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Films about American first ladies are rare, yet there have been more than two hundred theatrical films and TV productions made about just four of them. There have been 38 each featuring Eleanor Roosevelt and Martha Washington and 86 featuring Mary Todd Lincoln. Jacqueline Kennedy (Onassis) is in the middle with just 56, but then Mary Todd Lincoln had 100 years more of being famous than she did.

Chilean director Pablo Larrainโ€™s first film in English concentrates on the life of the widow of the 35th President of the United States in the days following his 1963 assassination as she plans his funeral and lays the ground work for his legacy via an interview with a Time Magazine journalist.

Natalie Portmanโ€™s portrayal of Jackie is far and away the best thing she’s done on film. She not only gets her look, walk, and idiosyncratic speech patterns down pat, she gets inside the character in one of the most devastating portrayals of grief ever put on the screen. In a year when she and Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea gave the two best Hollywood portrayals of grief-stricken characters since Ordinary People and Terms of Endearment, he won the preponderance of awards for Best Actor whereas she was only able to win a handful of awards for Best Actress. There is some consolation in the fact that she had already won most of the Best Actress awards in 2010 for Black Swan, but this is the film she should have received all that recognition for.

Portman dominates the film, but she receives strong support from Peter Sarsgaard as Robert Kennedy, Billy Crudup as the journalist, and the late, great John Hurt as a priest.

Jackie is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

One of Disney’s best animated musicals to come along in some time, Moana, set in Ancient Polynesia, boasts a score by Mark Mancina and songs by Mancina, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Opetaia Foa’i, the best of which is Miranda’s Oscar-nominated “How Far I’ll Go”.

The voice cast is headed by then-15-year-old newcomer Auli’i Cravalho as the Chieftan’s daughter and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as her idol, the demigod Maui, in a story based on Polynesian mythology.

Moana is available in both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

From John Carney, the director of Once and Begin Again, comes Sing Street, easily his best musical to date.

Newcomer Ferdia Walsh-Peelo stars as a 15-year-old boy in 1985 Dublin who forms a band in order to impress a girl (Lucy Boynton). The score is a mix of 1980s covers and original songs, the best of which is easily “Drive It Like You Stole It,” which received numerous Best Song nominations and awards, but was overlooked by Oscar.

The superb supporting cast includes Jack Reynor as Walsh-Peelo’s stoner older brother, Aiden Gillen and Maria Doyle Kennedy as his battling parents, and Don Wycherly as the stern principal of his new school.

Sing Street is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Less than nine months after Paramount’s bare-bones release of 2015’s 45 Years on Blu-ray and standard DVD, Criterion has issued a Special Edition of Andrew Haigh’s film starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay.

Rampling, in her only Oscar-nominated performance, and Courtenay (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner), both contribute to a discussion of the making of the film with Haigh.

Among those films receiving their initial Blu-ray release are Compulsion, Finian’s Rainbow, and S.O.B..

Film historian Tim Lucas provides one of the most incisive commentaries you will ever listen to on Kino Lorber’s presentation of Richard Fleischer’s 1959 film version of Meyer Levin’s Compulsion.

Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman as a thinly fictionalized Leopold and Loeb, and Orson Welles as an equally thinly disguised Clarence Darrow, shared Best Actor awards at that year’s Cannes Film Festival. Stockwell would repeat the feat three years later, sharing 1962’s Best Actor award at Cannes with Ralph Richardson and Jason Robards for Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

As Lucas points out, Fleischer’s film was uncannily mirrored by Richard Brooks’ film of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood eight years later. Both films were based on true stories about thrill killings committed by two young men. Both were widescreen black-and-white films and both received Best Picture nominations from awards bodies other than Oscar. BAFTA nominated Compulsion, while the Globes nominated In Cold Blood.

It was only twenty-one years from the Broadway opening of Burton Lane and E.Y. Harburg’s masterful musical Finian’s Rainbow when Warner Bros. made it into a film in 1968, yet the world had changed so drastically that the story seemed to have come from another age altogether. It wasn’t helped by fledgling director Francis Ford Coppola dragging out scene after scene. On the plus side, however, is the enduring charm of Fred Astaire, sans top hat and tails, as the scraggly, aging Irishman in search of a pot of gold. Equally charming are Petula Clark as his daughter, Don Francks as her beau, and Tommy Steele as the world’s tallest leprechaun. Best of all, nothing, but nothing, could diminish the power of Lane and Harburg’s music and lyrics, which remain the heart and soul of the production.

Warner Archive’s sparkling release includes the film’s overture and intermission.

Looking just as good is Warner Archive’s release of Blake Edwards 1981 film S.O.B. . The film, however, like much of Edwards’ output, is a matter of taste. Aside from Robert Preston, who is hilarious as a sort of Dr. Feelgood to the stars, the film is one crude and ridiculous scene after another. Julie Andrews (Mrs. Edwards) is ill-used as an actress, not unlike herself, who wants to change her goody-two-shoes image by revealing her breasts on screen. Fortunately, Edwards, Andrews, and Preston had Victor/Victoria in release five months after this turkey.

This week’s new releases include Fences and Elle.

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