Two things I usually don’t discuss are a film’s plot spoilers and the ages of its principal cast members. However, with The Age of Adaline, the spoiler is so obvious from the get-go that it’s not a matter of if it will occur, as when, and in a film that centers around its character’s ages, it seems disingenuous not to denote the ages of the actors playing them.

28-year-old Blake Lively (TV’s Gossip Girl) stars in this unusual fantasy film as a woman born in 1908 who marries, has a daughter, loses her husband and subsequently plunges into the San Francisco Bay during a rare Northern California snowstorm at the age of 29. Her heart stops, but a bolt of lightning from a comet strikes her heart and brings her back to life. The side effect of this occurrence is that she will not age beyond the moment the bolt of lightning struck her. 78 years later she has an identical accident under the same weather conditions in the same place. Her heart stops and she is brought back to life from another bolt of lightning from the same comet. This re-sets her internal rhythm and she begins to age again at 107. The key word here is “begins”, she doesn’t all of a sudden become an old hag as she might in other films as diverse as Lost Horizon, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Horror of Dracula

In the meantime, Adaline must relocate and seek a new identity every ten years or so to avoid becoming a scientific research subject. At the start of the story, she is getting ready to leave San Francisco, where she has been living and working for the past ten years, to move to Seattle to be close to her daughter. The daughter, played by 82-year-old Ellen Burstyn (Requiem for a Dream), passes herself off as Adaline’s grandmother.

Into her life comes a rich and handsome architect who pursues her. He’s played by 34-year-old Michiel Huisman (TV’s Games of Thrones). Although she has made up her mind to leave him, he convinces her to spend the weekend visiting his parents as they celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. They’re played by 65-year-old Kathy Baker (TV’s Picket Fences) and 73-year-old Harrison Ford (Star Wars). Baker doesn’t have much to do other than frown a lot. Her frown makes her look like 61-year-old Flora Robson in Murder at the Gallop, but unlike Robson in the Miss Marple mystery, Baker isn’t hiding a secret. Ford is. It seems he had an affair with Adaline forty years earlier when he was 33 and she was 39, still looking and feeling 29. At first she pretends that Adaline was her mother, but eventually admits to Ford that it was her. He begs her not to run off and break his son’s heart like she did his. Of course she doesn’t listen, but her intrepid suitor follows her and stands by her side as she begins again.

The success or failure of such a story depends on the casting and the casting here is first rate, making it as believable as it can possibly be. Like an empty calorie meal, it won’t do you much good, but it was a tasty dish going down.

Written by J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz and directed by Lee Toland Krieger, The Age of Adaline is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Universal has released a long overdue Blu-ray upgrade of the Coen Brothers’ 2001 film, The Man Who Wasn’t There.

Roger Deakins’ stunning black-and-white cinematography was nominated for an Oscar and the film was on numerous ten best lists. Billy Bob Thornton was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance. He, Frances McDormand, and Tony Shalhoub were nominated for various critics’ awards.

Thornton (Sling Blade) plays a quiet second chair barber in 1949 Santa Rosa, California who stumbles into a get-rich scheme that leads to blackmail and murder for which his wife Frances McDormand (Fargo) is charged. The plot thickens and what can go wrong does in this mystery thriller that is both an ode to film noir and a worthy modern entry in the genre.

Shalhoub (TV’s Monk) plays Thornton’s slick Sacramento lawyer while James Gandofini (TV’s The Sopranos), Richard Jenkins (The Visitor) and Scarlett Johansson (Lost in Translation) have other key roles.

Long unavailable in the U.S., Kino Lorber has released Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1967 film, The Honey Pot on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

The murder mystery, which is a twist on Ben Jonson’s 1605 play, Volpone, first saw the light of day as a novel by Thomas Sterling and then as a play by Frederick Knott. The film, which was originally released in the U.K. at 150 minutes, was trimmed to 132 minutes for U.S. release after complaints that it was too long. It’s still too long with a dullish first act that takes a while to get going. Once it does however, it is quite entertaining with several surprises at the end.

Oscar winners Rex Harrison (My Fair Lady), Susan Hayward (I Want to Live!), and soon-to-be Oscar winners Cliff Robertson (Charly) and Maggie Smith (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) star along with Capucine (Walk on the Wild Side and Edie Adams (The Apartment). The film takes place in and out of Harrison’s villa in Venice where he has invited three of his former lovers (Hayward, Capucine, Adams). Robertson is his newly hired male secretary; Smith is Hayward’s private nurse. Adolfo Celi (Thunderball) is the wily Italian detective brought in to solve a murder of one of the guests.

Harrison, Robertson, Smith and Celi come off best, with Smith especially appealing in one of her early efforts. Hayward, Capucine and Adams are hampered by the general unpleasantness of their characters, though Adams does have some amusing lines.

This week’s new releases include Love & Mercy and Cinderella .