The Criterion Collection has released sparkling new 4K UHDs of 1970’s Five Easy Pieces and 2025’s Sentimental Value.

At first glance, it may seem that a film shot on the west coast U.S. fifty-five years earlier and one shot in today’s Norway are an odd combination, but the two films have a lot in common.

Five Easy Pieces is about a musical prodigy raised on Beethoven, his Tammy Wynette record playing girlfriend, and his sophisticated family while Sentimental Value is about the estrangement of a stage actress at the height of her career and her long absent filmmaker father. Both, however, are about alienation within families.

Five Easy Pieces is the film that catapulted Jack Nicholson to superstardom after fifteen years of mostly minor roles in films that finally paid off with an Oscar nominated supporting role in the previous year’s Easy Rider. In Five Easy Pieces, he is the undisputed star, a complex character who is alternately mean-spirited and affectionate, sometimes charming and sometimes exasperating.

Filmed in late 1969 at the end of a tumultuous decade, Nicolson, a former piano prodigy, and his no-filters girlfriend, an equally superb Karen Black, are a discontented blue-collar couple in Bakersfield, California. He’s a construction worker, she’s a waitress. Halfway through the film, he decides to visit his old money family in a suburb of Seattle, taking the now pregnant Black with him but leaving her in a hotel while he visits the old homestead which includes his mute stroke victim father, his musically gifted sister, an also superb Lois Smith, his brother (Ralph Waite), his brother’s girlfriend (Susan Anspach), and his father’s caregiver, a male nurse who is sleeping with his sister.

Black takes a taxi to the residence where it’s clear to everyone but her that Nicholson’s sophisticated family doesn’t like her, but it takes a particularly snooty friend of the family (Irene Dailey) to bring Nicholson’s ire to the forefront. This leads to the film’s shocking conclusion that still has audiences asking why it ends that way.

The film won the New York Fillm Critics award for Best Picture, Director (Bob Rafelson), and Supporting Actress (Karen Black) while Lois Smith won the National Society of Film Critics award for Best Supporting Actress. Nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture, Actor (Nicolson), Supporting Actress (Black), and Original Screenplay (Rafelson and Carole Eastman), it lost Picture, Actor (George C. Scott), and Original Screenplay (Francis Ford Coppola, Edmund H. North) to Patton and Best Supporting Actress (Helen Hayes) to Airport.

Accompanying the newly remastered 4K UHD disc is the previously released Blu-ray of the film with special features including several interviews with Rafelson, Nicolson, and others. A feature length commentary by Rafelson and his former wife, Toby Carr Rafelson, the film’s production designer and art director, accompanies the film on both discs.

Sentimental Value also deals with a long absent family member awkwardly seeking re-connection with his immediate family. In this case, it’s the father, a former filmmaking legend (Stellan Skarsgard), seeking to recapture his former glory by trying to convince his now acclaimed actress daughter (Renate Reinsve) to star in his comeback film.

Told largely from Reinsve’s perspective, Skarsgard, ever the charmer, fails to convince her of his feigned sincerity as he crashes a memorial service for the recently deceased wife he abandoned years earlier. Reinvse’s married non-acting sister (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) is more inclined to forgive him even though neither Reisnve nor Lilleaaas’ young son are not fooled by him.

All three actors are brilliant, and Elle Fanning is not far behind them as the American actress Skarsgard casts instead of Reinsve. All four were nominated for Oscars with early favorite Skarsgard losing Best Supporting Actor to Sean Penn in One Battle After Another,

Nominated for 9 Oscars overall, the film won Best International Feature in a tough race with Brazil’s The Secret Agent, which like Sentimental Value, had also been nominated for Best Picture, losing to One Battle After Another. Director Joachim Trier lost to Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle After Another for Directing and Ryan Coogler for Original Screenplay for Sinners. Reinsve lost Best Actress to Jessie Buckley for Hamnet, and Lilleaas and Fanning lost Best Supporting Actress to Amy Madigan for Weapons. The film lost a fourth Oscar to One Battle After Another for Film Editing.

Accompanying the 4K UHD disc is a Blu-ray disc of the film with numerous extras including interviews with Trier and his four stars.

Criterion has also released 1963’s Charade on a newly restored 4k UHD disc.

Charade, often referred to as the best Hitchcock film that Hitchcock didn’t make, was a huge hit in which 59-year-old Cary Grant played one of his last romantic roles opposite 34-year-old Audrey Hepburn. Although both Grant and Hepburn were nominated for Golden Globes and BAFTAs, the latter of which Hepburn won, neither received an Oscar nomination. The film’s sole Oscar nod went to Henry Mancini’s beautiful title song which lost to “Call Me Irresponsible” from the otherwise forgettable Papa’s Delicate Condition.

The film still holds up beautifully with its mix of stylish locations, mysterious deaths, and comic scenes galore, with a top-notch supporting cast headed by Walter Matthau and George Kennedy.

Accompanying the film is a commentary from the previous Blu-ray release by director Stanley Donner and screenwriter Peter Stone. A Blu-ray is also included with the 4K UHD disc.

Kino Lorber has released a Blu-ray combo pack of the three Inspector Maigret French films made by Jean Gabin from 1958-1963.

1958’s Maigret Sets a Trap and 1959’s Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case were previously released without commentary. Newly recorded commentaries accompany both masterpieces as well as the newly released Maigret Sees Red from 1963.

Happy viewing.