Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special is the best supernatural thriller to come down the pike in a long time. It is also one of the few good films to have been released so far this year, which is not surprising as it comes from the director of Take Shelter and Mud, two very good films from several years ago.

Michael Shannon, with whom Nichols often works, plays a concerned father on the lam with his son played by Jaeden Lieberher (St. Vincent) with the aid of best friend Joel Edgerton (Warrior). They are being pursued by the FBI and other agencies at the behest of the religious cult from which they have escaped. Other key players include Kirsten Dunst (Fargo: Season 2) as the boy’s mother and Adam Driver (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) as an FBI profiler.

Who everyone really is and why they are doing what they are doing is eventually revealed as the film builds to its Close Encounters of the Third Kind-inspired climax. I have to say that I never really cared for Spielberg’s Close Encounters because I found the pace sluggish. That’s not the case here as the film’s slow, deliberate pace is used to give all five actors time to shine in their own special moment or two and allow the audience time to take in each new detail as the narrative leads inexorably to where you know it has to go.

Edgerton stars opposite Ruth Negga (Warcraft) with Shannon in a supporting role in Nichols’ next film, the eagerly anticipated Loving, which is expected to be one of the year’s prime Oscar contenders.

Midnight Special is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Disney has been extolling diversity at least since the release of Pinocchio and Dumbo 75 years ago. Their latest animated feature to hit home video, Zootopia, does so as well, but with a lot more emphasis than the subtlety with which those two classics made their point. Maybe that’s what today’s audiences need. I don’t know, but it does do it rather effectively as a sincere rookie cop rabbit (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) and a sly, conniving fox (voiced by Jason Bateman) in a Utopian animal society combine forces to solve a mystery. The second half of the film really lays the message on.

Zootopia is available on Blu-ray 2D, 3D and standard 2D DVD.

A number of classic films continue to be upgraded for Blu-ray release.

VCI, producers of the first home video media forty years ago, have largely been on the sidelines lately, but make a welcome return to the spotlight with a beautiful print of 1956’s The Brave One. Michel Ray, one of the best child actors of his day, plays the title character, a young Mexican boy who raises a bull from a calf only to have it snatched away by the rightful owner who puts in the ring. British-Brazilian Ray later became an Olympic skier and, through his wife, a billionaire as heir to the Heineken fortune. The film, directed by Irving Rapper (Now, Voyager), won an Oscar for Best Story for Robert Rich, later revealed to be a pseudonym for Dalton Trumbo.

A rather silly movie, albeit one with some universal truths thrown in here and there, 1969’s If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium is about a group of ugly Americans who take an eighteen-day bus tour of nine European countries. Most improbable of all, playboy tour guide Ian McShane falls in love with sensible Suzanne Pleshette and vice versa. At least they have something to do. Most of the other actors, including Mildred Natwick, Peggy Cass, Vittorio De Sica, and Patricia Routledge are poorly used. Despite this, both the Writers Guild of America and the Golden Globes honored the script by David Shaw (A Foreign Affair) with awards nominations. The film, directed by Mel Stuart (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), does look good in Kino Lorber’s excellent transfer and offers a time capsule of what both Great Britain and Continental Europe looked like forty-five years ago.

Kino Lorber has also provided an excellent transfer of 1993’s A Home of Our Own, Kathy Bates’ first starring role after her Oscar win for Misery. Allegedly based on a true story, she plays a widowed mother of six who decides to get her kids out of the underbelly of 1955 Los Angeles and travel north and east until she finds a more suitable living space. She settles on a shack on three acres of land owned by Japanese-American Soon Tek-Oh who owns a nursery across the road. He rents the space to her in exchange for errands she and the children perform for him. Bates is great as one would expect in a role in which she really gets her teeth into, as is Edward Furlong as her eldest son. His character, voiced by director Tony Bill, narrates the story in the then present. T.J. Lowther as the youngest son would go from this to the co-starring role opposite Kevin Costner in Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World which hit screens just two weeks later.

One of Kathy Bates’ best known later roles was as Denver heroine Molly Brown in 1997’s Titanic, but that role was a supporting one in which romantic leads Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet held center stage. The character’s life story had already been given quite a spin of its own thirty-three years earlier in 1964’s The Unsinkable Molly Brown starring Debbie Reynolds in her only Oscar-nominated role. The big, brassy musical, directed by Charles Walters (Easter Parade), made the transition from Broadway to Hollywood with its score by Meredith Willson (The Music Man) firmly in place with Reynolds replacing Tammy Grimes opposite her original co-star, Harve Presnell. The Warner Archive release is, as one would expect, an absolute stunner on Blu-ray.

Reynolds lost the 1964 Best Actress Oscar to Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins. Both that film and Andrews’ follow-up Oscar-nominated performance in the 1965 Oscar winner, The Sound of Music have, of course, already had their Blu-ray releases and now, thanks again to Warner Archive, so has Andrews’ third Oscar-nominated performance in 1982’s Victor/Victoria. James Garner, Robert Preston, and Lesley Ann Warren co-star in this perfectly delightful concoction with a Henry Mancini-Leslie Bricusse score, directed by Blake Edwards based on a 1933 German film. Andrews as a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman is at her charming best with Garner, Preston, and Warren proving to be her equals. Both Preston and Warren also earned Oscar nominations for their performances.

Anyone who would argue that this stunning transfer is anything less than perfect is a horse’s ass to me, but as the waiter in an early scene famously says, “only a moron would give advice to a horse’s ass”.

This week’s new releases include Eye in the Sky and the long overdue 1978 charmer, Movie Movie.