The camera focuses on a middle-aged Irish priest sitting in the confessional listening to a distressed parishioner who is opening up for the first time about being raped and sodomized on a daily basis for five years as a child by a now-deceased priest. Too late to prosecute the bad priest and too cynical to seek therapy, the man tells the priest there is only one way to draw attention to the crime and that is by killing a good priest. He has chosen the good priest hearing his confession and tells him he will kill him a week from Sunday.

The great Irish actor Brendan Gleeson has won several awards in Britain and Ireland for his career best performance as this imperfect, but essentially good priest in John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary. He has also been picking up stateside critics’ nominations and awards as the year-end awards move into high gear.

Gleeson is no stranger to awards, of course, having won his fair share for such portrayals as legendary Irish gangster Martin Cahill in 1998’s The General, Colin Farrell’s hit-man partner in 2008’s In Bruges, Winston Churchill leading Britain to war in 2009’s Into the Storm (for HBO), and the coastal Irish policeman partnered with fish-out-of-water FBI agent Don Cheadle in 2011’s The Guard. Memorable in major supporting roles in 2011’s Albert Nobbs and this year’s Edge of Tomorrow, he has three Golden Globe nominations under his belt but no SAG or Oscar nominations as yet.

McDonagh, who also guided Gleeson through The Guard, his first film a director, supplies the actor with a first rate supporting cast and strong production values including stunning cinematography and a haunting music score by Irish composer Patrick Cassidy.

The film follows Gleeson during the course of what may be his final week on Earth from Sunday to Sunday as he interfaces with numerous parishioners, one of whom is his intended killer. We meet his grown daughter from his pre-priesthood marriage (Mary Reilly), an embittered cuckolded butcher (Chris O’Dowd), his bored wife (Orla O’Rourke), her hot-headed lover from the Ivory Coast (Isaach De Bankolé), a cynical doctor (Aidan Gillen), an embittered wealthy landowner (Dylan Moran), a dying writer (M. Emmett Walsh), a grieving widow (Marie Josée Croze), the local police inspector (Gary Lydon), a gay hustler (Owen Sharpe), a confused teenager (Killian Scott), an artistically inclined altar boy (Michael Og Lane), a cannibalistic serial killer (Domhnall Gleeson), an inept younger priest (David Wilmot), and the local bishop (David McSavage).

Easily one of the year’s best films with one of the year’s greatest performances, Calvary is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

The biggest surprise hit of the summer, Guardians of the Galaxy, is a tongue-in-the-cheek sci-fi adventure from the Marvel franchise.

Chris Pratt is the easygoing hero who was kidnapped by aliens as a boy following his mother’s death. His cohorts include Zoe Saldana trading her blue makeup from Avatar for green, Dave Bautista as a blustering strongman, a CGI raccoon voiced by Bradley Cooper, and a CGI man-tree voiced by Vin Diesel. Lee Pace is the principal bad guy. Michael Rooker, John C. Reilly and Glenn Close are also on board as characters whose motivations are not made clear until the film’s end.

The interaction between the human actors and their CGI counterparts is seamless and the whole thing is a pleasant enough experience, but I’d personally prefer to see this splendid group of actors in something a little more down to earth, like a good old-fashioned murder mystery.

Guardians of the Galaxy is available in a 3D/2D Blu-ray combo pack and in a 2D standard DVD.

Kino Lorber has released Robert Altman’s 1976 film, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, on Blu-ray. Coming the year after Altman’s masterpiece, Nashville, and the year before his excellent 3 Women, this was a crass, condescending, self-congratulatory, smug condemnation of 19th Century show business by a group of artists who were doing quite well for themselves in the latter part of the 20th Century.

The film contained neither Altman’s nor any of his excellent cast members’ most satisfying work. Paul Newman had the title role, with Burt Lancaster as Ned Buntline, Joel Grey as Nate Salisbury, Geraldine Chaplin as Annie Oakley, and Altman regular Shelley Duvall as Mrs. Grover Cleveland, wife of the sitting U.S. President, among many others. See it if you don’t already know that even the best of the best can make a lousy film every now and then.

Criterion has released Blu-ray upgrades of three major Italian films, two of them enigmatic critical hits from the early 1960s, the third a critically lambasted exploitation flick from the mid-1970s.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura is the director’s famed 1960 exercise in ennui in which a missing woman’s lover and her sister search for her, fall in love and forget about the missing woman. Its profundity has eluded many over the years, while others find it enthralling and discover something new every time they see it. See it once and you won’t forget it no matter which side of the discussion you fall on. Monica Vitti, Gabrielle Ferzetti and Lea Massari star.

Antonioni’s follow-up film, 1961’s La Notte, has both bigger stars and more substance to it. Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau are an unfaithful couple in a deteriorating relationship with L’Avventura’s Monia Vitti heading the supporting cast. Again, audiences were split into two camps, one camp finding it boring, the other a rapturous masterpiece.

Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter was released in 1974 when similarly themed films were the stock in trade of hardcore porn. Tamer in execution, if not in theme, Cavani’s film starred Dirk Bogarde as a former Nazi officer who tortured Holocausts survivor Charlotte Rampling during World War II. It’s now 1957 and the two have a chance meeting at a Vienna hotel where she is a guest and he is the hotel’s night porter. They resume their former relationship with gruesome results. It’s definitely not for the squeamish.

This week’s new releases include Magic in the Moonlight and The Skeleton Twins.