The Piano Teacher, Michael Haneke’s 2001 film from Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel, is his only film not based on an idea of his own. The story of a masochistic music professor looking for perfection in her student lover, while maintaining an untenable relationship with her mother, was also Haneke’s first commercial success.

Haneke’s controversial 1997 film, Funny Games, had made him famous, but it took the star name of Isabelle Huppert to sell his later film. Huppert had been his first choice to play the mother in Funny Games, but she turned it down because she didn’t think it would give her enough room with which to employ her actor’s imagination, whereas the many facets of the sexually repressed professor in The Piano Teacher gave her plenty of material with which to work.

Annie Girardot as her difficult mother, on screen since 1950, had her best role since 1960’s Rocco and His Brothers made her an international star. Benoit Magimel who plays Huppert’s student lover began his screen career in 1988, but for many years was best known as Juliette Binoche’s younger companion with whom he fathered a child in 1999. Huppert herself, who began her screen career in 1971, had already earned ten César nominations for Best Actress, winning once for 1996’s La Ceremonie. The Piano Teacher would bring her an eleventh nomination for the French equivalent of the Oscar. 2016’s Elle, for which she earned her sixteenth César nomination and second win, would be the first film in her long career for which she would be nominated for an Oscar.

Haneke, later a double Oscar nominee for writing and directing 2012’s Amour, keeps the suspense building in this erotic, but never salacious, exploration of a woman’s psyche. Criterion’s 2K digitally restored Blu-ray presents the film better than it has ever bene seen. Extras include recently filmed, separate on-camera interviews with Haneke and Huppert.

Italian director Lina Wertmuller, still active in her 90th year, achieved her greatest success in the 1970s, culminating with her 1976 Oscar nominations for writing and directing Seven Beauties, making her the first female director nominated for an Oscar.

Although her two previous films, Love and Anarchy and Swept Away, both starring Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato, had been highly successful, Seven Beauties, also starring Giannini, was the one that proved to be a worldwide phenomenon. Its awkward mix of slapstick and concentration camp horror was immediately seen as masterful by critics and audiences alike. Today, its unparalleled depiction of human misery remains its greatest asset. Its comedy, however, is a matter of taste as the film alternates between life in the Nazi concentration camp and protagonist Giannini’s previous life as the only man in a family of ugly women.

Giannini’s character is not a hero. He’s an opportunist who survives by doing what’s best for himself even when it means the deaths of others. The film’s climactic scenes are as difficult to watch as anything in Schindler’s List or Son of Saul and still haunt all these years later. Neither Wertmuller nor Gianinni have done anything close to capturing the film’s genius since.

Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray release does the director’s bleak film full justice.

1968’s Krakatoa, East of Java, another Kino Lorber Blu-ray release, was at the opposite end of the critical spectrum. Ridiculed from the start for its title, even the film’s on-screen maps showed the volcanic Krakatoa to be west, not east, of Java. The resultant actioner is a mixed bag of tricks.

The special effects employed in the film are excellent for its period. The acting by Maximilian Schell as the salvage ship’s level-headed captain, Diane Baker as a mother in search of her son, John Leyton as a brainy bell diver, and Sal Mineo as a second-generation balloonist, is excellent. On the other hand, however, we get the usually fine Brian Keith overacting as a diver high on something or other, Barbara Werle trying to act her way out of a paper bag as his mistress, and Rossano Brazzi as Mineo’s ne’er-do-well father in a bad wig. The juxtaposition is startling. The film, though, is never boring and overall an enjoyable time-killer.

I wish I could say the same for John Sturges’ 1958 film The Law and Jake Wade, a serviceable-at-best western that Warner Archive has released on Blu-ray while many films in Warner’s great library have yet to see a Blu-ray release. Where, for example, are star Robert Taylor’s superior Camille and Waterloo Bridge? They’re sitting on the same shelf as Now, Voyager, Random Harvest, and dozens of other great films from Hollywood’s golden age that may never see the light of day on Blu-ray while Warner Archive continues to upgrade numerous films no one asked for.

On a happier note, Warner Archive has also given us a lovely to look at Blu-ray of 1954’s Brigadoon.

Brigadoon was the first collaboration between Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe that later gave us Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Camelot. The film version was directed by Vincente Minnelli, who later won his only Oscar for Gigi.

The film version of the 1947 Broadway musical suffers somewhat in that two of its best songs, “(I Should Know for I Was There on) My Mother’s Wedding Day” and “Come to Me, Bend to Me,” were cut from the score due to censorship problems. The former was never recorded while the latter was, but wasn’t used. It is, however, included as an extra on both the previous DVD and the Blu-ray. It should have been reinserted into the film in its proper context.

Aside from those two missing songs, the film is a joy to behold as Gene Kelly and Van Johnson play the two weary hunters who wander into the magical world of the Scottish village that was put to sleep 200 years earlier only to come alive one day every one hundred years. Cyd Charisse is the lass who steals Kelly’s heart as they go roaming through “The Heather on the Hill.”

While earlier releases of the film looked less than great due to the fading Ansco color in which it was filmed, all that has been corrected for this sparkling new release.

This week’s new releases include The Book of Henry and the Blu-ray upgrade of Home for the Holidays.