After three poorly received prequels to the original Star Wars trilogy, Lucasfilm has gone back to the originals to give us a seventh film that takes place three decades after 1983’s The Return of the Jedi.

J.J. Abrams, who directed the rebooted Star Trek in 2009 and its less successful sequel 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness with 2011’s Super 8 sandwiched in-between, has proven to be the right man to helm the ongoing Star Wars saga, providing Star Wars: The Force Awakens with both a fast pace and a light touch.

Returning to the fray are Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill, the three stars of the original Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi. Ford and Fisher give what are easily their best performances of the series this time around while Hamill’s presence is felt throughout even though he only makes an appearance at the end. Newcomers to the series, John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, and the prolific Oscar Isaac, prove to be their worthy successors. Standouts in supporting roles are Adam Driver and Domhnall Gleeson as the principal villains and Lupita Nyong’o in a great motion capture role as the canteen owner.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens opened late in the year without advance screenings and missed out on a number of year-end nominations and awards. It did, however, receive five Academy Award nominations in technical categories. It has also received fifteen nominations for the 42nd Annual Saturn Awards to be held in June. Among its nominations are those for Best Science-Fiction Film, Best Director (J.J. Abrams), two Best Actors (Harrison Ford, John Boyega), Best Actress (Daisy Ridley), Best Supporting Actor (Adam Driver) and two Best Supporting Actresses (Carrie Fisher, Lupita Nyong’o). May the force be with it!

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is available in both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Kino Lorber continues to release films on Blu-ray at a generous pace. Among the newest releases are The Purple Plain, The Gallant Hours, Donovan’s Brain, and The Black Sleep.

1954’s The Purple Plain, directed by Robert Parrish, provides Gregory Peck with one of his best roles of the 1950s, that of a self-destructive World War II pilot, who after the death of his wife only wants to die. He finds a new reason for living when a plane crash in enemy territory deep in the Burmese jungle forces him to stay alive to guide his companions to safety. There are fine supporting performances from Win Min Than, Brenda De Banzie, Bernard Lee, Maurice Denham and Anthony Bushell but it’s Peck’s film all the way. It’s arguably his best performance between his fourth and fifth Oscar nominations for Twelve O’Clock High and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Not nearly as good as The Purple Plain, but of interest to World War II buffs is Robert Montgomery’s The Gallant Hours starring James Cagney as Fleet Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey Jr. This 1960 film was Montgomery’s first film in ten years as director, and while he doesn’t appear on screen, he does narrate the American strategy and battle scenes in the film. Told in documentary style, the film opens with Halsey’s retirement ceremony in 1945 and in flashback follows Halsey from his assignment to command the U.S. naval operations in the South Pacific to the Allied victory at Guadalcanal, which turned the tide of the war. Cagney provides one of his more subdued performances. The supporting cast includes Dennis Weaver, Ward Costello, Vaughn Taylor, and Richard Jaeckel among many others.

An influential Grade B horror film, 1953’s Donovan’s Brain, directed by Felix Feist, had as its source material a famous novel by Curt Siodmak (The Wolf Man), first dramatized as a radio play with Orson Welles a decade earlier. Filmed straight and ripped off many times, this is the most famous version. Its influence can be felt on numerous science fiction and horror films including 2001: A Space Odyssey whose HAL the computer ultimately takes control of the astronauts as the dead millionaire’s brain takes control of the doctors who keep his brain alive in Donovan’s Brain.

Lew Ayres (All Quiet on the Western Front, Dr. Kildare) received an Oscar nomination for Johnny Belinda opposite Oscar winner Jane Wyman with whom he had an affair during the film’s production while she was not yet divorced from third husband Ronald Reagan. Ayres turned down the lead in Magnificent Obsession opposite Wyman, now married to fourth husband Fred Karger, in order to play the conflicted doctor in Donovan’s Brain opposite Reagan’s second wife, Nancy Davis. Any awkwardness, however, is not visible in the interaction of the two stars. Gene Evans and Steve Brodie co-star. An excellent informative commentary is provided by film historian Richard Harland Smith.

Horror films about mad doctors were a staple of the 1930s and 40s but by the mid-50s had been considered passé. 1955’s The Black Sleep, directed by Reginald Le Borg, was the sole exception. Starring Basil Rathbone as the mad doctor who experiments on patients in order to bring his comatose wife back to consciousness, co-stars Akim Tamiroff (a replacement for Peter Lorre for whom his role was written), John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., and Bela Lugosi all play over-the-top while Rathbone plays it straight. An informative commentary is provided by film historian Tom Weaver assisted by horror movie music expert David Schecter.

Scream Factory, a subsidiary of Shout Factory, has released a double bill of 1971’s Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Dunwich Horror, both with commentary from film historian Steve Haberman.

1971’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, directed by Gordon Hessler, was the third film version of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic, the 11th and final Poe film from American International Pictures. Jason Robards, Christine Kaufmann, Herbert Lom, Michael Dunn, and Lilli Palmer provide the film with more class than the tacky screenplay provides. It starts out with a stage production of the original Poe classic and then duplicates the actors’ roles in real life, with at least three scenes following the film’s climax before it peters out.

1970’s The Dunwich Horror, directed by Daniel Haller, was American International’s attempt at duplicating the success of 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, with Sandra Dee, Dean Stockwell, and Ed Begley standing in for Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes and Ralph Bellamy. It doesn’t even come close, trying though it does, with its mix of traditional horror and then popular dollops of nudity and sex. Sam Jaffe as Stockwell’s father steals the show.

Making its U.S. debut on standard DVD, 2015’s The Von Trapp Family: A Life of Music, directed by Ben Verborg, is a U.S. film released theatrically in Germany toward the end of last year. The narrative is provided by Rosemary Harris as an elderly Agathe von Trapp reminiscing about her life from the death of her mother in 1922 to the family’s escape from Austria in 1938. Agathe, who died in 2010 at the age of 97, was the real name of the eldest von Trapp daughter, but the film itself doesn’t appear to be any more historically accurate than The Sound of Music.

Both films present the eldest daughter (Agathe here, Liesl in The Sound of Music) as the eldest of the seven von Trapp children when in fact she had an elder brother who became a doctor. In The Sound of Music, Liesl’s boyfriend becomes a Nazi sympathizer and Hitler youth. In this film, her boyfriend, the grandson of the family cook, is a resistance fighter who is murdered by the Nazis. There is no historical evidence of either account being true. Both films end with fanciful escapes across the Alps, but in reality the von Trapps, a well-established singing group in Austria at the time, were on tour in Italy when they defected to America. The film is also fuzzy on the date of marriage between Georg and his second wife, Maria von Trapp, and the number of children they had together. In point of fact they were married in 1927, eleven years before leaving Austria and had three children together by that time.

See it as a companion piece to The Sound of Music, but don’t take it too seriously.

This week’s new releases include new Blu-rays of Howard Hawks’Only Angels Have Wings and Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion.