The Florida Project is only the third film to be released on DVD and Blu-ray featuring one of the twenty 2017 Oscar-nominated performances. The others were Get Out and Roman J. Israel, Esq. . As such, it should be seen for Willem Dafoe’s fine portrayal of a low-rent motel manager within walking distance of Disney World. Aside from that, however, I can’t really recommend the film.

Some of the greatest movies ever made have been about the struggles of poor people. The most memorable have been those in which the protagonists never rise out of poverty despite their struggles but carry on with their heads held high. You can find this in everything from I Am a Fugitive to a Chain Gang to Make Way for Tomorrow to The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley to Midnight Cowboy to What’s Eating Gilbert Grape to Manchester by the Sea. The Florida Project seems to want to belong to that stellar group but falls far short.

The title of the film comes from the name attributed to Disney’s buying up of land in Orlando, Florida to build Disney World in the 1950s. Dafoe’s motel is in the poor part of the city on the outskirts of the resort. Its denizens are mostly single mothers and their unruly, unsupervised kids. Critics have been effusive in their praise of Brooklynn Prince as the six-year-old daughter of a 22-year-old druggie and sometimes prostitute. She has her moments, but she’s no Shirley Temple or Tatum O’Neal. As her mother, Bria Vinaete, discovered by director Sean Baker on Instagram, is mostly annoying. Her line delivery is so poor that she had me believing she was selling scented tissues to passers-by to obtain her rent money. It wasn’t until I read a synopsis of the film that I learned she was selling perfume at inflated prices.

Some of the supporting characters are interesting but aren’t developed enough to elicit empathy from the audience. Only the accomplished Dafoe does that, but he’s often acting in a vacuum, no more so than in the out-of-nowhere scene in which he chases an old pedophile who has wandered into the motel’s parking lot.

Others have found magic in the film’s abrupt ending in which (SPOILER ALERT) two of the kids run off to Disney World (END OF SPOILER ALERT). I just found it ridiculous, and like practically everything else in the film, condescending in its depiction of poor people.

The animated French film The Girl Without Hands fell short of an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature but is nevertheless worth catching. A first film by celebrated illustrator Sébastien Laudenbach, who struggled for years to get the financing necessary to make the film, its minimalist drawings may be off-putting to some, but the Grimm Brothers tale about a young girl unwittingly sold to the devil by her father is an absorbing one. In French with English subtitles, the dialogue is almost as minimalist as the drawings so those who don’t like reading subtitles will not have a lot to complain about. It’s not for young children, but those too young to read who see it anyway will have no trouble understanding what is going on.

The Girl Without Hands is available on Blu-ray and standard DVDs.

Among those films newly receiving a Blu-ray upgrade are A Summer Story and a double disc dose of Robert Mitchum and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep.

Released by Shout Factory, 1988’s A Summer Story is a beautifully filmed version of John Galsworthy’s short story, The Apple Tree, about love found and lost as a heavily made-up middle-aged James Wilby on holiday with his wife stops at the sheep farm where in 1904 a young girl (Imogen Stubbs) living on what was then her aunt’s (Susannah York) farm with her aunt and loutish cousins attends to a young lawyer (Wilby) who is staying at the farm while recovering from a strained ankle. They fall in love and upon recovery, he vows to return and take her away with him. On his return, he finds she’s buried on the side of the road where she wanted to be so that he would easily be able to find her when he returned. The film’s last shot of a handsome smiling young shepherd, who is obviously the son Wilby never knew he had, waving at Wilby in his passing car has haunted romantics with thoughts of what might have been, ever since.

Neither Stubbs nor Wilby has had the kind of career that they should have had, but remarkably both stars and the director (Piers Haggard) are still working, mostly on British TV. Had the film been directed by someone like James Ivory, who directed Wilby in Maurice and Howards End, his two best known films, it might have had the kind of exposure it needed to become the wider known classic it should be.

1975’s Farewell, My Lovely was a stylish remake of 1944’s Murder, My Sweet with Mitchum giving one of his best performances in a film that was clearly given the green light due to the success of 1974’s Chinatown. Unlike that film, which was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won one, Farewell, My Lovely was nominated for only one, Best Supporting Actress for Sylvia Miles in the role Esther Howard created in the earlier version, that of a good-hearted but foolish lush. Mitchum and Charlotte Rampling had the roles more famously played by Dick Powell and Claire Trevor in the earlier version.

1978’s The Big Sleep, which was a remake of the 1946 film of the same name, was less successful. Transplanting Marlowe from Los Angeles to London was not a good idea that served none of the film’s star-heavy cast well. In addition to Mitchum, the film wasted the talents of his Ryan’s Daughter co-stars Sarah Miles and John Mills, as well as Joan Collins, Edward Fox, Richard Todd, John Justin, and an incapacitated James Stewart. If the original film is better remembered for the chemistry between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall than it is for its plot, the remake is remembered for neither. The chemistry between Mitchum and Miles is non-existent, and you can forget the convoluted plot.

Warner Archive has re-released Richard Linklater’s 1995 film SubUrbia on DVD and finally released Paul Muni’s 1936 Oscar winner The Story of Louis Pasteur on DVD for the first time.

SubUrbia was one of Linklater’s earliest successes. Filmed in Austin, Texas and one of its suburbs, the film follows a group of three young men who hang out in front a convenience store, the girls who are attracted by them, and their friends. Giovanni Ribisi and Nicky Katt provide the film’s best performances, some would say the best of their careers.

The Story of Louis Pasteur is one of the better traditional biographical dramas that Hollywood produced in quantity from the 1930s through the early 1960s. Muni, directed by William Dieterle, makes an excellent Pasteur, ably assisted by the likes of Josephine Hutchinson, Donald Woods, Anita Louise, Fritz Lieber, Akim Tamiroff, Dickie Moore, and others. Its long unavailability has been baffling to say the least. It’s a film that should be seen by everyone at least once.

This week’s new releases include Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Darkest Hour.