They Shall Not Grow Old, Peter Jackson’s remarkable documentary made to commemorate the centennial of the end of World War I, was released in the U.K. last November, but its U.S. debut, aside from special screenings, did not take place until February of this year. Warner Archive has now made it available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Jackson, best known for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, has done a stunning job of recreating the war as seen through the eyes of foot soldiers from never before seen footage stored at the British Imperial War Museum. Rather than use a standard narration, Jackson chose to use the recorded memories of World War I British veterans made in the 1960s and 70s. The film begins in black-and-white as it takes the eager young recruits from enlistment through boot camp and then goes to color as it explores the wrenching aspects of the war itself.

Unlike the colorization of old black-and-white films done in the past, Jackson’s painstaking process makes the footage look as though it was shot in color to begin with. The sound effects accompanying what were silent films are, as you would expect, the way things would have sounded if they had been recorded live. What makes it so startlingly real is the spoken dialogue pored over by lip-readers who wrote down what they found which was given to actors to speak. Many of the participants died within hours of their scenes being filmed. The carnage shown in the film is devastating. It was so great that at one point steamrollers were used to pound the bodies of 2,000 German and British soldiers, killed side by side, into the ground so that surviving soldiers could walk over them without stepping on them. You will come away from this one understanding why no one in it wanted to talk about the war for years, if at all.

While there have been a handful of great narrative films made about the foot soldier in the “war to end all wars,” this is the first documentary that can take its place proudly beside the likes of The Big Parade, All Quiet on the Western Front, Journey’s End, Westfront 1918, and Oh! What a Lovely War.

Sony has released Outlander – Season Four on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

The popular series taken from Diana Gabaldon’s intended ten-book series with the ninth about to be published, delivers heart-pounding action in every episode of which there are thirteen per season as time-travelling doctor Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe) goes back in time from 1945 to 1743 and back again, only to return twenty years later in search of her 18th Century Scottish highlander husband, Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan).

At the end of the previous season, Claire and Jamie have arrived in America a decade before the Revolutionary War along with Jamie’s nephew, Young Ian (John Bell), his and Claire’s foster son Fergus (César Domboy), and Fergus’s wife Marsali (Lauren Lyle). As the season progresses, they will be joined in the late 18th Century by Claire and Jamie’s 20th Century daughter Brianna (Sophie Skelton) and her pursuing Scottish boyfriend (Richard Rankin). Along the way, they will meet up with Jamie’s uncle Martagh Fraser (Duncan Lacroix), his aunt Jacosta Cameron (Maria Doyle Kennedy), and Jamie’s old friend, Lord John Grey (David Berry) whose son doesn’t know that Jamie is his real father. There will be kidnappings, rapes, fiery deaths and the usual misunderstandings that highlight the series, but the compelling storyline propelled by its sterling cast will have you binge-watching through the night.

Previously released on Blu-ray without extras by MGM, Criterion has released a 4K restoration of Blue Velvet with all the bells and whistles that we expect from them, and more.

David Lynch’s thriller that begins with the search for a body to go with a severed-ear, features career-high performances from Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, and Dennis Hopper with Dean Stockwell, Hope Lange, and Brad Dourif among its supporting players. Needless-to-say, the film looks better than ever, but what really sells this release is the wealth of extras that include fifty-three minutes of deleted scenes and alternate takes assembled by Lynch, a new feature-length mediation on the making of the film, a seventy-minute documentary from 2002 about the making of the film and various interviews.

Among the films previously released on DVD only, getting their first Blu-ray releases are Beatriz at Dinner, A Patch of Blue, Portrait in Black, and Madame X.

Miguel Arteta’s Beatriz at Dinner with a screenplay by Mike White (Brad’s Status) is a 2017 comedy-drama previously given a throwaway DVD only release by Lionsgate that on the surface seems like a self-indulgent exercise in frustration but is in retrospect a film that gets under your skin and stays there.

Salma Hayak’s Spirit Award-nominated performance is the best of her career, topping even her Oscar-nominated performance in 2002’s Frida. She plays a masseuse invited to the home of socialite Connie Britton whose car breaks down which gets her an invitation to stay to dinner where Britton and her husband (David Wahofsky) are entertaining the husband’s blowhard major client (John Lithgow at his sleazy best). The ending of the dialogue-heavy film may frustrate you, but you’ll have fun getting there.

Warner Archive has done another admirable job with the release of Guy Green’s 1965 film A Patch of Blue starring Sidney Poitier in one of his signature roles as a kindly man who befriends a blind girl (Elizabeth Hartman) he’s met in a park, whose homelife with her hideous mother (Shelley Winters) and alcoholic grandfather (Wallace Ford in his last film) is next to unbearable.

The film earned Golden Globe nominations for Best Picture-Drama, Actor (Poitier), Actress (Hartman), and Director, but Winters and Ford were overlooked. Only Hartman and Winters received Oscar nominations in the top categories, with Winters winning. It still holds up to multiple viewings thanks to the performances of all four stars.

Kino Lorber, which releases more classic films than any other disc company, has done their usual fine job with two Lana Turner successes, 1960’s glossy thriller Portrait in Black and 1966’s Madame X, the third film version of the venerable tearjerker that earned Ruth Chatterton an Oscar nomination in its 1929 iteration and provided character actress Gladys George with a rare starring role in the 1937 version.

Portrait in Black, directed by Michael Gordon the year after he directed Pillow Talk, features a screenplay by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts who were Oscar nominated for 1957’s Man of a Thousand Faces, which is based on their 1947 Broadway play of the same name. It’s a neo noir melodrama with large doses of incredulity but it’s beautiful to look at it with its location filming in San Francisco and all those gorgeous gowns that murderess Turner gets to wear as she and her doctor lover (Anthony Quinn) knock off her husband (Lloyd Nolan) and try to stay a few steps ahead of Richard Basehart, Sandra Dee, John Saxon, Virginia Mayo, and Anna May Wong among others in its impressive cast.

Turner suffers and suffers in Madame X in which she is watchable but acting honors go to Keir Dullea as the grown son she was forced to give up by her nasty husband (John Forsythe) and Constance Bennett as Forsythe’s controlling mother in her last film.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray releases of The Man Who Laughs and Veronica Guerin.