It’s Halloween, time for a ghost story. The Criterion Collection obliges with a first-rate 4K UHD upgrade of Alejandro Amenabar’s 2001 horror classic, The Others.

Reminiscent of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents of forty years earlier, based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, as well as Robert Wise’s 1963 version of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting, Amenabar’s original story has twists all its own which helped make it one the highest grossing horror films of all time. Like those earlier films as well as 1999’s The Sixth Sense, it is a psychological horror film, not one filled with blood and gore, its success relying heavily on its casting.

The Innocents had Deborah Kerr and Michael Redgrave. The Haunting had Julie Harris and Claire Bloom. The Sixth Sense had Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment. The Others has Nicole Kidman and Fionnula Flanagan.

Produced by Tom Cruise, this was his last collaboration with soon-to-be-ex-wife Kidman who stars as a frightened mother of two equally petrified children in an isolated estate on Britain’s island of Jersey in 1947 awaiting the return of her husband from World War II two years after the war ended.

This was one of two huge hits for Kidman that year, the other being Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! Nominated for a Golden Globe for both performances, Moulin Rouge! for Best Actress – Musical or Comedy and The Others for Best Actress – Drama, she won for the former for which she was later nominated for an Oscar.

Kidman’s nomination for The Others was the film’s only nomination at the Globes. It fared better at the Globes’ rival Satellite Awards where if was nominated for six awards including Best Picture – Drama, Screenplay, Actress – Drama (Kidman), Supporting Actress – Drama (Fionnula Flanagan), Art Direction, and Sound, failing to win any. Oscar failed to nominate it at all.

Amenabar was represented at that year’s Oscars by Vanilla Sky with a nomination for Cameron Diaz as Best Supporting Actress.

In addition to Kidman’s impressive performance, The Others provides strong supporting roles for Flanagan as a creepy housekeeper, as well as Christpher Eccleston as Kidman’s long missing husband, Alakina Mann and James Bentley as their extremely frightened children, and Renée Asherson billed as “old lady” in her last film. Asherson, Robert Donat’s widow, would live another thirteen years, dying in 2014 at 99.

Extras on the Criterion release include 2023 interviews with Amenabar, producer Fernando Bovaira, Kidman, and Eccleston.

Also in time for Halloween, Warner Archive has released Tod Browning’s 1936 classic The Devil-Doll on Blu-ray for the first time.

The first film since Browning’s 1925 silent classic The Unholy Three in which Lon Chaney’s main character disguises himself as an old lady shop owner, this one gave the distinction to Lionel Barrymore who delivers one of his greatest performances as the revenge driven former banker who shrinks his enemies into living dolls that he controls. Maureen O’Sullivan as his unsuspecting daughter and Frank Lawton as her fiancé also deliver strong performances.

In a rarity for Warner Archive, newly recorded commentary is provided by film historian Dr. Steve Haberman and Film Historian/Filmmaker Constantine Nasr.

Also newly released from Warner Archive is Julian Schnabel’s 2000 film Before Night Falls, based on the life of Cuban poet and author Reinaldo Arenas.

Arenas, brilliantly played by Javier Bardem, was a Cuban peasant born in 1943 who joined Castro’s revolutionaries at the age of 14 in 1958 but later suffered cruelly at the hands of the oppressive Castro government which banned his books and jailed him for a crime he didn’t commit.

The openly gay Arenas was persecuted for both his sexuality and his political views after winning a literary prize with his first novel in 1965. His future works had to be smuggled out of the country in order for them to be published. Jailed in 1974 and finally able to flee Cuba for the U.S. in 1980, he lived in poverty for the remainder of his life, dying of AIDS in 1990.

Although Arenas’ life was a constant struggle, the film is a beautifully filmed tribute to a courageous man who never gave up, triumphing even over death as he plans to end his life his way.

On more than 75 ten-best lists, Bardem’s performance won the New York Film Critics Circle, National Board of Review, and National Society of Film Critics’ awards for Best Actor along with Golden Globe and Oscar nominations.

Johnny Depp has a surprising dual role as a prison warden and a drag queen who smuggles Arenas’ manuscripts out of the prison.

The supporting cast also includes Olivier Martinez, Andreas Di Stefano, Michael Wincott, Pedro Armandariz Jr., and director Schnabel’s wife and five children including his son Vito Maria Schnabel as the teenage Arenas.

Schnabel finally received an Oscar nomination of his own, receiving a 2007 nomination for Best Director for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Bardem would win an Oscar on his second nomination for 2007’s No Country for Old Men, his only nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category. He would go on to receive two more nominations for Best Actor for 2010’s Biutiful and 2021’s Being the Ricardos in which he played Desi Arnaz opposite Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball.

Happy viewing.