Criterion has released a 4K UHD/Blu-ray combination of Anora, the fastest release of a major film by the home video giant in its history. They usually take their time with their releases, typically providing upgrades of films first released by other companies.

While the package is a nice one, it is also a rather dubious one. It consists of three discs, the film itself on both a 4K UHD disc and a standard Blu-ray disc which is customary for the company’s 4K UHD releases. The third disc consists mostly of writer-producer-director Sean Baker and his star Mikey Madison patting each other and themselves on the back. They’re entitled to do that, I’m just not sure how many adoring fans of the film really want to know the many details they provide about the making of the film.

One example is Baker explaining how Madison, a born and bred Los Angeles girl, struggled to affect a Brooklyn accent that her character tried so hard to overcome but which manifests itself when she is stressed. To many, it simply comes across as the actress going in and out of character.

The film is a good one, not a great one. Many of the scenes, including the opening one in which sex worker Ani goes about her business, and the mid-film chase scene through Manhattan and Brooklyn go on too long. The latter is derivative of the chase scene from Billy Wilder’s 1961 film, One, Two, Three through West and East Berlin just after the building of the Berlin Wall. That scene is still laugh out loud funny. The one in Anora is not.

Baker is a talented filmmaker who works with his actors to achieve performances that stick with you as do most of those in Anora including the starring performances of Madison as the enterprising sex worker, Mark Eydelshteyn as the son of a Russian oligarch on his first visit to the U.S., and Yura Borisov as a caring enforcer of the oligarch.

The film won five Oscars with four of them going to Baker and one to Madison. Had the newly established award for casting been available for 2024 films, Baker could have won that too as he casts his own films. Will he ever be so fortunate again?

Criterion has also released a combination 4K UHD/standard Blu-ray package of Claude Berri’s back-to-back 1987 films, Jean de Florette and its sequel, Manon of the Spring from the works of Marcel Pagnol. That’s a total of four discs, a 4K UHD disc and a standard Blu-ray disc for each film.

Next to Pagnol’s Marseilles Trilogy (Marius, Fanny, César), these films represent the best of the author-playwright’s works.

Beautifully filmed in the French countryside, Jean de Florette is set in 1920s Provence in which greedy landowner Yves Montand and his backward nephew (Daniel Auteuil) conspire to block the only water source for an adjoining property in order to bankrupt newly inherited owner Gerard Depardieu and force him to sell.

All three stars deliver compelling performances with Depardieu heartbreaking as the naïve city dweller who inherits a farm that once belonged to his mother.

Manon of the Spring picks up the story after the tragic death of Depardieu’s character in which his shepherdess daughter (Emmanuelle Beart) plots revenge against Montand and Auteuil.

Warner Archive has also been delving into French film history, albeit French history Hollywood style, with the sparkling new Blu-ray release of 1953’s Lili.

Lili, directed by Charles Walters, is the charming story of a naïve 16-year-old girl (Leslie Caron) who falls for the charms of a lecherous magician (Jean Pierre Aumont) while becoming part of a puppeteer’s act at the local carnival. She loves the puppets but not the puppeteer (Mel Ferrer) who secretly loves her.

Caron received her first Oscar nomination for her lovely performance in a one hour and twenty-one-minute film that is well worth your time.

Kino Lorber has released Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XXV featuring three films from the undervalued John H. Auer.

Included in this release are 1947’s The Flame, 1953’s City That Never Sleeps, and 1954’s Hell’s Half Acre, all of which were made for Republic Pictures, whose catalogue is now owned by Paramount.

The Flame stars John Carroll as the black sheep of a wealthy family who has squandered his fortune and is now scheming to have his French nurse girlfriend (Vera Ralston) ingratiate herself to his dying half-brother (Robert Paige) so that she will become Paige’s wife and marry Carroll when he dies. Complications arise when Ralston really falls in love with Paige.

There are plot twists aplenty to keep you involved with stronger than usual supporting performances in a film of this nature by the likes of Broderick Crawford, Doris Dowling, Blanche Yurka, Henry Travers, Victor Sen Young, and Hattie McDaniel.

City That Never Sleeps stars Gig Young as a Chicago cop who wants to leave his wife (Paula Raymond) and run off with a showgirl (Mala Powers) but is stymied by a local crooked lawyer (Edward Arnold), the lawyer’s two-timing wife (Marie Windsor), and a sleazy magician (William Talman). Wally Cassell steals the film as a “mechanical man.” Ron Hagerthy, who played Young’s kid brother, is not such a kid anymore but he’s still with us at 93.

Hell’s Half Acre takes us to Honolulu with Evelyn Keyes who goes there to determine if gangster Wendell Corey is the husband she thought died in the attack on Pearl Harbor. He is, of course, but we know that from the beginning of the film that also stars Elsa Lanchester as a resourceful cab driver, Keye Luke as the police chief, Philip Ahn as Corey’s partner in crime, Jesse White and Marie Windsor as a pair of married sleazebags, and Nancy Gates as an early murder victim.

Happy viewing.