Although Ivan Reitman has produced an occasional dramatic feature film in his almost-fifty-year Hollywood career, Draft Day is the first non-comedic film the director of Ghostbusters and Dave has helmed.

Who this film was made for is open to question. It’s not a film for die-hard football fans who have derided the machinations of the Cleveland Browns General Manager played by Kevin Costner and the lack of real-life football players as participants. It’s not really a film for non-football fans either as those machinations are hard to follow for the uninitiated. What’s not hard to follow, however, is the film’s heart which is in the right place as seemingly foolish Costner goes with the right guys in the end.

Costner, whose career ascended to the stratosphere on the strength of two baseball classics, Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, is equally at home in the fall-and-winter sport. Less at home, though, Jennifer Garner has another ho-hum role as his pregnant girlfriend while Denis Leary is wasted in a stock portrayal of a scrappy coach. Better are Chadwick Boseman, Tom Welling and Josh Pence as football players; Frank Langella as the team’s patrician owner; and Ellen Burstyn as Costner’s feisty mother.

The film is a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, but it’s not likely to replace Knute Rockne All American or Jerry Maguire as anyone’s favorite football movie.

Draft Day is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Kino Lorber continues with its excellent Blu-ray upgrades of major United Artists releases from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Kirk Douglas has one of his best roles as American Army Colonel Mickey Marcus in Melville Shavelson’s 1966 film, Cast a Giant Shadow. Recruited as an adviser to the fledgling Israeli Army at the end of 1947, he is soon promoted to General and given command of the Army which against all odds wins its war for independence.

Senta Berger as a female fighter and Douglas’ lover gets equal billing while Angie Dickinson as Douglas’ loyal wife gets co-star billing. Frank Sinatra, Yul Brynner and John Wayne are billed as “guest stars” suggesting their roles are cameos. Not so, Brynner and Wayne in particular have substantial supporting roles as do James Donald, Stathis Giallelis, Luther Adler and Topol. The film’s ironic ending remains one of the most poignant of all war movie endings.

Burt Lancaster is a one-man army in Sydney Pollack’s 1968 comic western The Scalphunters. The legendary actor plays a fur trader whose furs are stolen by Indians when he is bushwhacked leaving him with runaway slave Ossie Davis. Lancaster chases down the Indians only to see them killed and scalped by outlaw Telly Savalas and his gang after which he pursues the outlaws, assisted by Davis. Shelley Winters plays a prostitute involved with Savalas.

The unusual film features memorable sequences between Lancaster and Davis, Davis and Winters, Winters and Savalas, Savalas, Lancaster and his horse, and Davis and Lancaster’s horse.

You know Halloween is just around the corner when video distributors start releasing, re-releasing and/or upgrading previous horror releases. Newly released on Blu-ray are 1984’s Firestarter, 1983’s The Legend of Hell House, and the 1979 version of Dracula.

One of Stephen King’s lesser novels, Mark L. Lester’s film of Firestarter, is best remembered as 8-year-old Drew Barrymore’s first film since her breakout role in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial two years earlier. Barrymore is terrific. The actress is the whole show as the little girl who sets people who mess with her on fire. David Keith is fine as her father but no one else, including heavyweights Martin Sheen and George C. Scott as the principal villains, and Art Carney and Louise Fletcher as well-meaning caretakers, can hold a candle to her.

One of the most chilling horror films ever made, The Legend of Hell House adds to the legend as Pamela Franklin, Roddy McDowall, Clive Revill, and Gayle Hunnicutt spend an extended weekend in the haunted house at the request of elderly Roland Culver. It compares favorably with the better known The Haunting from a decade earlier.

The 1977 Broadway revival of Dracula starring Frank Langella was such a huge success that Universal, which owned the rights, decided to make a film of the oft-told tale yet again with John Badham fresh from the success of 1977’s Saturday Night Fever at the helm. With Langella in the title role, Laurence Olivier as Van Helsing, and Kate Nelligan as Lucy, it’s a classy romanticized version that is worth a look but be warned, this was made more for Masterpiece Theatre aficionados than horror fans.

Scorpion Releasing has released two long unavailable TV movies on DVD only.

Carol Burnett spent so many years on TV satirizing classic dramatic films that her own dramatic roles often seem to be caricatures themselves. Not so her grieving mother in 1979’s Friendly Fire in which Burnett plays a not-so-simple Iowa farm wife who wants to know how her twenty-five-year-old son was killed in Vietnam. She, and Ned Beatty as her husband, a Master Sergeant during the Korean War, fight a lonely battle against the Army, the Nixon administration, and the shunning of their neighbors in their quest to get answers as the country itself begins to turn against the undeclared war.

Timothy Hutton as the couple’s younger son and Sam Waterston as a writer who helps them find answers stand out in the supporting cast.

Jack Hofsiss’ 1979 Broadway play The Elephant Man covers the same ground as the 1980 David Lynch film of the same name. The main difference is that the play eschews the heavy make-up that John Hurt hid so memorably behind in the film. Philip Anglim, however, accomplishes the same effect with just the contortions of his body and voice. Kevin Conway and Penny Fuller are equally memorable in the roles played in the film version by Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft.

The one downside, however, is that this version of The Elephant Man is taken from an old taping of the play providing less than stellar visuals.

This week’s new releases include Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the Blu-ray upgrade of Hangmen Also Die.