Nominated for 8 Academy Awards, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival is the French-Canadian director’s fourth film to factor into the Oscar race, but the first for which he himself is nominated for Best Director.

Villeneuve’s first flirtation with Oscar came with the nomination of 2010’s Incendies, which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. The film, which was about adult French-Canadian twins, one male, one female, who travel to the Middle East after the death of their mother in search of their father. It lost to Denmark’s In a Better World.

His second flirtation with Oscar was with 2013’s Prisoners in which he directed Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal in the edge-of-your-seat thriller about two kidnapped girls. It earned Roger Deakins the 11th of his stil- Oscarless 13 nominations for Cinematography. Deakins would earn his 13th for Villeneuve’s 2015 thriller, Sicario, which also received Oscar nods for Editing and Scoring. The performances of Emily Blunt and Benicio Del Toro as FBI border agents were well-awarded as well, but not by Oscar. Villeneuve and writer Taylor Sheridan were also under consideration elsewhere, but not by Oscar. They are both nominated this year, Sheridan for his screenplay for Best Picture nominee Hell or High Water. Joe Walker, who earned his first Oscar nod for editing Sicario, is also nominated for editing Arrival.

In addition to Villeneuve and Walker’s nominations, Arrival is nominated for Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Production Design, Sound Mixing, and Sound Editing. Eric Heisserer’s screenplay from Ted Chiang’s short story, The Story of Your Lifeb is a marvel. It expands the simple story of a linguistics professor’s encounter with aliens in explaining her daughter’s life, without making it seem drawn out or overblown. The visual effects are minimalistic, but effective. The extraordinary performance of Amy Adams is far and away the best thing she’s done on screen. Her lack of a nomination for Best Actress is truly a shame. You would have to go all the way back to Patricia Neal’s work in Robert Wise’s 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still to find anything comparable. Quite simply, Arrival is one of the year’s best films and deserving of its many accolades.

Arrival is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Expected to be one of 2016’s prime Oscar contenders, Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk instead turned out to be one of the year’s biggest critical and box-office flops. The reason the critics spurned it was mostly because the exhibited festival version they took pains to see was in the 4D resolution, 3D projection at a hard-on-the-eyes 120 frames-per-seconds that Lee preferred, instead of the standard 24 frames-per-second which was released to most theatres. As I understand it, most theatres are not equipped to show the higher resolution version and only five theatres in the world booked it. It was initially released to 800 theatres in the standard 24 frames-per-second format. That’s the version available on standard DVD and Blu-ray. There is also a 4D, 3D Blu-ray version for those who have the latest home video equipment.

Beyond the technical issues, the film was a hard sell to an indifferent public that didn’t want to see another movie about soldiers coming home to a country that would rather forget that we’ve been at war in the Middle East since 9/11/2001.

The film opens with news footage of a 19-year-old American soldier in Iraq in 2004, rescuing his sergeant and holding off the enemy. The footage goes viral and the soldier (Joe Alwyn) and his squad (led by Garrett Hedlund) are brought home and given a victory tour that culminates at the televised Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving Day football game in which they are scheduled to play back-up to half-time performers Destiny’s Child featuring Beyonce. Flashbacks of Alwyn’s family life and his time in Iraq fill in the gaps leading to his decision of whether to seek an honorable discharge due to his post-traumatic stress disorder as recommended by his sister (Kristen Stewart) or return to Iraq with his squad. That’s the crux of the film. Everything else is window dressing.

I have a feeling that were this directed by an up-and-coming no-name director it would be hailed as a minor masterpiece. Coming from the two-time Oscar-winning director of Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain, and Life of Pi, it’s a bit of a letdown. It’s far from the total disaster that 2003’s Hulk was, though, more like his interesting, but less successful 2009 film Taking Woodstock was.

Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, and many other prizes, Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs is a beautifully realized look at the lives of four families that share a farmhouse in Northern Italy during a year at the end of the 19th Century. Filmed in Bergamo in the local dialect of the day, long extinct at the time of filming, the cast is comprised of non-actors going about their day-to-day lives under the direction of a master, Olmi, who got his start directing documentaries. Aside from his first narrative film, 1961’s Il Posto, this remains his most famous work.

The Criterion Collection-restored Blu-ray and standard DVD features a new introduction by British filmmaker Mike Leigh (Secrets & Lies), several archival interviews with Olmi, and new on-stage interviews with various artisans and actors who worked on the film, including Omar Brignoli, the then-8-year-old heart and soul of the film.

Henry Hathaway (Call Northside 777, Fourteen Hours) didn’t think much of his 1956 film 23 Paces to Baker Street, but film buffs have long admired this London-set mystery with Van Johnson as an acerbic blind playwright who helps the police solve a baffling murder. The mystery, from an old Philip MacDonald novel, is not all that baffling, but Hathaway’s use of every corner of the wide screen in the early days of CinemaScope is endlessly fascinating. The playing of Johnson, Vera Miles as his cast aside fiancé, and Cecil Parker as his butler, is highly reminiscent of the interplay between James Stewart, Grace Kelly, and Thelma Ritter in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window two years earlier, especially in the apartment scenes. The ending is a blueprint for Wait Until Dark, the play and film that it preceded by a decade.

23 Paces to Baker Street is finally available in the U.S. in its proper aspect ratio on Blu-ray and standard DVD from Kino Lorber.

This week’s new releases include Manchester by the Sea and Hacksaw Ridge.