Criterion has released Blu-ray upgrades of two more cinematic masterpieces, The Fisher King and The Bridge.

The only non-British member of Monty Python, Terry Gilliam achieved great success with 1974’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail which he co-directed with Terry Jones. He returned to the quest for the Holy Grail with 1991’s The Fisher King written by fledgling screenwriter Richard LaGravenese. It would be the only one of his films Gilliam didn’t write himself.

The film is a brilliant mix of drama, comedy, friendship, love and craziness woven around four stars, Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, Mercedes Ruehl and Amanda Plummer, with an assist from Michael Jeter.

Williams and Bridges were at the height of their respective careers. Ruehl, Plummer and Jeter were known for their stage work.

Williams had top billing, but Bridges had the larger part as a wealthy shock jock radio star who loses everything when one of his key callers kills seven people and himself in a Manhattan restaurant. Three years later he is living off his latest girlfriend, video store owner Ruehl. Attacked in Central Park by a couple of young vigilantes, he is rescued by homeless Williams whose wife was one of those murdered in the restaurant shootout. Williams has only recently awoken from his catatonic state and is on a quest for the Holy Grail which he has tracked to Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Bridges will reluctantly help him retrieve it, but first he must help him woo the equally weird Plummer that Williams worships from afar. Cabaret entertainer Jeter will help in this regard.

Bridges had been a major star throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, earning Oscar nominations for The Last Picture Show, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Starman. He would later earn additional nominations for The Contender, Crazy Heart and True Grit, winning for Crazy Heart. His best performances, however, were in films from 1989 through 1993, which included See You in the Morning, The Fabulous Baker Boys, American Heart and Fearless, as well as The Fisher King, none of which oddly earned him Oscar recognition.

Williams had received Oscar nominations for Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society, but curiously missed out on one for Awakenings. He would be nominated again for The Fisher King and go on to win for Good Will Hunting. Ruehl would be nominated and win an Oscar for The Fisher King largely based on her heartbreaking breakup scene with Bridges. The never-nominated Plummer, already had a Tony for Broadway’s Agnes of God and nominations for revivals of A Taste of Honey and Pygmalion. Jeter had won a Tony for the Lionel Barrymore role in the musical version of Grand Hotel the year before.

Criterion’s release of The Fisher King is head and shoulders above the previous release from Tri-Star.

Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Film of 1959, though not released in the U.S. until 1961, The Bridge was one of the most influential films of its day and retains its reputation as one of the great anti-war films of all time..

Before The Bridge, all post-World War II German films about the war had focused on heroic non-Nazi “good” Germans. The Bridge would have none of the that. The film’s protagonists were a group of seven 15- and 16-year-old boys who were drafted in April 1945 as the war was coming to end as part of Hitler’s “final solution”. The day after they were drafted they were ordered into combat with their battalion. Their commanders, seeking to protect them ordered them to protect an insignificant bridge outside of their hometown, while the rest of the battalion moved to the front lines. Instead of laying low as they were ordered by their sergeant who left to find the demolition experts who would blow up the bridge the next morning, they engaged in combat with a U.S. tank company. All but one died at dawn on the bridge.

Bernhard Wicki’s film is from the 1958 novel by 29-year-old journalist Gregor Dorfmesieter working under the pen-name of Manfred Gregor based on his own experiences fourteen years earlier. Wicki, who has been compared to Orson Welles, spent the rest of his life trying to duplicate the success of The Bridge but never came close. Invited to the U.S., he filmed the German sequences of The Longest Day and directed The Visit and Morituri before returning to Germany where he spent most of his time acting in films for other directors. He had a role in admirer Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas.

Criterion has packed the new release of The Bridge with extras including an interview with Wolker Schlondorff (The Tin Drum) on Wicki’s influence on future directors. Also included is a vintage interview with Wicki in which he cites Roberto Rossellini (Open City) and Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves) as his influences.

Liam Neeson gets a lot of flak for making “paycheck” films, but he earned back some his lost respectability as a serious actor with last year’s A Walk Among the Tombstones. This year’s Run All Night, directed by Juame Collet-Serra, while not exactly a cinematic masterpiece, is one of his better films. It’s an edge-of-your-seat white-knuckle thriller set in Manhattan in which hitman Neeson singlehandedly fends off Irish Mafia chief Ed Harris, the New York City police and even his own family members to protect his son (Joel Kinnaman) from the wrath of Harris after Neeson kills Harris’s son (Boyd Holbrook) just as he was about to kill Kinnaman. Nick Nolte and Lois Smith play Neeson’s parents, Vincent D’Onofrio the only cop Neeson trusts, and Common, a particularly vicious hitman.

Disney has pretty much cornered the market on inspirational sports films. Niki Caro’s McFarland, USA is the latest example. The director of Whale Rider and North Country provides Kevin Costner with a strong role as a washed up P.E. teacher who comes to the small California agricultural town of McFarland where he institutes a cross-country running team comprised of field workers’ sons who themselves have to work in the fields before and after school. The team he puts together wins the first California cross-country championship and subsequent teams win another 8 times over the next 13 years. The running, on and off the track, is superbly done. Unfortunately the domestic issues that fill the time between races seem like just that, filler. Still it’s worth seeing for the performances of Costner and his boys.

This week’s new releases include Danny Collins and the San Francisco Opera Company’s production of Show Boat.