Sustained grief is something we don’t encounter very often in American movies. You’d have to go all the way back to Robert Redford’s 1980 film Ordinary People to find a popular film as mired in the subject as Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea. Both films, though their approaches are different, give us characters who can’t let go of the deaths in their families, despite their best efforts at trying to move on.

Ordinary People was about a family of four in which the older son is killed in a boating accident and the younger son (Timothy Hutton) is recovering from an attempted suicide because he blamed himself for the accident that killed his brother. His father (Donald Sutherland) tries awkwardly to move on, while his mother (Mary Tyler Moore) is in denial.

Boating plays a part in Manchester by the Sea as well, in that the lives of the two brothers (Kyle Chandler, Oscar winner Casey Affleck) and the older brother’s son (Lucas Hedges) spend a lot of time on the older brother’s boat. The older brother (Chandler) dies from a heart attack and the younger brother (Affleck) is appointed guardian of his brother’s son. Slowly we are drawn into the family’s history, which involves divorces from both brothers and their wives’ remarriages, while the men remain unattached.

To say more about the plot would give too much away. It’s best for audiences to experience it for themselves. Suffice to say that Casey Affleck delivers the performance of his career so far as the emotionally scarred survivor of not just his brother’s death, but earlier heartache as well. Lucas Hedges is almost his equal as his tough on the outside nephew and Michelle Williams turns in her usual fine performance as Affleck’s heartbroken ex-wife. Gretchen Mol also does fine work as Chandler’s ex-wife and Hedges’ absent mother.

Mel Gibson returns to his roots with Hacksaw Ridge. The actor-director who burst onto the international scene with Peter Weir’s 1981 anti-war masterpiece Gallipoli, put so much violence into his Oscar-winning Braveheart and subsequent Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, that he is the last person one would expect to direct the most pacifistic war film ever made. Yet that is exactly what he does with Hacksaw Ridge, which like American-born, Australian-raised Gibson’s early films, was made entirely in Australia with a mostly Australian cast. You couldn’t tell that from watching the film, which takes place in Virginia, South Carolina’s Fort Jackson and eventually the battle of Okinawa in the South Pacific.

Hollywood had wanted to film the story of conscientious objector Desmond Doss for decades. Audie Murphy had wanted to make it in the 1950s, but it wasn’t until Gregory Crosby (Bing’s grandson and one of the film’s producers) wrote a treatment that Doss liked in 2001 that he finally agreed to have his story told. Gibson was first approached to make the film a decade ago but turned it down, finally relenting the third time he was asked.

The film doesn’t eschew the violence associated with the war, but the emphasis is not on the gore, but the heroism of Doss who repeatedly risked his life to save countless wounded soldiers in one of the bloodiest battles of the war. Unlike Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, which downplayed the sentiment in Olympian Louis Zamperini’s biographical drama and suffered for it, Gibson plays up the sentiment here, obtaining career high performances not just from Andrew Garfield as Doss, but from Sam Worthington as his skeptical commanding officer and Hugo Weaving as his disapproving father as well as strong ones from Teresa Palmer, Rachel Griffiths, Luke Bracey, and even Vince Vaughn.

Unlike Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York, which has it both ways when Gary Cooper’s York turns his weapon on the enemy, Doss refuses to touch a gun throughout. Although it’s his faith as a 7th Day Adventist that earns him his conscientious objector status, it was almost killing his brother in a childhood fight that turned him against violence. There are no scenes in a church in this one. We’re spared a modern-day Walter Brennan hamming it up from the pulpit. We do get the real-life Doss just before his death, along with his former commanding officer, speaking to the camera in the film’s emotionally riveting coda.

Fashion guru Tom Ford’s first film as a director, 2009’s A Single Man, was based on Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel of the same name. His second, 2016’s Nocturnal Animals, is based on Austin Wright’s 1993 novel, Tony and Susan. The neo-noir has its moments, but is a tough sit-through for those who are easily repulsed by violence.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams star as Tony and Susan, a long-divorced couple. He is an author who sends her, an art gallery owner, the manuscript of his latest novel, which we see dramatized as she reads it. In it, the protagonist (also played by Gyllenhaal) is a victim of road rage in which the unthinkable happens. Why he would write such a thing and send it to her is as much a part of the mystery as is what happens to the characters in the novel.

Adams and Armie Hammer as her current husband come up a bit short in this one, but Gyllenhaal, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as his tormenter, and Michael Shannon as a dying cop deliver strong performances.

Manchester by the Sea, Hacksaw Ridge, and Nocturnal Animals are available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Warner Archive has given us another sterling Blu-ray upgrade with The Boy Friend. Ken Russell’s 1971 film is both a filmization of Sandy Wilson’s London and Broadway smash and a backstage musical in the tradition of 42nd Street.

The 1954 Broadway production of Wilson’s musical made a star of Julie Andrews and the 1970 Broadway revival with Judy Carne and Sandy Duncan introduced it to a new generation. Russell’s film won iconic 1960s model Twiggy a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy. Russell’s most accessible film, he made this between The Devils and Savage Messiah with none of the hysteria associated with either of those films.

While remaining as faithful to the material as he was capable of, Russell also borrowed heavily from Busby Berkeley and, in one sequence Federico Fellini, in something that would have been at home in his 1969 film, Fellini Satyicon.

Criterion has pulled out all the stops for Michael Curtiz’s 1945 film Mildred Pierce, which looks smashing on Blu-ray. There are extras galore, including the 2002 documentary, Joan Crawford: The Ultimate Movie Star and archival interviews with Crawford and Ann Blyth.

Disney’s new Pinocchio Blu-ray is the same transfer as their seven-year-old 70th anniversary edition. Sony’s Guess Who’s Coming to DinnerBlu-ray is the same transfer as last year’s Twilight Time release. If you have these, you don’t need an upgrade. If you don’t, what are you waiting for?

This week’s new releases include the Oscar winning Moonlight and Oscar presenter Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply.