Grantchester Season 3 continues the first-rate British mystery series about Anglican priest Sidney Chambers (James Norton) in the mid-1950s who aids his police inspector friend Geordie Keating (Robson Green) in solving local murders. In addition to Geordie, the series features his close relationships with his married soon-to-be-divorced girlfriend Amanda Hopkins (Morven Christie), his blunt-spoken housekeeper Mrs. Maguire (Tessa Peake-Jones), and his closeted gay assistant cleric Leonard Finch (Al Weaver).

The first episode on the home video Blu-ray and DVD release of the third season is a Christmas special that aired on Christmas Eve, 2016 in the U.K., but in the midsummer in the U.S. where the series is still running on PBS.

The episode is a critical one in that it establishes the groundwork of the six-episode season that follows. In addition to solving a murder, Sidney and Leonard must direct the annual children’s Christmas play and the pregnant Amanda must give birth to her husband’s child, which Sidney has vowed to raise. The season itself will test the Sidney-Amanda relationship as Sidney goes through a crisis of faith in which he must choose between remaining a priest or marrying a divorced woman. Anglican priest can marry, but marriage to a divorcée was still frowned upon at the time.

The other principals are tested as well. Geordie must decide between continuing his relationship with a secretary half his age or returning to his wife and four children. Mrs. Maguire must decide whether to forgive her missing husband for having disappeared for ten years and Leonard must decide whether to go through with a sham marriage to a woman or acknowledge his feelings for the town’s equally closeted gay photographer.

As in previous seasons, the stories involving the murders and the suspects are just as complex as the relationships between the main characters. In all cases, either the murder victims, including a young Pakistani and a hardworking young mother, or the innocent suspects, including a crusty old shopkeeper and a bride-to-be, earn our empathy.

Will there be a Season 4? We can only hope as the last episode of Season 3 seems to have tied up all the loose ends, not that some of them couldn’t unravel again. The setting of this series bridges the gap between Foyle’s War set during World War II and its immediate aftermath and Endeavour and George Gently which are set in the 1960s. All four are essential viewing for lovers of British mysteries. With Foyle’s War having ended and George Gently set to bow out with the release of the next series, Endeavour will be the only one left standing if Grantchester doesn’t come back for another season. That would be sad.

Terence Davies, the director of The House of Mirth and The Deep Blue Sea, has made another exquisite film about a woman, the melancholic 19th Century poet, Emily Dickinson, unknown in her time but now revered as the greatest American poet of her day, if not of all time.

Like Davies’ masterpiece, The Long Day Closes, A Quiet Passion moves at a languid pace as the frustrated poet slowly comes to realize that her beloved home is also her tomb. Cynthia Nixon, who like Davies, is a lifelong Dickinson fanatic, imbues the character with a strong sense of who she is, no matter what others may think. Almost as good are Jennifer Ehle (TV’s Pride and Prejudice) as her loving sister, Keith Carradine (Nashville) as her concerned father, and Jodhi May (A World Apart) as her supportive sister-in-law.

A Quiet Passion is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. Kong: Skull Island marks the 69th appearance of King Kong in a film or TV dramatization that harkens back to the original 1933 King Kong.

It took just eight months for the sequel to the original, 1933’s Son of Kong, to make it into theatres. It’s taken twelve years for this unacknowledged sequel to the 2005 remake to make it to the screen. I say unacknowledged sequel because although the film is structured as a reboot of the Kong legend, the plot highly resembles that of Son of Kong in which the crew from the original returns to Skull Island where they encounter the title character. The crew here is all new as the action moves from a brief encounter during World War II to an expedition in the 1970s, the decade during which Hollywood remade the original with not only a different crew but a different building from which the giant ape falls to his death. Since 9/11, however, the 1976 version of King Kong ending with his fall from the World Trade Center gets no play. It was back to the Empire State Building for the 2005 version.

Like the 2014 version of Godzilla, this is a very busy film in which the actors are secondary to the action. Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Brie Larson, and John C. Reilly have the principal roles. Hiddleston and Larson seem overwhelmed by the film’s special effects. Jackson and Reilly mug way too much. Only Goodman seems to be acting as though he were in a decent film, which this one struggles to be but ultimately fails at.

Warner Bros. is releasing the home video version of Kong: Skull Island in various packaging, including standard DVD, Blu-ray, 3d Blu-ray, 4D Blu-ray, and a Kong: Skull Island/Godzilla combo pack. You can bet that Warner Bros. will produce a new version of 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla soon after next year’s Godzilla sequel hits theatres.

Celebrating its 30th anniversary, Mike Figgis’ first theatrical film, Stormy Monday, has been released on Blu-ray by Arrow Films.

Filmed at the height of the Americanization of England in the late 1980s, the modern film noir takes place in Newcastle where the future Oscar-nominated writer-director of Leaving Las Vegas grew up. In addition to Figgis, the film either launched or increased the reputations of the film’s four stars as well as cinematographer Roger Deakins (No Country for Old Men) and costume designer Sandy Powell (Shakespeare in Love).

Melanie Griffith (Working Girl) received top billing as the former mistress of gangster Tommy Lee Jones (The Fugitive) whose new lover, Sean Bean (Game of Thrones), is a cleaner at the jazz club Jones wants to take from owner Sting who, like Figgis, grew up in Newcastle and delivers his best dramatic performance here. Extras include commentary by Figgis and a documentary on the locations in the film and what they look like now. Fans of the excellent contemporary British mystery series Vera, which is filmed there, should already be familiar with the locale.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray upgrades of Silkwood and Where the Boys Are.