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We the Animals has been nominated for five Film Independent Spirit awards, the most of any film this year. The nominations are for Best First Feature, Film Editing, Cinematography, Supporting Male (Raul Castillo), and Someone to Watch (director Jeremiah Zagar).

Documentary filmmaker Zagar’s first narrative feature is an adaptation of the 2011 best-selling novel by Justin Torres about the lives of three mixed race brothers growing up in upstate New York with their Puerto Rican father (Raul Castillo) and white mother (Sheila Vand). The film is narrated by the youngest of the boys, ten-year-old Jonah (Evan Rosado), who is different than his brothers (Josiah Gabriel, Isaiah Kristian), partly because of his love of literature and partly because he is gay.

The film has the look and feel of two other recent highly acclaimed films about children growing up in relative poverty, 2016’s Oscar-winning Moonlight and 2017’s The Florida Project. Unlike those two films, however, which ended in uncertainty, this one ends on a positive note that is somewhat at odds with the ending of the novel. Nevertheless, the author loves what the director has done with his work.

All three of the boys are excellent first-time actors. Castillo is best known for TV’s Looking and Vand is best know for playing the lead in 2014’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.

We the Animals is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

One of the year’s biggest box office hits, John M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians, is based on Kevin Kwan’s international best-seller of the same name. Not having read the novel, I can’t say whether it was good or not, but Chu’s film is about what you’d expect from the director of Justin Bieber videos. Superficially about a Chinese-American NYU professor falsely accused of being a gold-digger after the heir to a Chinese fortune in Singapore, it wallows in the glitter and gold flaunted by her adversaries. Constance Wu (TV’s Fresh Off the Boat) and Henry Golding, a Malaysian TV host and actor, are the stars. Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is Golding’s disapproving mother. 91-year-old Lisa Lu, who was one of the mothers in the far more incisive 1993 film about Chinese-Americans, The Joy Luck Club, plays his grandmother.

Crazy Rich Asians is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

The Criterion Edition release of Billy Wilder’s 1959 masterpiece Some Like It Hot, on both Blu-ray and standard DVD, is a gorgeous 4K restoration of the shimmering black-and-white film often cited as the funniest film ever made.

Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis are at their best as the jazz musicians who witness the February 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago and as a result dress in drag to join an all-girl band on its way to a gig in Miami. Once there, Curtis steals the band manager’s clothes to also impersonate a millionaire yacht owner in order to romance band singer Marilyn Monroe. Lemmon, still in drag, is himself romanced by wealthy yacht owner Joe E. Brown. George Raft is the Al Capone-like mobster in pursuit of the guys and Pat O’Brien is the federal agent in pursuit of Raft. Among the film’s highlights are Monroe’s singing of “Running Wild,” the crowding of the upper berth on the train, Curtis’ Cary Grant voice imitation in his wooing of Monroe and, of course, the film’s final line spoken by Joe E. Brown, perhaps the greatest last line in film history.

Extras include separate archival TV interviews with Curtis, Lemmon, and Wilder and a radio interview with Monroe.

Making their U.S. Blu-ray debuts are The Blue Dahlia, The Glenn Miller Story, and Robin and Marian.

One of the best films noir of the 1940s, as well as one of the most baffling mysteries of the era, Raymond Chandler’s The Blue Dahlia, directed by George Marshall (Destry Rides Again), reunited three of the stars of 1942’s The Glass Key, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, and William Bendix in roles that played to the strengths of all three.

Ladd was the war hero suspected of killing his faithless wife (Doris Dowling), Lake was the ex-wife of Dowling’s lover (Howard Da Silva), and Bendix was Ladd’s friend with a metal plate in his head that made him crazy. Hugh Beaumont was Ladd and Bendix’s friend, Will Wright the private detective keeping an eye on Dowling, and Tom Powers the police captain who is two steps ahead of all of them.

The Shout Select release includes commentary with film historians Arthur K. Rode and Steve Mitchell and a 1949 Screen Guild Theatre radio production.

The Glenn Miller Story, also from Shout Select, was a hugely successful 1954 biopic of the beloved bandleader played by James Stewart and directed by Anthony Mann in a break from their string of western classics of the 1950s. If the film seems too formulaic and sweet to modern audiences, it may be because of the goody two-shoes performance of June Allyson as Miller’s widow, who was on set throughout the filming.

Extras include commentary by film historian Jim Hemphill as well as an alternative cut of the film prepared by Universal for its 1985 re-release.

A box office flop in 1976, Robin and Marian is nevertheless a seminal film about legends grown old. No longer the young and vibrant Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland of the 1938 classic The Adventures of Robin Hood, 38 years later in real time but only 20 years later in screen time, Sean Connery’s Robin is old and tired from his years in support of Richard the Lionhearted in the Crusades and Audrey Hepburn’s Maid Marian is now a nun and the prioress of her abbey.

This was Hepburn’s first film since Wait Until Dark nine years earlier and would be the last real chance she had of creating another iconic character on-screen. She and Connery are terrific as is Robert Shaw as the Sheriff of Nottingham. Directed by Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night) from a screenplay by James Goldman (The Lion in Winter), it’s a shame this isn’t a better-known film.

The only extra on the Sony release is the theatrical trailer.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray releases of The Magnificent Ambersons and Georgy Girl.

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