Inside Out is director Peter Doctor’s first film since winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature for 2009’s Up. It could well win him a second Oscar. I wish that I could join in in the enthusiasm, but I can’t.

I find the film a near-miss. It’s clever and cute, perhaps too clever for young children and too cute for adults. The story takes place largely in the head of an 11-year-old girl whose emotions are out of whack due her move with her parents from a small Minnesota town to San Francisco.

There are things to like in the film, of course, from the design of the world inside the girl’s head to the low key on-going gag of the family’s possessions being delayed in the move. On the other hand, young children won’t get a lot of the jokes and older children might need a crash course in Psychology 101 to understand the arc of the film.

Where it really loses me is in the middle as two of the emotions depicted in the film, Joy and Sadness, get waylaid and it’s up to the other three, Anger, Fear and Disgust, to hold the fort. This section of the film drags on way too long, saved only by the presence of Bing Bong, the girl’s long-forgotten imaginary friend who disappears in a puff of smoke before the girl can recall him. That’s a bummer.

Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, and Mindy Kaling voice the emotions; Kaitlyn Dias the girl; Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan the parents; and Richard Kind Bing Bong.

Inside Out is available in three formats: 3D Blu-ray, 2D Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Universal, which has been slower than any other studio to release its classic films, a library that includes pre-1948 Paramount films as well as well as Universal films from the studio’s inception to the present, is stepping up its game.

The latest batch, available on DVD only, includes four long-requested titles, Broken Lullaby, Never Say Goodbye, The Female Animal, and A Gathering of Eagles.

Ernst Lubitch’s Broken Lullaby may be the director’s best film, which is saying quite a lot considering he was the director of such durable classics as Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner and To Be or Not to Be. Those films were comedies, Broken Lullaby was not. Its failure at the box-office made Lubitsch vow to never make another drama, a vow he kept for the rest of his life.

Released in January 1932, it was sandwiched between Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant and One Hour With You, both of which were Oscar nominees for Best Picture of 1931/32 while the superior Broken Lullaby received no more love from the Academy than it had audiences.

Based on a play with the more descriptive title of The Man I Killed, Broken Lullaby is an anti-war film that rivals All Quiet on the Western Front in that regard. Phillips Holmes plays a young French soldier, a violinist in civilian life, who kills a German solder on the battlefront toward the end of World War I, discovering that he, too, was a musician that studied at the same conservatory in Paris before the war. Haunted by the death, he goes to lay flowers on the soldier’s grave in Germany and visits the family, but before he can tell them who he is, they embrace him as a friend of their son. The film is an emotional tour-de-force for Holmes, Nancy Carroll as the dead man’s fiancé, and Lionel Barrymore and Louise Carter as his shattered parents. Shown at the same Venice Film Festival as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Sin of Madelon Claudet, Grand Hotel, Frankenstein, and The Champ, the film was banned in Czechoslovakia for its pacifist themes.

With an assist from Douglas Sirk, Jerry Hopper directed Never Say Goodbye from a Priandello play set in Italy. Updated to depict life in the U.S. during the Cold War, this 1956 “woman’s film” stars Rock Hudson as a young doctor raising his 8-year-old daughter Shelley Fabares in the absence of his presumed-dead wife. Lo and behold, on a business trip to Los Angeles he runs into the wife who immediately runs out the restaurant and is hit by a car. Their story is told in flashback as he awaits the outcome of her operation.

The film is made memorable by the lovely performance of Cornell Borchers as the Austrian wife who disappears for seven years behind the Iron Curtain and will not contact her husband when she finally escapes because she thought he had deserted her. George Sanders co-stars as her artist friend.

A real curiosity, Harry Keller’s 1958 melodrama The Female Animal stars Hedy Lamarr as an aging movie star, George Nader as her latest kept man, Jane Powell as her daughter, and Jan Sterling as a sleazy former star. A few years earlier, this would have likely been a vehicle for Joan Crawford, but Lamarr acquits herself well as does Nader, but everybody’s favorite girl next door, Powell, is badly miscast as a sexpot. Sterling is totally wasted in a role no bigger than the ones she played ten years earlier, although now that she’s a star she gets equal billing with the other three.

Delbert Mann’s 1963 film A Gathering of Eagles is based on a story by Sy Bartlet, the author of the novel Twelve O’Clock High and the screenplay for the 1949 film. It is basically a remake of that classic set in peacetime instead of wartime with readiness drills taking the place of bombing missions during the Cold War.

Rock Hudson stars as the tough base commander with Rod Taylor as his easygoing second in command, Mary Peach as his British-born wife, Barry Sullivan as an old-timer put out to pasture, and Leora Dana as Sullivan’s salt-of-the-earth Army wife in this rewarding salute to the Strategic Air Command.

Season 3 of Australia’s Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is now available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.
Essie Davis (The Babadook) is back for another lighthearted dozen episodes set in the madcap 1920s, ably assisted by Nathan Page, Hugo Johnstone-Burt, Ashleigh Cummings, and Miriam Margolyes among others.

This week’s new releases include Mr. Holmes and Trainwreck.