cantankerous blind man and the young student who reawakens his humanity, was perhaps over-praised in some circles, but there shouldn’t be any question that Pacino delivers one of his strongest performances, as does the young Chris O’Donnell as the student. O’Donnell is in every scene of the film and Pacino is in most of them. A remake of Dion Risi’s 1974 Italian film of the same name, the first film starring Vittorio Gassman, was a 1975 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film and Best Adapted Screenplay, the source material was a novel by Giovanni Arpino. Most critics agree the earlier film was the superior one but consider the acting of Pacino to be on the same level as Gassman.

Blu-ray extras include deleted scenes.

Three years before winning his first and only Oscar to date, Pacino received a Golden Globe nomination for one of his best performances in Harold Becker’s Sea of Love. Playing a New York City detective who gets too close to a murder suspect, the 49 year-old actor, whose career had been considered in jeopardy after 1985’s disastrous Revolution, bounced back with the charisma that first brought him to stardom two decades earlier. The film also bolstered the careers of Ellen Barkin and John Goodman, who received acting nominations form the Chicago Film Critics.

Blu-ray extras include the documentary, The Creation of the Sea of Love.

Kevin Costner and Clint Eastwood were, of course, two of the most respected actor/directors of the early 90s. Both had been nominated for Oscars for acting and won for directing films in 1990 and 1992, respectively – Costner for Dances With Wolves, Eastwood for Unforgiven. The two combined their talents for 1993’s A Perfect World, with Costner playing the main character and Eastwood directing, as well as playing a secondary role.

Costner plays an escaped convict who kidnaps an 8 year-old Jehovah’s Witness, played by T.J. Lowther, the morning after Halloween when the boy is still sad because he wasn’t allowed to go trick or treating the night before. The bond that develops between the two forms the crux of the film. Eastwood heads the team hunting him down. Laura Dern co-stars.

The film, which is emotionally complex, proved that Eastwood’s Unforgiven was not a fluke and added to the veteran actor/director’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s most durable players both in front of and behind the screen.

There are no Blu-ray extras.

Director Eastwood gave actor Eastwood one of his best roles as a retired FBI profiler in Blood Work which begins with his character suffering a near-fatal heart attack while chasing a serial killer. Two years later he’s given a heart transplant and asked by the donor’s sister to help solve her murder. Jeff Daniels as his neighbor; Wanda De Jesus and Mason Lucero as the dead woman’s sister and son; Tina Lifford as a dedicated detective with the L.A. Sheriff’s department and Paul Rodriguez and Dylan Walsh as knuckleheaded L.A.P.D. cops round out the principal cast. The film version of Michael Connelly’s best-seller benefits strongly from its adaptation by L.A. Confidential’s Brian Helgeland.

Blu-ray extras include the documentary Making Blood Work

Director Steven Soderbergh infuses Julia Roberts’ 2000 Oscar winner, Erin Brockovich, with more comedy than is usually present in whistleblower dramas.

Soderbergh was the year’s most lauded director, having received Oscar nominations for both this and Traffic and winning for the latter, although his direction here is almost as impressive. He gets excellent work from Roberts at her career best as the unemployed single mother who talks her away into a job with the attorney who litigated her auto accident case and then on her own initiative investigates a series of horrendous medical situations resulting from a polluted water supply that leads to a lawsuit against Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) resulting in the largest settlement ever given in a direct action lawsuit in the U.S.

Albert Finney excels as her boss, Ed Masry, receiving his fifth Oscar nomination for his performance. Aaron Eckhart is her neighbor, sometimes babysitter and sometimes lover and Marg Helgenberger and January Jones are among the victims represented in the lawsuit.

Blu-ray extras include a making-of documentary and a brief interview with Brockovich and Masry.

Saving the best for last, the newly released Blu-ray upgrade of the 1968 animated classic, Yellow Submarine, features a frame by frame hand restoration of the entire film which was then scanned in 4K, providing the brightest picture possible. No automated software was used owing to the delicate nature of the original artwork.

The film, the third to feature The Beatles at the height of their popularity, has the boys voicing psychodelic cartoon images of themselves in the story of the fab four freeing Pepperland from the music hating Blue Meanies. This was The Beatles at the apex of their musicality with songs like “Eleanor Rigby”; “When I’m Sixty-four”; “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonelyhearts Club Band”; “With a Little Help from My Friends”; “All You Need Is Love” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”. The Peter Max inspired drawings were not only themselves hallucinogenic, but inspired audiences around the world to “light up” during presentations of the film. You could get high from the fumes wafting through the theatres. The critics loved it. It received citations from the New York Film Critics and the National Society of Film Critics. The National Board of Review named it the year’s third best film behind The Shoes of the Fisherman and Romeo & Juliet, but the staid Academy, which wouldn’t honor animated feature films for several more decades, had no place for it.

Blu-ray extras include audio commentary; a making-of documentary; storyboard sequences and original pencil drawings for the “All You Need Is Love” sequence.

This week’s new DVD releases include Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and the Blu-ray debut of Harold and Maude.