On Chesil Beach is about a 1962 marriage that lasted six hours, the events that led up to it, the events of the afternoon and evening following the wedding, and its aftermath. It’s from an acclaimed novel by Ian McEwan (Atonement) who also wrote the screenplay. Directed by Dominic Cooke (TV’s The Hollow Crown), it stars Saoirse Ronan fresh from her Oscar-nominated triumph in last year’s Lady Bird.

Ronan once again proves herself to be the Meryl Streep of her generation, giving us both a different accent and an unforgettable character with each film she makes. Here she is the upper-middle-class British daughter of socially prominent Samuel West and Emily Watson, who is a classically trained cellist and member of a local musical quartet. On holiday after her college graduation, she has met and fallen in love with a young man whose family is not in her social circle, although she assuages her parents’ concern by informing them that his father is the headmaster of a primary school in the country. The boy is played by played by the equally gifted Billy Howle (TV’s The Witness for the Prosecution). His father is played by Adrian Scarborough (Notes on a Scandal) and his brain-damaged mother by Anne-Marie Duff (Nowhere Boy).

The two are clearly madly in love, but things do not go well in their attempt to have sex for the first time after their wedding. Will they work things out or will their wounded pride keep them apart for the rest of their lives? Reminiscent in style with the great British films of the era in which it takes place, A Kind of Loving, The Family Way, and The Go-Between, although dramatically quite different, it is, like them, a very special film. Not a great success at the box office, it nonetheless will be remembered in years to come as one of the great early showcases of a legendary actress.

On Chesil Beach is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Kino Lorber has issued a Blu-ray upgrade of Cradle Will Rock.

Tim Robbins’ first film as a director after his Oscar nomination for 1995’s Dead Man Walking, 1999’s Cradle Will Rock is an ambitious film about the 1930s Federal Theater Program of the WPA (Works Projects Administration). Focusing on Marc Blitzstein’s composition of the Broadway musical The Cradle Will Rock and Diego Rivera’s painting of “The Man in the Crossroads” mural in Rockefeller Center, the film is at once fascinating and infuriating, fascinating in the material in covers, infuriating in much of its presentation. It’s a film you’ll enjoy more if your expectations aren’t too high given its starry cast.

Hank Azaria as a determined Blitzstein, Bill Murray as a passionate ventriloquist, Joan Cusack as an equally passionate organizer, John Cusack as Nelson Rockefeller, Rubén Blades as Diego Rivera, John Turturro and Barbara Sukowa as a struggling puppeteer as his wife, and Cherry Jones as a harried WPA producer come off best. Vanessa Redgrave and Susan Sarandon as social gadflies and Emily Watson as an untalented would-be actress are merely adequate. Angus Macfayden as an insufferably pompous Orson Welles is dreadful and Cary Elwes as an equally pompous John Houseman isn’t much better. Bob Balaban, Jack Black, Paul Giamatti, and Barnard Hughes are underutilized. Broadway stars Victoria Clark, Daniel Jenkins, Timothy Jerome, Stephen Spinella, Marla Schaffel, Michele Pawk, Audra MacDonald, and Gregg Edelman barley register in blink and you’ll miss them appearances.

Kino Lorber has also issued a Blu-ray release of The Day After in both its 222-minute U.S. TV version and its 227-minute European theatrical version.

Inspired by the 1979 film The China Syndrome, ABC’s Brandon Stoddard wanted another event miniseries to mirror the success of 1977’s Roots so he commissioned the screenplay for a miniseries called Silence in Heaven that became the movie The Day After. Originally scheduled to run two nights, it was cut back to director Nicholas Meyer’s single night vision when advertisers dropped out after they had a look at the film’s shocking imagery of instant evaporation from a nuclear blast to the slow, agonizing deaths brought on by the fallout that spread over the remaining population. Those advertisers were chagrined when the film turned out to be the most viewed TV movie in history.

Amazingly, this superb achievement was only Meyer’s third film as a director following 1979’s Time After Time and 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan with startling imagery that evokes scenes from previous film masterpieces ranging from Gone with the Wind to Woodstock. An Emmy winner for its special effects, the makeup by Oscar winners Michael Westmore and Zoltan Elak (Mask), and the score by David Raksin (Laura) are among the film’s many other standouts as are the performances of Jason Robards, JoBeth Williams, Steve Guttenberg, John Cullum, John Lithgow, Bibi Besch, Lori Lethin, Jeff East, Amy Madigan, and many others.

Audio commentary by film historian Lee Gambin and comic artist/writer Tristan Jones is provided on the theatrical cut. New interviews with JoBeth Williams and Nicholas Meyer accompany the TV version on a separate disc.

Severin Films has released a Blu-ray of 1980’s The Changeling, a beautifully restrained psychological horror film featuring superb performances from George C. Scott as a composer-lecturer who rents a long unoccupied Seattle mansion and Melvyn Douglas as a powerful U.S. senator with a secret. Based on the true story of an allegedly haunted house in Denver, the ghost that haunts the mansion is that of an 8-year-old crippled boy who died in the house seventy-five years earlier. Blu-ray extras include commentary with director Peter Medak and others.

Shout Factory has released a Blu-ray of the 1975 TV movie Queen of the Stardust Ballroom.

Nominated for 11 Emmys and winner of two, this was a pretty moldy affair even then. Maureen Stapleton and Charles Durning, neither of whom were great singers, warble their way through a few forgettable songs as a recent widow and a lonely married man who find happiness in each other’s arms in a Bronx ballroom for oldsters. Charlotte Rae plays Stapleton’s disapproving sister-in-law. It all plays out as you would expect and did not translate at all well to a Broadway musical starring Dorothy Loudon and Vincent Gardenia a year later. That show, renamed Ballroom, replaced most of the dreadful songs from the TV version with equally dreadful ones except for Loudon’s 11th hour power ballad “Fifty Percent,” which became her signature song. Time has not been kind to this maudlin work.

This week’s new releases include The Yellow Birds and The Blu-ray release of Home from the Hill.