Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive is not only the idiosyncratic director’s best film ever, it could easily lay claim to being the best vampire movie yet made. Witty and constantly surprising, the film centers on centuries-old sophisticated vampires Adam and Eve (Tim Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton) who survive on donated blood. Hers is supplied by Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), his by Dr. Watson (Jeffrey Wright). Once a friend of Byron and Shelley, Adam is now a rock musician whose manager is a zombie named Ian (Anton Yelchin). Enter Eve’s trouble-making sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) whom Adam and Eve haven’t seen in eighty-seven years.

Those looking for action should probably look elsewhere. The film is more concerned with examining the lives and feelings of those who have sadly outlived their time. Heavy on atmosphere, the film is mostly devoid of action until Ava destroys Adam’s 1905 Gibson guitar among other casually evil acts. Even then the response is more melancholy ennui than swift action. Jarmusch had originally made the film with more action but when asked to add more, he removed what little action there was to begin with.

Filmed mostly in Detroit, the once bustling, now eerily abandoned, city makes the perfect location for the goings-on as does the seamier side of Tangier where the lovers have another retreat. Hiddleston and Swinton are both terrific. Hurt, despite his limited screen time, does his best work in years.

Only Lovers Left Alive is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD from Sony Classics.

Oscar belatedly honored Alfonso Cuaron earlier this year with a Best Director award for Gravity but the Mexico-born writer-producer-director has been Oscar worthy at least as far back as 2001’s Y Tu Mama Tambien which has been given a sparkling new dual Blu-ray and DVD release from Criterion.

Cuaron began making short films in the 1980s, followed by TV work before making his first theatrical film in Mexico in 1991. In the U.S. later in the decade, American audiences first discovered his work with his stunning 1995 adaptation of A Little Princess which was nominated for Oscars for its Art Direction and Cinematography, the latter by his childhood friend, brilliant cinematographer Emmanuel Libezki, who also won a long overdue Oscar for Gravity on his sixth nomination.

Cuaron had originally intended to make a road picture as his first feature film in 1991, but put it off until his return to Mexico ten years later. The film, the title of which translates as And Your Mother Too, seems highly improvised, but in fact has a very tight screenplay written by Cuaron and his brother Carlos. It was thoroughly rehearsed by the film’s three stars in most cases for two days before each scene was filmed.

The film’s young stars, Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, had been friends for years and were among a handful of actors who competed for all the major roles given to young actors in Mexican films at the time. Their off-screen friendship and rivalry perfectly fits their roles in this coming-of-age comedy/drama in which they have sex with a woman who joins them on their cross country trip and eventually each other before parting and meeting again for the last time a bit later. Their story is told against the backdrop of changing political times in Mexico.

Maribel Verdu who plays the older Spanish woman who joins the boys on their road trip is a prominent Spanish actress whose unfamiliarity with Mexico City slang plays handily into the story line.

Cuaron, whose future credits would include Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Children of Men, as well as Gravity, reached a level of achievement with Y Tu Mama Tambien from which he has yet to decline.

Extras include fascinating “Then” and “Now” documentaries in which Cuaron, his brother Carlos, cinematographer Libezki, and the film’s three stars are interviewed, as well as a documentary interview with philosopher Slavoj Zizek who discusses the parallels between the film’s narrative and the political environment in Mexico at the time of filming.

An actor (Romancing the Stone), writer and director (A Walk in the Clouds) both in his native Mexico and the U.S., Alfonso Arau had his biggest international success with 1992’s Like Water for Chocolate, a sensuous romance that was, along with Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien, one of the two biggest Mexican cross-over hits to light up the U.S. box office.

Lumi Cavazos gives a luminous performance as the turn of the 20th Century rancher’s daughter forbidden to marry as it is her duty to care for her mother until the mean woman dies. Marco Leonardi (Cinema Paradiso) co-stars as the young man who marries her older sister in order to be close to her. Tita (Cavazos) is the chief cook for her family, using food for both good and occasionally evil. Filled with magic and awe, the film radiates bliss across the decades and the generations. The Lionsgate Blu-ray looks terrific but omits the English dubbed soundtrack from the old Miramax DVD. Small matter though, as the film flies by in less than two hours.

Another Spanish-language film, Pedro Almodovar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! gets a Blu-ray upgrade from Criterion. The 1989 film was Almodovar’s “little” film made on the principal set of his groundbreaking 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, his two-for-the-price-of-one film, so to speak.

Almodovar favorite Antonio Banderas stars as a former mental patient who kidnaps a former porn star, now a B-movie actress, in the hopes of convincing her to marry him. One unsavory thing leads to another in what is a very wry satire on modern relationships which unaccountably received an NC-17 rating when it was released in the U.S. in 1990. Almodovar, of course, would go on to greater acclaim with such films as All About My Mother; Talk to Her and Bad Education.

Fox has given the 1997 sleeper hit The Full Monty a Blu-ray upgrade that includes numerous extras, among them more than thirty minutes of deleted scenes.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray upgrades of On the Beach andHigh School Confidential.