Meryl Streep is an extremely lucky actress. Not only has the 67-year-old’s career flourished at an age when most of her contemporaries are either retired or given little to do in the films they do manage to make an appearance in, but she’s in the conversation for year-end awards for just about every film she makes, whether she deserves to be or not. This year has been an unusually strong one for lead actresses, so much so that Streep’s performance in Florence Foster Jenkins has generally been considered outside of the running. That is until this past week when she managed to nab one of the year’s five Best Actress nominations from the Screen Actors Guild. Suddenly, she’s very much in the conversation for a possible twentieth Oscar nomination.

The film, like many of the films for which Streep has been nominated for an Oscar in the past, isn’t particularly good. It’s not bad, either. It’s just there, a bit of fluff about an old lady who can’t sing, but is indulged upon by her friends and fans who applaud her outrageous attempts at pubic singing.

The film takes place in 1944 when the real-life Mrs. Jenkins was 76. Hugh Grant is her doting husband in what is obviously a marriage of convenience and Simon Helberg is her put-upon pianist. The film was directed by Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, The Queen, Philomena) who knows a thing or two about directing aging actresses to an Oscar nomination, but this is his weakest effort since he directed the then 71-year-old Judi Dench to a nomination for Mrs. Henderson Presents. The film provides so much opportunity for wool-gathering that I couldn’t help but think during much of it, how much more relevant it might have been if filmed in 1945 by Ernst Lubitsch or René Clair with Ethel Barrymore, Clifton Webb, and Dana Andrews in the leads.

Florence Foster Jenkins is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Tim Burton will probably never make a film as good as Ed Wood or even Big Fish again, but it’s nice that he keeps trying. His latest, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, is a sweet-natured film about a young man (Asa Butterfield) who time travels back to 1943 to get to the bottom of a mystery concerning the death of his grandfather (Terence Stamp). There he meets the courageous Miss Peregrine (Eva Green) and the residents of her home for peculiar children who are in danger of being killed by the nefarious Samuel L. Jackson. The film is based on a series of recent novels by Ransom Riggs. Although many fans of the novels were disappointed with changes made to some of the characters, and the absence of others, Riggs himself thought the changes improved upon his original ideas. Not having read them, I found the children’s characters to be quite engaging. It’s certainly a more interesting film than Florence Foster Jenkins.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is available on Blu-ray 3D, 2D and standard DVD.

Jane Austen (1775-1817) only wrote six novels and a novella in her 41 years, but those seven works have produced 69 film and TV adaptations thus far over an almost 80-year period. Whit Stillman’s 2016 film, Love & Friendship, is based on her novella, Lady Susan.

Lady Susan (Kate Beckinsale) is an unusual Austen protagonist. She is a recent widow and a sexual predator who ends up with a fool for a new husband. This is nowhere as good as Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, but it has its charms and is often amusing and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. Chloe Sevigny, Stephen Fry, Xavier Samuel, and Tom Bennett co-star.

Love & Friendship is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Newcomers Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri are the Little Men of the title in the latest film from Ira Sachs (Love Is Strange). The international Film Festival sensation features Greg Kinnear and Jenifer Ehle as Taplitz’s parents and Independent Spirit nominee Paulina Garcia as Barbieri’s mother who are at odds over Kinnear’s raising the rent on tenant Garcia’s dress shop in the building he recently inherited from his father. It’s up to the boys to be the adults in the house in this sweetly done slice-of-life drama.

Little Men is available on standard DVD only.

Previous DVD releases newly upgrade to Blu-ray include 1994’s Little Women, 1952’s Sudden Fear, 1950’s The Asphalt Jungle, and 1944’s The Lodger.

Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is generally regarded by most modern audiences as the best of the three film versions of the work, but I vehemently disagree. To my mind, George Cukor’s 1933 version was far superior. Gordon Hessler’s more leisurely 1978 TV miniseries was also better in my mind. I do, however, find Armstrong’s version superior to Mervyn LeRoy’s 1949 take on the classic.

I have no argument with the Oscar nods Armstrong’s film received for Best Costume Design and Best Score. I’m okay with Winona Rider’s Best Actress nod as Jo, but she takes a back seat for me to Katharine Hepburn’s portrayal in Cukor’s version. The best performances in Armstrong’s film were given by Claire Danes as Beth, Kirsten Dunst as the young Amyb and Christian Bale as Laurie. The best performances in Cukor’s version, aside from Hepburn’s, were Spring Byington’s Marmee, Edna May Oliver’s Aunt March, and Douglass Montgomery’s Laurie. The best performances in the miniseries were those of Dorothy McGuire as Marmee, Greer Garson as Aunt March, and Robert Young as Mr. Laurence. The worst performance in the Armstrong version was Mary Wickes’ very tired interpretation of the feisty Aunt March. Wickes, usually a breath of fresh air in her many films and TV appearances, was a year away from her death at 85 and sadly looked it. There was no spark to her performance.

There are no extras on this Columbia release but Cohen Media, Criterion, and Kino Lorber, have all provided generous extras on the other three upgrades.

David Miller’s Sudden Fear is a nifty thriller set mainly in San Francisco, spoiled only by the miscasting of Jack Palance as the romantic lead who, no surprise, turns out to be not so romantic after all. Still, he and Joan Crawford did receive Oscar nominations for their performances, so there are obviously those who disagree. The black-and-white cinematography is the real star here.

John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle is still a terrific thrill-a-minute caper film with fine performances from Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, James Whitemore, Oscar nominated Sam Jaffe, Jean Hagen and Marilyn Monroe among others. Huston and Ben Maddow’s screenplay is one of the best-ever written for a film noir.

John Brahm’s The Lodger is easily the best psychological horror film of the 1940s with a career-best performance by Laird Cregar as the sensitive title character who leads a double life as Jack the Ripper. Merle Oberon, George Sanders, Cedric Hardwicke, and Sara Allgood co-star.

This week’s new releases include Sully and Hitchcock/Truffaut.