A Most Violent Year started out the 2014 awards season with promise, winning National Board of Review awards for Best Picture, Actor Oscar Isaac (tied with Birdman’s Michael Keaton) and Best Supporting Actress Jessica Chastain. Aside from a few critics’ nominations for Chastain, however, that was it for J.C. Chandor’s third film.

Word of mouth was not kind to the film which initially drew audiences anticipating a slam-bang action film, which it is not. Its title refers to 1981, the year in which it takes place, deemed to be the most violent in New York City history. Isaac plays a heating oil business owner trying to expand that business, but running into trouble when his oil trucks are hijacked and his oil stolen and sold on the black market. Chastain is his bookkeeper wife, the daughter of a mafia kingpin serving time in federal prison. Violence does occur but it is not the main focus of the film which like Chandor’s previous films, Margin Call and All Is Lost, is concerned with character development as much as it is with plot.

Isaac and Chastain, who have known each other since Julliard, are wonderful together. There are fine supporting performances, too, from David Oyelowo as the federal prosecutor investigating Isaac’s company, Albert Brooks as Isaac’s wily lawyer, and Elyes Gabel as a very unlucky truck driver. The film, which is handsomely photographed on location in NYC, is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

New York of sixty years earlier is also on fine display in James Gray’s The Immigrant, the director’s fourth film in a row to star Joaquin Phoenix. The actor, who worked for the director on The Yards, We Own the Night and Two Lovers, has another complex role as a conflicted showman and pimp. Marion Cotillard, who started off awards season with the Best Actress award from the New York Film Critics for both this and Two Days, One Night, gives a brilliantly nuanced performance as the Polish immigrant forced into prostitution to pay for the release of her sister from Ellis Island where she is being held awaiting deportation for illness. Her story may be far-fetched but she imbues the character with such poignancy that you hardly notice while the film plays out. She’s actually even better here than she is in Two Days, One Night for which she received her Oscar nomination this year. Jeremy Renner as Phoenix’s combative cousin, a magician who loves her, is also quite good.

In addition to its New York Film Critics award for Best Actress, film also won for its stunning cinematography. It’s available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

One of the pleasures of the current TV season has been the six episode series Grantchester, which ran earlier this year on PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery. Beautifully filmed in the English countryside that has become the standard for British mystery series, it takes place in 1953 as the country is emerging from the hardships following World War II in which rationing was still a factor. Fast-rising actor James Norton stars as a young Anglican priest with a fondness for whiskey and women as well as helping a local police inspector solve murders. Robson Green co-stars as the inspector. The only thing keeping the series from being a slam-dunk for renewal is the availability of its star who has just received a BAFTA TV award nomination for the miniseries Happy Valley in which he plays a rapist

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

Receiving a complete makeover, the Joan Hickson Miss Marple series, which has always looked washed out on home video, was digitally re-mastered with great care for release on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Hickson was 40 when Agatha Christie saw her on stage in one of her plays and told her she hoped that one day she would play her beloved old lady crime solver. Christie was dead 8 years and Hickson was 78 when she finally got to play her in a series of adaptations of Christie’s novels that would total 12 over an 8-year period, ending when she was 84. The series is being released in three volumes containing four mysteries each. The first two volumes have already been released with the third scheduled for release next month. If there is one complaint I have with it is that they are not being released in the order in which they were made and initially shown on TV.

Hickson, who died at 92 in 1998, was for many the ideal Marple. Personally I found her a bit dull, having preferred Margaret Rutherford, who played the part in four films in the 1960s; and Helen Hayes, who portrayed her in three made-for-TV movies in the mid-eighties, concurrent with Hickson’s early portrayals. The mysteries, however, several of which run 3 hours, are excellent. A revival of Agatha Christie’s Marple began in 2004 with the recently deceased Geraldine McEwan and continues with Julia McKenzie, neither of whom I’ve seen in the role.

Universal has released a stunning upgrade of Imitation of Life, both the 1934 and 1959 versions on one Blu-ray. Neither the richly textured earlier film in black-and-white nor the glossy color remake have ever looked so good.

My preference is for the original in which Claudette Colbert as the maple syrup traveling saleslady and Louise Beavers as her maid with a secret pancake recipe join forces and become rich and famous, with Beavers’ Delilah an obvious takeoff on Aunt Jemima. Actually only Colbert becomes really rich and famous as Beavers elects to remain her faithful maid with her 20% profit banked for her by Colbert. The remake eschews the pancake angle altogether with Lana Turner as a struggling actress who becomes a major star and Juanita Moore as her maid Annie who helps raise Turner’s daughter along with her own.

The heart of both films is the attempt at passing for white by the maid’s light-skinned black daughter and the heartache it brings her mother, culminating in the mother’s death and the daughter’s retribution.

While the first film gives equal significance to the stories of Bea (Colbert) and Delilah and their daughters (Rochelle Hudson and Fredi Washington), the remake presents Turner’s Lora as overly emotional and shallow and her daughter as borderline annoying. Sandra Dee complained that she wanted to play the role as an 18-year-old but that they made her play it like a 13- or 14-year-old. Susan Kohner’s role as Annie’s daughter is expanded from the original, with her finding jobs as a singer and dancer and having a white boyfriend (Troy Donahue) who beats and leaves her when he finds out she is really black.

Moore and Kohner were deservedly nominated for Oscars for their performances, as Beavers and Washington almost certainly would have been had they given supporting awards at the time of the first film’s release.

Warner Archive has finally released two long-requested Rosalind Russell classics on standard DVD only.

Russell earned a richly deserved Oscar nomination as the inspirational Australian nurse who found a treatment for polio when the medical profession had all but given up in 1946’s Sister Kenny. Alexander Knox and Dean Jagger co-star. Switching gears, she plays a Broadway star who commits murder in 1948’s The Velvet Touch. Circumstantial evidence points to her rival, Claire Trevor, who is at her sarcastic best, turning in another fine performance in the same year she would win an Oscar for Key Largo. Sydney Greenstreet is also outstanding as the theatre-loving detective brought in to solve the murder.

This week’s new releases include The Babadook and Big Eyes.