An early front-runner for this year’s Best Foreign Film award, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida is the Polish-born director’s first film made in his homeland. The Oxford-educated documentarian and feature film director has made an astonishing film set in the early 1960s and filmed as though it were actually made in 1962.

The film was made in black-and-white in the old academy ratio of 1:37:1 or 4×3, not widescreen. It takes place in what has come to be called the period of “small stabilization” in Poland following a period of harsh Communist rule after the end of World War II.

Told with striking imagery but featuring sparse dialogue, the film centers on two women, a young nun about to take her final vows and her aunt, the sole living relative she didn’t know she had.

18-year-old Anna learns upon meeting her Aunt Wanda that her name is not Anna, but Ida, and that she is Jewish by birth. The film follows the two women as they set out across Poland to find how her parents died and where they are buried. Wanda, a cynical Communist judge, regrets the life she has led and Anna/Ida must decide what she wants out of her own life. The film is not only remarkably true to the period but to the filmmaking style of the period. Even the film’s minimalist sex scene is handled with the discretion such scenes would have had at the time. The ending is also very much that of a late 1950s, early 1960s film.

Veteran Polish actress Agata Kulesza gives a superb performance as Wanda and newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska is remarkable as the young Anna/Ida. In an interview presented as one of the Blu-ray’s extras, Pawlikowsnki makes reference to the haunting cinematography as being the work of a 29-year-old camera operator who took over as cinematographer when the original director of photography became ill just after the start of filming. The credited cinematographer, however, is 66-year-old Ryszard Lenczewski.

The film is available on standard DVD.

The Blu-ray release of Jack Clayton’s 1961 film, The Innocents, based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, more than lives up to Criterion’s reputation for presenting pristine editions of films both old and new to home video. The film itself has achieved a popularity in recent years that wasn’t always the case.

When the film was first released, Twentieth Century-Fox did not know how to market the film. It was advertised both as a haunted house movie and as an art film, pleasing neither audience. The art film crowd thought the film had too many Hammer horror film touches while the haunted house movie crowd thought it wasn’t scary enough. Classier ads promoting star Deborah Kerr for a seventh Oscar nomination did not have the desired effect either. The film received no Oscar nominations and Kerr’s then-record six Best Actress nominations ended with her last for the previous year’s The Sundowners.

Kerr herself considered her portrayal of the frightened governess to be her own best performance even though others might more enthusiastically cite her performances in Black Narcissus, From Here to Eternity, The King and I, Tea and Sympathy, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, An Affair to Remember, The Sundowners or The Night of the Iguana as being worthier of that statement.

The film was based not directly on James’ novel but on the 1950 Broadway adaptation which gives the film its name. However, Clayton, fresh from the success of Room at the Top, wasn’t happy with the direction the play took and brought in other writers beside the play’s author William Archibald, most notably John Mortimer and Truman Capote who Clayton later said wrote 95% of what he used.

Clayton worked closely with cinematographer Freddie Francis (Sons and Lovers, The Elephant Man) to give the film its eerie look. Every bit as good as Kerr’s performance, are those of the child actors supporting her. Martin Stephens had already made a name for himself in the surprise 1960 box office hit Village of the Damned. Pamela Franklin, who was making her film debut, would become one of the most in-demand child actresses of the decade culminating with her award-winning performance in 1969’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Criterion has also released a Blu-ray upgrade of Roman Polanski’s 1961 film of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The film, the initial production of Hugh Heffner’s Playboy Films, was a modernization of Shakespeare’s tragedy in which the ghastly murders are performed on screen rather than off-stage and Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth performs the famous mad scene in the nude.

Despite, or maybe because of, its sensationalism, the film won the Best Picture award from the National Board of Review. Other awards groups, including the Oscars, pretty much ignored it but the critics did appreciate the film’s look and the performances of Jon Finch as the murderous Scottish king and Annis as his evil wife.

Kino Lorber’s classy Blu-ray upgrades of MGM-owned albeit mostly United Artists films of the 1950s and 1960s continues with a sensational looking Elmer Gantry.

Richard Brooks’ film of Sinclair Lewis’ controversial novel about a phony evangelist earned Oscars for Burt Lancaster at the top of his craft as the sleazy title character and Shirley Jones playing against type as a vengeful prostitute. Brooks won an Oscar himself for Best Screenplay, but failed to receive a Best Director nod. The film was also missing form the Best Picture line-up, and where, oh where, was the deserved nomination for Jean Simmons as true believer Sister Sharon?

Extras include an on-camera interview with Shirley Jones recounting her experience with the film.

Binge watching, the practice of watching whole seasons of TV series in quick succession, is made easy by the release of whole season through on-demand; streaming, and, of course, DVD releases.

My most recent exercise in binge watching is Law & Order: SVU – The Fifteenth Year. I had seen one or two episodes during the course the season’s run and didn’t really care for the direction the venerable series seemed to be taking. Seen altogether, however, it all makes sense.

I could have done with less of the psycho-after-Olivia storyline that dominated a number of episodes, but the rest of it – the developments of Amaro and Rollins’ characters; the retirements of long-time favorites Munch and Cragen; and the baby you know Benson just has to adopt, added immensely to the grabbed-from-the-headlines storylines. Kudos to Mariska Hargitay, Danny Pino, Kelli Giddish, Ice T, Richard Belzer, Dann Florek, Raul Esparza, the under-used Tamara Tunie and BD Wong, and Donal Logue who brought tremendous energy to several episodes as an undercover cop-turned-unit commander. Kudos, too, to all those guest stars whose appearances, large and small, made this one of the series’ best seasons after all.

This week’s new releases include Sundays and Cybele and Blu-ray upgrade of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.