In late 2014, TCM released a bare-bones Blu-ray of Howard Hawks’ 1939 classic Only Angles Have Wings. Now less than a year and a half later Criterion has released a superior 4K restoration of the film on Blu-ray with the many extras that Criterion is renowned for.

Hawks was one of the pioneers of the use of aviation in film beginning with 1928’s The Air Circus, achieving screen immortality with 1930’s The Dawn Patrol. His 1936 film Ceiling Zero followed the tradition and in 1939 after the flop of the now critically revered Bringing Up Baby returned to the genre with Only Angels Have Wings.

The story of a rough and tumble airmail company in South America in the early 1930s is told from the perspective of traveling entertainer Jean Arthur who is a more typical film heroine of the era than the prototype take-charge Hawks woman exemplified by Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire, or Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep. She cringes at the sudden deaths of pilots she was sitting with just a few minutes before while daredevil pilots Cary Grant and Thomas Mitchell make light of the situation.

The film is Hawks at his best, combining his trademark lightning-fast repartee between characters with thrilling action sequences while keeping the whole thing grounded in star power.

Arthur was at a career high, sandwiching this film in between two Frank Capra classics, You Can’t Take It With You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Grant made this on the heels of George Stevens’ high adventure classic Gunga Din. Mitchell was at his career peak, having already been seen earlier in the year in John Ford’s Stagecoach for which he would win an Oscar for a performance that he in some ways surpasses in Only Angels Have Wings. He would round out the year in three more classics: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Gone With the Wind, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Joining them are Richard Barthelmess, the star of Hawks’ The Dawn Patrol in his last great performance; and Rita Hayworth in the role that made her a star.

Extras include a 1939 Lux Radio Theatre adaptation with all five stars.

Not considered one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films, 1941’s Suspicion is nevertheless better than its reputation would have you believe and Warner Archive’s newly released Blu-ray restoration does it full justice.

Joan Fontaine won an Oscar for her brilliant portrayal of Cary Grant’s mousey wife in the same mold as she played Laurence Olivier’s mousey wife in Hitchcock’s Rebecca, the previous year’s Oscar winner for Best Picture. This time around she suspects her ne’er-do-well husband is going to poison her to death. In Hitchcock’s originally planned ending, he does, but in the studio imposed ending he was forced to film, it’s all been a misunderstanding. All the same, it’s a great ride while it lasts. Nigel Bruce as Grant’s friend steals his few scenes, but Dame May Whitty and Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Fontaine’s parents are pretty much wasted in underwritten roles.

From her first Oscar nomination in 1970 for the late 1969 release of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? to her dual wins for Klute and Coming Home to her fifth nomination for 1979’s The China Syndrome, no actress exemplified films of the 1970s more than Jane Fonda. The actress, who like most in her profession, loathes watching herself on film but did just that to sit down with Nick Redman on Twilight Time’s limited edition Blu-ray of 1977’s Julia, for which she received her third Oscar nomination.

Not having seen the film in decades, Fonda’s memory of the film was a bit sketchy, but she remembered well the film’s central train journey, her scenes with Oscar winners Vanessa Redgrave and Jason Robards and fellow nominee Maximilian Schell as well as Meryl Streep’s debut in a key scene. She also remembers meeting the formidable Lillian Hellman, whom she plays, as a hurricane was about to hit her Martha’s Vineyard home and helping her board up the place. What neither she nor director Fred Zinnemann nor anyone else connected with the film knew at the time, was that Hellman’s memoir on which it was based, was total fiction. There was no Julia in Hellman’s life. The resistance fighter played by Redgrave was based on a real-life resistance fighter who never met Hellman. The real “Julia” escaped Nazi Germany, emigrating to the U.S. with her husband and daughter in 1939 two years after the alleged tragic events portrayed in the film.

Fonda retired from acting when she married third husband Ted Turner in 1991, but returned to acting in 2005, four years after their divorce. Ten years later she finally had a role the equivalent of her great roles of the 1970s as the reluctant divorcée in Netflix’s Grace and Frankie, now on DVD.

Fonda and Lily Tomlin play two very different women, Fonda a retired cosmetics entrepreneur, Tomlin an art teacher of ex-convicts, who form a bond after their attorney partner husbands, Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston announce they are gay, have been in a twenty-year relationship and are divorcing them to marry one another. With a vibe reminiscent of The Golden Girls, the four stars, along with their terrific supporting cast and guest stars, deliver an excellent portrait of life in the 70s, not the 1970s as they did forty years ago, but their own seventies.

A current nominee for the 2016 BAFTA TV awards for Best Mini-Series and Best Actor (Ben Whishaw), 2015’s London Spy is also now on DVD.

Whishaw (In the Heart of the Sea) dominates, but does not overwhelm the story in which he plays a thirty-something gay warehouseman who enters improbably into a relationship with a nattily dressed, but seemingly naïve employee of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service. When he discovers the body of his lover of eight months (Edward Holcroft) in an obviously staged situation, no one will believe that he was murdered, possibly by his handlers at MI6. Eventually he convinces old friend and former MI6 agent Jim Broadbent to help him get to the bottom of it, but standing in the way is Holcroft’s deceptive mother, played by Charlotte Rampling in another of her amazing late-career performances.

Both Grace and Frankie Season 1 and London Spy are available on standard DVD only.

This week’s new releases include The Revenant and The Lady in the Van.