Things to Come, the new to home video film from Mia Hansen-Love, is not a remake of William Cameron Menzies’ film of the same name from H.G. Wells’ classic novel that captivated audiences eighty years ago. Rather, it is a wistful French film about an aging philosophy professor coping with the changes in her life.

Isabelle Huppert, an Oscar nominee for last year’s Elle, might just as easily have been nominated for this performance. As in that film, Huppert defies the ravages of age as she plays a forthright woman who must cope with her now grown children being out on their own, her difficult mother giving up on life and her husband having found someone else. She is just as strong a teacher as she’s always been, but the times have changed and her methods may not be what those in charge want these days. Nevertheless, her former students still revere her. Can that be enough as she loses nearly everything in life that has been dear to her? Perhaps it can.

Huppert is extraordinary in the role, and receives strong support from André Marcon as her husband, Roman Kolinka as her favorite former student, and Edith Scob as her mother

Things to Come is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Warner Archive continues to upgrade many of the major films from the vast Warner catalogue on Blu-ray. Newly released are The Accidental Tourist, Seven Days in May, and The Loved One

Lawrence Kasdan’s 1988 film of Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist remains a one-of-a-kind film about a travel writer (William Hurt) whose marriage unravels after the horrific murder of his young son. Although the premise is sad, the film’s outlook is one of optimism and hope as Hurt struggles between the renewed stirrings of lust and love from his soon-to-be ex-wife (Kathleen Turner) and the affections of the odd dog groomer (Geena Davis) he has come to cherish along with her own young son.

Hurt, on a roll in the 1980s with Body Heat, The Big Chill, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Children of a Lesser God, and Broadcast News, gives another outstanding performance as the buttoned down, buttoned up author looking for comfort in a world he no longer understands. Kathleen Turner, his Body Heat co-star, is second-billed but missing from a good chunk of the film, but is fine in her few scenes. The real gem, though, is Geena Davis as the dog trainer, a role which won her the film’s only Oscar.

Davis had been making critics and audiences alike take notice with her performances in such films as Tootsie, The Fly, and Beetlejuice, but here she topped them all as she would top herself once again three years later with Thelma & Louise for which she won numerous awards as did co-star Susan Sarandon.

Extras include numerous deleted scenes including one startling scene in which Hurt is at the top of the World Trade Center and afraid to come down. References to The Towering Inferno are made. It’s all quite chilling. That scene, had it not already been deleted, would most certainly have been deleted after 9/11/2001.

A decade before Watergate and more than half a century before the current political crises, shenanigans at the highest level of the U.S. government was left mainly to fiction writers.

Along with such other highly explosive political dramas of 1964 such as Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe, and The Best Man, John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May focused on a fictional U.S. president (Fredric March) in a time of peril.

Based on the Fletcher Knebel-Charles W. Bailey bestseller, Frankenheimer’s film is about an attempted military coup by certain members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by Burt Lancaster. Kirk Douglas is Lancaster’s junior officer who discovers the plot and reports it to the president, who then deploys loyal staffer Martin Balsam and a trusted U.S. Senator (Edmond O’Brien) to obtain proof with which to confront Lancaster and force him to step down.

The film is filled with almost non-stop tension. The one misstep is the inclusion of Ava Gardner as Lancaster’s former mistress. It’s not Gardner’s fault, but her character adds little to the plot and takes away from the film’s otherwise palpable urgency.

March delivers one of his best performances and O’Brien nearly matches him in an Oscar-nominated supporting turn.

Having won an Oscar for 1963’s Tom Jones, Tony Richardson was given carte blanche to pick his next project. He chose Evelyn Waugh’s 1948 novel The Loved One, as black a comedy as was ever written. The screenplay is by Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove) and Christopher Isherwood (I Am a Camera). Richardson’s incredible cast is headed by Robert Morse the British émigré who, through a series of misadventures, ends up working for a funeral director whose human and animal funerals become more and more extravagant, culminating in the launch of a rocket to take the latest celebrity to heaven’s gate.

Morse had to have all his dialogue looped in post-production due his constant going in and out of his British accent. No looping was necessary for the screamingly funny Jonathan Winters and Rod Steiger, the legitimate Brits in major roles (John Gielgud, Roddy McDowall), or the myriad of famous faces who pop up from Milton Berle and Margaret Leighton to Tab Hunter and Liberace to Dana Andrews and Lionel Stander. As advertised, the film had something to offend everybody. Still, it should be seen, at last once.

Gene Kelly was 46 and looked it playing a 32-year-old writer-director opposite 20-year-old Natalie Wood in Irving Rapper’s 1958 film of Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar, a Warner Bros. film released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber rather than Warner Bros.

The novel by the author of The Caine Mutiny had been a huge bestseller, but the film version from the director of Now, Voyager comes across as a poor man’s version of A Star Is Born with Wood as the rising star who outshines her mentor. Kelly awkwardly bridges the gap here between his last full musical, 1957’s Les Gils, and his first full dramatic role in 1960’s Inherit the Wind.

Better are Claire Trevor and Everett Sloane as Wood’s parents and Ed Wynn as Trevor’s uncle.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray debuts of Universal’s Dracula and The Mummy Complete Legacy Collections.