Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises was the recent honorary Oscar winner’s third film to be nominated for a Best Animated Feature Oscar behind Spirited Away (for which he won) and Howl’s Moving Castle. It was also the 73-year-old animator-writer-producer-director’s avowed last film. Few artists have ended their careers with such a towering achievement.

The Wind Rises is an unusual choice for an animated feature, a biographical drama about the early life of Jiro Horikoshi (1903-1982), the chief engineer of many Japanese fighter designs of World World II including the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter which wreaked the most havoc on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Miyazaki’s beautiful, meticulous animation perfectly augments the heavily fictionalized story of Horikoshi, who dreamed of becoming a pilot but because of his near-sightedness couldn’t qualify and instead became an aeronautic designer. Although he had no use for Japanese imperialism, Horiskoshi’s love for the beauty of the machinery he has been asked to design propels him forward. The film’s narrative also explores the friendship between Hirsoshi (voiced by Joseph Gordon Levitt in the English version) and a fellow designer (John Krasinksi) and his courtship and marriage to a girl suffering from tuberculosis (Emily Blunt). Stanley Tucci voices Hiroshi’s fictional Italian mentor in several breathtaking scenes.

The Wind Rises is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

New Zealand has been used as a film location for films from Hollywood as far back as 1957’s Until They Sail and for international co-productions, most notably with Australia from 1993’s The Piano on and the U.S. from the Lord of the Rings trilogy on. Films made solely by New Zealand itself have not enjoyed much of a reputation even in their own country, which is why the sleeper hit Housebound is such a welcome surprise.

Marketed as a comedy-horror-mystery film, the film’s trailer put the emphasis on horror and the film certainly starts out creepily enough as a young woman is sentenced to house arrest for an ATM robbery in the home she grew up in. It then becomes a ghost story that turns to something quite different and quite compelling, but to say what that is would spoil the fun. Suffice it to say mystery buffs will love it. Morgana O’Reilly as the young heroine and Rima Te Wiata as her seemingly not-all-there mother are terrific and they receive strong support from Glen-Paul Waru as a friendly security guard and Ryan Lampp as a most unusual houseguest.

Housebound is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Horror master George A. Romero is best known for his first film, 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, but his best work may well be 1988’s Monkey Shines which has been given a superb new Blu-ray release from Shout Factory. Loaded with extras, both the Blu-ray and upgraded DVD include a fascinating feature-length commentary by Romero and on-screen interviews with stars Jason Beghe and Kate McNeil as well as Romero.

Beghe plays an athletic young man who is hit by a car while jogging and becomes a quadriplegic. He is given a service monkey to perform tasks for him that he can’t do himself. McNeil is the monkey trainer. John Pankow is a friend who conducts experiments with monkeys. Stanley Tucci is the doctor who steals Beghe’s girlfriend. Joyce Van Patten is Beghe’s mother from hell. The monkey, Ella, is jealous of anyone who comes between her and her man. People will die. The film’s one misstep is a studio imposed “last scare” just before the end of the film.

Hal Ashby’s 1978 film, Coming Home, new to Blu-ray, was the most successful post-war drama since 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives. Whereas the earlier film dealt with homecomings after World War II, Coming Home deals with returning soldiers during the undeclared Viet Nam war. Best Actor Oscar winner Jon Voight is unforgettable as a bitter paraplegic whose attitude softens in light of his affair with married VA Hospital volunteer Jane Fonda, also an Oscar winner for her performance. Oscar-nominated Bruce Dern, the third side of the triangle, has perhaps the film’s most difficult role as a battle weary officer whose life is unraveling before his eyes. At the time, Dern’s walk into the ocean at the end of the film seemed both a rip-off of A Star Is Born and a convenient way to give the Voight-Fonda romance a fresh start. Now, however, with the escalation of military suicides in the news, Ashby’s original intention of making audiences aware of military suicides comes through loud and clear. Dern’s was the second in the film which had already broken new ground with Robert Carradine’s shocking drug overdose earlier in the film.

Like Coming Home, Frank Capra’s 1934 classic, It Happened One Night won Oscars for its leads, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. In fact it was the first film to win Oscars not just in both those categories but in Oscar’s top five categories, winning for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay as well.

It Happened One Night, which has been given a Blu-ray upgrade by Criterion, is a romantic comedy, a screwball comedy and a road movie all rolled into one. While it is now regarded as the first prominent screwball comedy, it wasn’t really that, having been preceded by the likes of The Front Page, Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living. Nevertheless it is certainly a fine example of the genre with Gable’s tough guy reporter and Colbert’s heiress who doesn’t want to be an heiress, obviously in love, but at cross-purposes throughout the film.

Capra’s last film, 1961’sPocketful of Miracles, has also been upgraded for Blu-ray. An interesting if inferior remake of Capra’s 1933 film, Lady for a Day, Miracles suffers from too much Dave the Dude and Queenie Martin (Glenn Ford and Hope Lange) and not enough Apple Annie (Bette Davis). All the same, the film does have its moments, most of them supplied by the film’s supporting cast which includes Thomas Mitchell, Arthur O’Connell, Ann-Margret and Oscar nominee Peter Falk.

One of the great films of 1961, Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg, is now available on Blu-ray in two separate releases, one as an import from Australia and one as a newly released offering from Twilight Time. I’m not sure about the Australian import, but the Twilight Time release includes the film’s overture, intermission and exit music absent from earlier home video releases of the film.

Spencer Tracy has one of his greatest roles as the retired small town New England judge thrust into the spotlight as one of three judges at the Nuremberg trial of four men of the German judiciary under Hitler. The time is 1948. It’s been three years since the most important Nazi leaders have been tried. The cold war is heating up and everyone wants to forget the past, but can they?

Burt Lancaster is the most sympathetic of the men in the dock, a member of the aristocracy who hated Hitler. Marlene Dietrich is the widow of a German Army General found guilty by a previous tribunal and hanged. Richard Widmark is the American prosecutor. Maximilian Schell is the German defense counselor. Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift are victims of Nazi oppression. They are all memorable, especially Schell in a superb Oscar-winning performance.

The three hour plus film is an expansion of Abby Mann’s 1959 Playhouse 90 episode with Claude Rains, Melvyn Douglas and Paul Lukas in the Tracy, Widmark and Lancaster roles and Schell in the role he would play on the big screen. While the teleplay concentrated on the trial, the film expands into the world outside the courtroom, most memorably with Tracy walking through the bombed out stadium where Hitler gave his speeches and in the intimate conversations between Tracy and the sublime Dietrich.

This week’s new releases include Blu-ray upgrades of The Conformist and Thieves Like Us.