Wind River is one of the year’s best films, a thriller about the murder of an 18-year-old Native American woman on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming east of Boulder Flats, an area as large as the state of Rhode Island policed by just one Indian Tribal Police chief and his six deputies.

Jeremy Renner has his best role since his Oscar-nominated performances in The Hurt Locker and The Town as the veteran tracker with the Fish and Wildlife Service whose job it is to hunt and kill predatory animals on the reservation. On one of his outings he comes across the body of the girl who it turns out was the best friend of his daughter who died under mysterious circumstances three years earlier. At the request of the Indian Tribal Police chief (Graham Greene), he agrees to escort the sole FBI agent assigned to the case, a sharp but naïve young woman from out of the Las Vegas office (Elizabeth Olsen).

The screenplay, by Taylor Sheridan, who also directed, is very much in the vein of his previously acclaimed Sicario and Hell or High Water, the latter for which he received a well-earned Oscar nomination last year. Like those films, the narrative not only follows the intense police investigation into the crime, but takes us into the life of the protagonists, while at the same time examining the social context in which the drama unfolds.

Renner’s estranged wife (Julia Jones) is the daughter of the tribal chief (Apesanahkwat) and his wife (Tantoo Cardinal) with whom Renner is still close. His 8-year-old son (Teo Briones) is still having nightmares three years after his sister’s death. The father of the newly murdered girl (Gil Birmingham) is also a close friend and Renner is determined to prove that the man’s estranged son (Martin Sensmeier) had nothing to do with his sister’s death. Not content to just drive Olsen around and keep her out of harm’s way, Renner uses his tracking skills to hunt and trap the real killers, coming to her aid in the film’s horrific, but justified, bloody climax.

Though partially filmed on the Wind River Reservation, most of the outdoor locations utilized in the film were in the state of Utah, not Wyoming.

Wind River is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Matt Reeves’ War for the Planet of the Apes is one of the year’s better box-office successes and nicely brings the pre-Planet of the Apes trilogy to conclusion.

The film begins with human-raised ape Caesar (Andy Serkis) having decided to move to a place across the desert with the other apes to end the war with humans and live in peace. When they are attacked in a cave hidden by a waterfall and Caesar loses his wife Cornelia and son Blue Eyes, with younger son Cornelius the only surviving family member, he separates from the other apes to hunt down the human Colonel (Woody Harrelson) who was responsible for killing his family. Joined by Maurice (the orangutan), apes Luca and Rocket, and eventually chimpanzee Bad Ape (Steve Zahn) and mute girl, Nova, a battle for survival of either the humans or the apes will determine the future of the planet.

What I like best about this franchise that began with 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes and continued with 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is its character-driven emphasis with just enough CGI to tell the story without overwhelming it. The moving ending is well-earned, underscored as it is by Michael Giacchino’s superb score, derived as in the other two films in the trilogy from Jerry Goldsmith’s classic score for the original 1968 film.

War for the Planet of the Apes is available in Blu-ray and standard DVD as well as 3D and the new 4K packaging.

The title of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 film Le Samourai is a bit misleading. It has nothing to do with Japanese warriors popularized by such 1950s films as Kenjo Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, Teinosuke Kinogasa’s Gate of Hell, and Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samourai other than that the protagonist is a loner like the mythical samurai.

Melville’s film is, rather, a part traditional, part New Wave French thriller in the tradition of Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Starring Alain Delon (Purple Noon, Rocco and His His Brothers), it is about a contract killer, a man of few words, whose best friend is his caged bird. Indeed, the first ten minutes of the film contain no dialogue.

Le Samourai, which wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1972, was then considered the best film in the long career of the writer-director who died of a heart attack in 1973 at the age of 55. That consideration changed with the U.S. release of Melville’s 1969 French resistance drama Army of Shadows, which won numerous awards in 2006 after its digital restoration.

What sets Le Samourai apart from most gangster films is Delon’s cool, yet intense performance as he dodges both the police and the mobsters who want to kill him before he can reveal who hired him. The film’s startling climax is a classic.

The Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray upgrade includes archival interviews with Melville, his actors, and his biographers.

Filmgoers in the 1940s had their fill of Hollywood war movies after World War II, but the success of Roberto Rossellini’s Italian neorealist excursions into the genre such as Paisan encouraged Hollywood to make grittier, more realistic war movies beginning with 1949’s Battleground and Twelve O’Clock High, which brought in audiences and won awards. Soon, realism wasn’t enough, and Hollywood filmmakers found that by infusing their war movies with dollops of sex they could make even more money and win more awards, culminating in the 1953 Oscar winner From Here to Eternity.

The new formula began to reach absurd lengths, however, when a picture book romance was added to the intense intrigue of 1954’s The Caine Mutiny. Hollywood responded by ramping up the sex and downplaying the action in the highly successful 1955 film version of Leon Uris’ bestselling Battle Cry.

Given a superb restoration by Warner Archive, Battle Cry, directed by Raoul Walsh, looks better than it ever has on the new Blu-ray.

The film was most notorious at the time for the sex scene between Dorothy Malone, discreetly nude sitting on a chair in her bedroom from which you see only her dangling legs, while Tab Hunter strips and changes into Malone’s husband’s bathing suit behind the bar in the living room.

The Malone-Hunter dalliance was the center-point of the first part of the film in which Hunter eventually dumps the older, married woman and returns to childhood sweetheart Mona Freeman who he then marries. The second part of the film is dominated by the emotionally complex relationship between Aldo Ray and New Zealand war widow Nancy Olson.

Van Heflin gets top billing for what is essentially a supporting role as the beloved company commander, James Whitmore, more-or-less reprising his Oscar-nominated sergeant in Battleground, is the film’s narrator. William Campbell, John Lupton, Perry Lopez, Fess Parker, and L.Q. Jones are various other young soldiers. Allyn Ann McLerie is a barmaid and Anne Francis a girl on the make. Raymond Massey has one scene as Heflin’s terse superior officer.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray debut of Since You Went Away and Hangover Square.