Two of the films that were expected to earn major Oscar nominations last year were not released until early this year making them ineligible for consideration for the 2013 awards. Will they factor into the 2014 race? Perhaps not, but they shouldn’t keep anyone from enjoying them.

Held back because it wasn’t completed on time, George Clooney’s The Monuments Men is a well-made film about a World War II platoon led by art professors intent on taking back the art treasures stolen by the Nazis as the war wears down. Their intent is to return the works to their owners or to a museum if the owners can’t be traced. They are not only working against time as Hitler’s henchmen have instructions to destroy everything as they abandon occupied territory, they are also working against the Russians who want to take the treasures for themselves in compensation for their heavy losses on the Eastern front.

The story of the quest to stop the Nazis from destroying precious works of art and to recover what has been stolen is not new to films. Among the previous films that have explored the situation are the mid-sixties films The Train and Is Paris Burning?

If there is a downside to the film it’s that there are so many stars in it that with all of them having to have their own big scene or two there isn’t much time left for character development – we hardly get to know two of them before they expire while the others are narrowly sketched and defined. The monuments men are played by George Clooney; Matt Damon; John Goodman; Jean Dujardin; Hugh Bonneville; Bob Balaban and Dimitri Leonidas. Cate Blanchett has an important role as a French resistance spy and Nick Clooney, George’s dad, play his son’s character thirty years later in the film’s coda.

The Monuments Men is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Watching The Monuments Men may put you in the mood for one of the great films about the resistance made during the war itself. If so, you can’t do better than This Land Is Mine, Jean Renoir’s 1943 classic about an unnamed European country which is obviously France from which Renoir had only recently escaped.

Renoir is an excellent choice in another respect. His father, Pierre Auguste Renoir, was one of the artists whose works were among those stolen in The Monuments Men.

Centering on two families of teachers, This Land Is Mine was a reunion for Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara, the actress he discovered, put under contract and elevated to stardom as his co-star in 1939’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Laughton is a mother obsessed coward at heart who becomes a reluctant hero when his mother (a fantastic Una O’Connor) informs on O’Hara’s brother (Kent Smith). With impressive support from George Sanders; Walter Slezak; Thurston Hall and Philip Merivale, it’s nevertheless Laughton and O’Connor who make the strongest impressions.

Laughton and O’Connor had a long collaboration from 1934’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street in which O’Connor was Laughton’s housekeeper to 1959’s Witness for the Prosecution in which she played a murdered woman’s hard of hearing housekeeper to his crafty defense attorney.

This Land Is Mine, a Warner Archive release, is available on standard DVD only.

The other intended 2013 release, In Secret, was held back because the distributor, Exclusive Media Corp. didn’t want to mount an expensive Oscar campaign for a film that didn’t seem to have much of a chance. The film was released in early February almost “in secret” itself. Never heard of it? Sure you have, but not by that name. The film was shown at the Toronto Film Festival under its original title, Thérese. The film is the umpteenth film version of Emile Zola’s Thérese Raquin.

The basic story line of Thérese Raquin was co-opted by James M. Cain for the now better known The Postman Always Rings Twice, filmed by Luchino Visconti in 1943 as Ossessione and by Hollywood in 1946 with John Garfield and Lana Turner and again in 1981 with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange.

Lange appears in In Secret as Madame Raquin, the domineering aunt of Elizabeth Olsen’s Thérese. Having raised her abandoned niece alongside her sickly son (Tom Felton), Lange engineers the marriage of the two, which is happy enough until the husband brings home a friend (Oscar Isaac) who awakens his wife’s sexuality. The film’s art direction and costume design are its strongest assets. All four leads give excellent performances with only Lange lacking likeability as the film twists and turns to its inevitable conclusion.

In Secret is available on standard DVD only.

Terence Davis’ 1992 cult film, The Long Day Closes has been given a lovely presentation by Criterion in one of its recent dual format releases.

The film is unlike anything Davies or anyone else has ever done. The director of 2000’s The House of Mirth and 2011’s The Deep Blue Sea makes room for 35 fully sung songs in the course of its 85 minute running time with connecting dialogue in his character study of a lonely 11 year-old boy in the 1950s whose solace is the local movie theatre. The songs are sometimes sung live by cast members; sometimes by famous versions of classic recordings such as Nat King Cole’s “Stardust”; Doris Day’s “At Sundown” and Debbie Reynolds’ “Tammy” which is sung over a routine day for the boy which includes attendance at a Catholic Mass. Leigh McCormack gives a haunting performance as the boy in his only film role. Veteran actress Marjorie Yates plays his widowed mother.

Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of F.W.Murnau’s 1921 classic, Nosferatu herewith renamed Nosferatu the Vampyre is not quite as scary as it is creepy. Klaus Kinski, made up to look like the original’s Max Schreck, gives one of his best performance as does Bruno Ganz as Joanthan Harker. Isabelle Adjani’s Lucy is a matter of taste.

The film, though beautifully made, is rather slow moving until it gets to its pip of a climax which seems a bit rushed, but is well worth waiting for.

This week’s new releases include Red River and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, Series 2.