My Cousin Rachel, like other famous films made from the works of the prolific Daphne DuMaurier, such as Rebecca, The Birds, and Don’t Look Now, was first filmed immediately after the release of the printed work on which it was based.

The 2017 version, however, which has been newly released on Blu-ray and standard DVD, is the superior film. That said, the 1952 version was nothing to sneeze at. It received four Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Richard Burton) and Best Black-and-White Cinematography, Art Direction, and Costume Design. Burton was nominated as Best Newcomer at the Golden Globes and star Olivia de Havilland was nominated for Best Actress.

Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin have the de Havilland-Burton roles in the remake with Holliday Grainger and Iain Glen in the roles previously played by Audrey Dalton and Ronald Squire.

The story centers around the death of orphaned Philip Ashley’s benefactor, his cousin Ambrose, and Philip’s belief that he was murdered by Ambrose’s new wife who he sarcastically refers to as “my cousin Rachel” until he meets and is dazzled by her. Philip (Burton, Claflin), against the advice of his young friend (Dalton, Grainger) and her father (Squire, Glen) who is also his godfather, turns his fortune over to Rachel (de Havilland, Weisz).

Filmed on location in Cornwall, Surrey, and Tuscany, the new version is a constant pleasure to the eye. Claflin, 30 at the time of filming, was four years older than Burton was when he played the naïve 24- to 25-year-old, but looks younger and plays more to the character’s age. Burton, on the other hand, always seemed older than his years. Weisz, an Oscar winner for The Constant Gardener, plays perfectly to the duality of her character. Is she who says she is or is she the calculating murderess Philip first believed her to be? Weisz keeps you guessing. De Havilland, already a double Oscar-winner for To Each His Own and The Heiress when she played the role 65 years ago, played it a bit harshly, keeping you in suspense, but leaning toward a conclusion that may not be the right one.

The endings of both films veer from the novel, with Henry Koster’s old version coming in darker than it should have, while Roger Michell’s remake adds an uplifting coda we didn’t expect.

Two years before his first Oscar nominated Best Picture, Sense and Sensibility, and twelve years before Brokeback Mountain earned him his first Oscar, Ang Lee burst into American filmgoers’ consciousness with 1993’s The Wedding Banquet, his second film, but first one released in the U.S., newly released on Blu-ray by Olive Films.

The bittersweet comedy revolves around a sham wedding in which gay Taiwanese-American Winston Chao weds green card tenant May Chin to placate his visiting traditional Chinese parents, while passing off partner Mitchell Lichtenstein as a mere friend. His mother, Ya-Lei Kuei might be fooled, but his father, Lee regular Sihung Lung is not as dumb as he pretends to be. Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, a citation that went to Taiwan, not Lee, it was filmed entirely in New York in Mandarin and English.

If you look at John Huston’s filmography, you will find that he made more stinkers than good films in his long career, but when he was good, there were few better – The Maltese Falcon – The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – Key Largo – The Asphalt Jungle – The African Queen – were all unimpeachable works of quality, followed by a long period of hits and misses. In the 1960s and 70s, he was more admired for his acting in The Cardinal and Chinatown than for his directing, but no other director had as great a late career resurgence as he did with his last three films – Under the Volcano – Prizzi’s Honor – The Dead, the latter released posthumously in 1987.

Kino Lorber reminds us of that fact with newly released Blu-ray of 1985’s Prizzi’s Honor, Huston’s gangster movie to end all gangster movies, cleverly marketed as a comedy to woo audiences of the day who had tired of the genre after it reached its zenith with The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. Even more so than Coppola’s films, Huston’s black comedy, a term he hated, turns family honor on its head. Everyone in a mob family, here, is complicit in the family business, including the women. Huston gets great performances, as one would expect, from Oscar-nominated Jack Nicholson as a hit man and Kathleen Turner as a hit woman married to each other who are hired to kill one another. Even more amazing is the Oscar-winning performance he elicits from daughter Anjelica Huston as Nicholson’s vengeful ex-fiancée, who had been almost twenty years in films at that point without attracting much attention. Almost as amazing are William Hickey, Oscar-nominated as the Prizzi don and veteran character actors John Randolph, Robert Loggia, and Lee Richardson as other Prizzi family honchos. The film won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Picture and received a total of eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Director. It was based on a novel by Richard Condon, the author of The Manchurian Candidate, who received an Oscar nomination for Adapted Screenplay.

John Frankenheimer, the director of 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate, like Huston, had a very spotted career. A celebrated TV director in the 1950s, he directed some of the most iconic films of the 1960s, which, in addition to The Manchurian Candidate, included such films as Birdman of Alcatraz, Seven Days in May, and Seconds, after which he went into a long decline.

Like Huston, Frankenheimer kept working, occasionally coming up with something of value amongst the dreck, until he returned to form with 1998’s Ronin, released on Blu-ray by Arrow Video. Unlike Huston, though, Frankenheimer did not maintain the same high level of quality until his death a mere four years later.

Ronin is a Japanese word meaning “wanderer,” a term applied to the samurai without a master in feudal Japan. The professional killers in Frankenheimer’s film are wanderers who meet in Paris to form a team to track down a steel briefcase with content about to be sold to the Russians. None of them are Japanese. American ex-CIA agent Robert De Niro, Frenchman Jean Reno, Irishmen Jonathan Pryce and Sean Bean, Russian Stellan Skarsgard, and De Niro’s fellow American, Skip Sudduth, are the men hired by Irishwoman Natascha McElhone to track down the briefcase. The action takes them all over France, with the climax occurring during the packed concert performance of an Olympic figure-skating champion, played by real-life Olympic champion Katarina Witt.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray releases of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Maurice.