Widows was one of the most highly anticipated films of 2018, widely predicted to be a box-office smash and a major Oscar contender in numerous categories including Best Picture, Directing, Adapted Screenplay, Actress, Supporting Actress, and more. It ended up being a box-office flop and getting no Oscar or Golden Globe nominations. It did manage to get a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress for Viola Davis, but that was it as far as major awards recognition was concerned. What happened?

The problem was that awards prognosticators based their predictions on the past performances of the film’s director and cast and the previous awards recognition given the 1983 British TV miniseries, which was accorded two BAFTA TV nominations, assuming what clicked before would click again.

Directed by Steve McQueen, this was his first film since winning the 2013 Oscar for Best Picture for 12 Years a Slave, for which he had also been nominated for Best Directing. It moved the action of the earlier miniseries from 1980s London to contemporary Chicago, which may have been a good idea in itself, giving the film a fresh location. The problem was that it packed too much into its two-hour-and-nine minutes running time to allow audiences time to get used to one situation before it moved onto another without fully understanding what they were seeing. Eventually, most of the confusion was sorted out in flashbacks, but it was all so cold and matter-of-fact that audiences simply didn’t care. Even the usually superb Viola Davis who led the cast, couldn’t hold it together. She plays a dour, always angry woman who doesn’t flash her million-kilowatt smile until the last scene. It was too little too late. The few audiences that did see it did not recommend it to their friends and it was quickly gone from theatres.

Seen on Blu-ray and standard DVD, the film does not seem all that bad. Davis’ portrayal of the put-upon widow of a professional thief does generate enough sympathy for her predicament to sustain interest. It also provides interesting characters for Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Carrie Coon, and Cynthia Erivo as her fellow widows as it does Garret Dillahunt, Kevin J. O’Connor, and Lukas Haas as some of the men in their lives. On the other hand, Liam Neeson, seen mostly in flashback as Davis’ duplicitous husband; Colin Farrell, Robert Duvall, and Brian Tyree Henry as nasty politicians; Daniel Kaluuya as Henry’s thug of a brother and Jacki Weaver as Debicki’s mother and pimp are merely loathsome in their one-dimensional villainous roles, with the reptilian Weaver coming off the worst.

The screenplay was co-written by McQueen, Gillian Flynn, who wrote the overrated Gone Girl, and Lynda La Plante who wrote the superb Prime Suspect TV series that starred Helen Mirren over a period of sixteen years from 1991-2006. The film does have a trick ending that might surprise some viewers, but like Flynn’s Gone Girl, most mystery buffs will have figured it out long before it’s revealed.

Rosamund Pike, who received an Oscar nomination for the 2014 film version of Flynn’s Gone Girl, gives her best performance yet as American journalist Marie Colvin who worked for the British newspaper The Sunday Times from 1985 until her death in Syria in 2012 in Matthew Heineman’s A Private War.

Oscar-nominated documentarian Heineman (Cartel Land) does a superb job of presenting Colvin’s story in a you-are-there documentary style while still giving the film a highly involving dramatic narrative. It doesn’t shy away from presenting the story of the celebrated war correspondent with all her foibles from her hard drinking to her grabbing sex wherever she finds it. The period covered is the last twelve years of her life from just before she goes to Sri Lanka where she loses an eye in a grenade attack during the Sri Lankan Civil War to the Syrian government’s war on its own citizens where she loses her life in Homs.

The film is based on a 2012 Vanity Fair article and does not address the fact that, based on evidence it had found, Colvin’s family filed suit in 2016 that her death was a targeted assassination. Just last month in January 2019 the court ruled that the Syrian government was liable for her death and awarded $300 million in punitive damages.

A Private War is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Recently released Blu-ray upgrades include A Dry White Season andForty Guns from Criterion and Kotch and Charly from Kino Lorber.

A Dry White Season reportedly took five years to make and was released at the climax of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa in 1989. Directed by Euzhan Palcy, it was the first Hollywood film directed by a black woman as it follows the conscience raising of a white schoolteacher (Donald Sutherland) who finds a celebrated solicitor (Marlon Brando) to bring a case against the government for the wrongful imprisonment and death of his gardener. Brando’s first film in nine years, it earned him his eighth and final Oscar nomination.

The digitally restored 4K Criterion release is a vast improvement over the previous MGM Blu-ray release. Extras include a newly conducted interview with the director.

Released in 1957, Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns was a modestly successful feminist western starring Barbara Stanwyck whose reputation has grown over the years. Given a 4K digital restoration it has never looked better. The many extras include A Fuller Life, the 2013 documentary by Fuller’s daughter Samantha Fuller who appears in a newly recorded interview with Fuller’s widow, Christa Fuller.

Walter Matthau received an Oscar nomination for his endearing portrayal of the title character in 1971’s Kotch, a role intended for Jack Lemmon who opted to direct his friend Matthau in the role rather than play it himself.

Matthau, who was 50 at the time, is heavily made up as his 73-year-old character but gets it just right as a character who may be loud and annoying to his family but is not ready for the old-folks home where his son (Charles Aidman) and daughter-in-law (Felicia Farr) have placed him. He escapes and goes on a road trip with his grandson’s former babysitter (Deborah Winters) and settles down with her to await the birth of the baby she is carrying after her boyfriend abandons her. The 4K digital restoration gives renewed luster to this enjoyable little film.

Having lost the film version of his acclaimed TV role in Days of Wine and Roses to Jack Lemmon, Cliff Robertson bought the films rights to Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon, which was the basis for his Emmy-nominated role in 1961’s The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon. Filmed in 1968 as Charly, the still interesting film in which Robertson plays a retarded man who participates in an experimental operation, which turns him into a genius without informing him that the results of the operation are temporary, has been given a well-deserved 2K digital restoration. Directed by Ralph Nelson (Lilies of the Field) and co-starring Claire Bloom (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), the film was an unexpected hit and won him the Oscar over frontrunners Peter O’Toole in The Lion in Winter and Alan Arkin in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

This week’s new releases include Bohemian Rhapsody and At Eternity’s Gate.