In the Heat of the Night has been given a beautiful 4K digital restoration for its Criterion Blu-ray release that finally gives this Oscar-winning masterpiece its due.

Although it was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won five, it has long been critically held in the shadow of two other iconic 1967 films, Bonnie and Clyde, which was nominated for ten Oscars and won two, and The Graduate, which was nominated for seven and won one. This pristine release should go a long way toward showing today’s audiences exactly what audiences of fifty-two years ago first encountered in movie theatres.

Norman Jewison’s film was based on John Ball’s Edgar Award-winning 1965 mystery novel of the same name with an Oscar-winning script by Stirling Silliphant, award-winning cinematography by Haskell Wexler, Oscar-winning editing by Hal Ashby, and an unforgettable jazz score by Quincy Jones. It featured a brilliant performance by Sidney Poitier, one of three he gave that year, which also included To Sir, With Love and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and an equally brilliant one by Rod Steiger who won the lion’s share of the year’s Best Actor awards including the Oscar.

Filmed primarily in Sparta, Illinois, the film takes place in Sparta, Mississippi where Poitier is between trains having visited his mother and is now on his way home. He is picked up by deputy sheriff Warren Oates as a suspect in a local murder, not knowing that Poitier is a homicide detective in Philadelphia, Penn. Steiger is the bigoted town sheriff who at first rejects Poitier’s chief’s offer of help, but is forced to take it when the murder victim’s widow, Lee Grant, insists that he do so.

The one scene that had to be filmed in Mississippi because the location couldn’t be duplicated in Illinois, is perhaps the most famous in the film, the one that takes place on a plantation where the owner (Larry Gates) slaps Poitier’s face and Poitier slaps him back. That scene was a watershed moment both in film history and Civil Rights awareness.

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Rebecca was the first suspense film to win an Oscar for Best Picture, making In the Heat of the Night the second, but it was the first and last to date whodunit to win.

Extras include new interviews with 92-year-old Jewison and 93-year-old Grant who relays, among other things, an amusing tale of thinking that the man Jewison sent to meet her train and show her around would be her assistant during her stay, not realizing that he was the film’s editor, Hal Ashby, who would later direct Grant to an Oscar nomination for The Landlord and a win for Shampoo.

Also included is an archival interview with Poitier and an in-depth analysis of Poitier’s career by his biographer Aram Goudsouzian. The commentary is from the previous MGM Blu-ray by Jewison, Grant, Steiger, and Wexler.

Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased is based on Garrard Conley’s autobiography about the horrors of gay conversion therapy.

The son of a Baptist minister in a small Arkansas town, he was outed to his parents by a disturbed boy who had raped him and was coerced into going through church-sponsored gay conversion therapy by his parents and the church elders.

The name of the facility and the names of the people involved including Garrard and his family have been changed for the film, but the incidents are the same. Lucas Hedges, in his first starring role, is excellent as Garrard, called Jared in the film. Even better is Nicole Kidman in her finest maternal performance to date as his well-meaning mother who has an epiphany when her son calls for help and pulls him out of therapy even though she knows it will antagonize her husband.

Russell Crowe’s entrenched father is a tougher character to like, but he comes through in the end while director Edgerton gamely plays his villainous unlicensed therapist without an ounce of sympathy throughout. Also of note are the various actors playing fellow conversion therapy victims, most notably Troye Sivan, Britton Sear, and Joe Alwyn who is also in the current Mary Queen of Scots and The Favourite.

Boy Erased is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD. Extras include deleted and extended scenes and interview with Hedges, Kidman, Crowe, and Edgerton.

It’s been a long time since Glenn Close has been in discussion for an Oscar, but the legendary star of Fatal Attraction and Dangerous Liaisons has her first serious shot at taking home the little golden man in three decades with The Wife, a film it took her 14 years to get made.

Most critics agree that Close’s performance is flawless, but many of those same critics find the film itself trite. I disagree.

The film starts interestingly with a phone call from the Nobel Prize committee informing writer Jonathan Pryce that he was won the Nobel Prize for literature. At first, his wife (Close) is overjoyed at the prospect but as the couple make their way to the event, her facade cracks. Deep seated pain that she has kept hidden for nearly forty years begins to emerge and eventually we learn the truth about their marriage and the unfulfilled passions and shared compromise that has gotten them to where they are.

It’s Close’s show, but the performances across the board are first-rate with Pryce almost equaling her as the alcoholic, philandering husband who is still chasing girls in his advanced age. There are good performances, too, from Christian Slater as Pryce’s oily would-be biographer, Max Irons as their son, and Harry Lloyd and Annie Starke as the younger versions of Pryce and Close. Elizabeth McGovern makes a brief appearance as an older writer who plants the seeds of Pryce and Close’s relationship with the contradictory response to the oft-heard “a writer has to write” with the harsher epithet that “a writer has to be read.”

Extras include an interview with Close, a conversation with the cast, and a Q&A session with Close and author Meg Wolitzer.

This week’s new releases include A Private War and Widows.