Notorious, newly released by Criterion in a 4K restoration with all the bells and whistles you might expect, is proof positive that Alfred Hitchcock was not the cold technician his detractors claimed. The 1946 film is both a first-rate nail-biter and a deeply moving love story, the two threads coming to conclusion in one of the most suspense-filled endings in the history of film.

Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant both play against their legendary screen personas. She is not the saintly heroine of Casablanca, Gaslight, and The Bells of St. Mary’s. He is not the easy-going light leading man of The Awful Truth, Holiday, and The Philadelphia Story. She is the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy. He is her government handler, the man who puts her in a hornet’s nest of Nazis hiding in plain sight in Brazil. Their love affair begins early, hits a major bump when he doesn’t try to talk her out of marrying the head spy (Claude Rains), resumes tentatively while she is in danger and reaches its full bloom when he comes to rescue her in the nick of time.

The film features four great performances by Bergman, Grant, Rains and Leopoldine Konstantin in her only film as Rains’ suspicious, controlling mother, yet only Rains was nominated for an Oscar. In fact, the film’s only other nomination was for Ben Hecht’s meticulous screenplay. The film was overlooked for Ted Tetzlaff’s cinematography, Theran Warf’s editing, Roy Webb’s score, and most astonishingly, Best Picture and Direction.

The Criterion release features previously recorded commentaries from 1990 by film historian Rudy Behlmer and 2001 by Marian Keane as well as a new on-screen interview with Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto, a program about the film’s visual style with AMPAS president, cinematographer John Bailey, and more.

Shout Select has released a Blu-ray of Stuart Heisler’s The Glass Key, the fast-moving film version of the novel by Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man) that was the favorite of the acclaimed mystery writer from all his works.

The film was the second pairing of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, following the success of the same year’s This Gun for Hire, which will be a forthcoming Shout Select release. They’re doing these Ladd-Lake Blu-ray releases in reverse order. Their release of The Glass Key follows their release of the 1946 Ladd-Lake thriller The Blue Dahlia last November.

Although Ladd has the film’s most prominent role, he is third-billed behind Brian Donlevy and Lake but ahead of William Bendix whose performance as a sadistic thug was the film’ most talked about role at the time and a factor in Bendix’s Oscar nomination for that year’s Wake Island in which he supported Donlevy and Robert Preston who was billed over Ladd in This Gun for Hire despite Ladd having had the ostensible lead in that as well.

Ladd was at the time new to film stardom despite having been in films since 1932. Donlvey, who plays his politician boss in the film, was a previous Oscar nominee for 1939’s Beau Geste and a sensation in Preston Sturges’ 1940 film, The Great McGinty.

The film revolves around Donlevy’s being accused of murder and Ladd’s efforts to clear him. Commentary is provided by film historians Alan K. Rode and Steve Mitchell.

1963’s The Prize, newly released on Blu-ray by Warner Archive, was directed by Mark Robson from a best-selling novel by Irving Wallace. The screenplay was written by Ernest Lehman, who wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest in the style of that film with elements of Hitchcock’s 1940 film Foreign Correspondent thrown in for good measure.

Paul Newman stars as a Nobel Prize-winning writer in Stockholm to receive his award where Edward G. Robinson as a nuclear scientist is also there to collect an award. Elke Sommer and Diane Baker co-star with Leo G. Carroll, Gérard Oury, Kevin McCarthy, and Sergio Fantoni providing key support. Robinson is kidnapped and a doppelganger is put in his place a la Albert Basserman in Foreign Correspondent while Newman races around like Cary Grant in North by Northwest to save him. The film’s highlight is a nudist convention Newman finds himself in midway through the film. It’s all in good fun.

The only extra is the film’s trailer.

It’s unusual for a film to get a sequel forty years after the original, and even more unusual to have the original film’s star play herself forty years older in real time. That, nevertheless, is the case with Jamie Lee Curtis and Halloween.

David Gordon Green (Stronger) directs with the blessing of the original’s John Carpenter. The film is a direct sequel of the original, ignoring the myriad sequels that appeared in the interim. Curtis is a grandmother now with a granddaughter (Andi Matichak) the age she was in the original. Judy Greer is Curtis’ daughter who resents her upbringing, living her mother’s nightmare in fear of the return of Michael Meyers, the bogeyman of the original until return he does as he escapes from the overturned bus moving him from one facility to another seemingly for no reason other than to set the plot in motion.

Fans were mixed on whether this film was better than the original, but it is highly entertaining unlike a lot of modern films which are just, well, horrible.

Halloween is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Based on the true story of a jovial bank robber who escaped from San Quentin at the age of 70 and set out to rob more banks, The Old Man & the Gun stars 82-year-old Robert Redford as the robber and 69-year-old Sissy Spacek as his new-found sweetheart with Casey Affleck as the robbery detective who hunts him down. Tom Waits and Danny Glover are featured as Redford’s fellow bank robbers. Director David Lowery (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) and many others who worked on the film worked with Redford at his Sundance Institute.

It’s a very genial film, but it’s all rather lightweight with the scenes between Redford and Spacek the film’s most engaging. See it for them.

The Old Man & the Gun is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

This week’s new releases include First Man and The Hate U Give.