Winner of this year’s Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy and now nominated for seven Academy Awards, Ridley Scott’s The Martian is an entertaining film that also provides Oscar nominee Matt Damon with his first nomination for Best Actor since 1997’s Good Will Hunting for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay along with Ben Affleck. In between he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for 2009’s Invictus.

Damon plays an astronaut believed to be killed in a windstorm as the crew of his spaceship prepares to leave Mars. Injured, but not dead, Damon’s character, who is also a botanist, uses his scientific knowledge to survive until another spaceship can rescue him from the red planet. Although not really a comedy, the film has enough humor in it to earn its Golden Globe in the wrong category with a straight face. Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels and Chiwetel Ejiofor lead a splendid supporting cast.

Scott, who was previously nominated for directing Oscars for Thelma & Louise, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down, failed to earn another nomination in that category for The Martian, but he is nominated for Best Picture as one of the film’s credited producers.

The Martian is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Veteran film and TV comedy director Ken Kwapis has upped his game significantly with A Walk in the Woods, an engaging biographical adventure film about travel writer Bill Bryson who, after writing about his travels around the world, decides to stay home and explore the backwoods of his own New Hampshire surroundings. He’s played by Robert Redford in his most relaxed performance in years. Redford and Nick Nolte as his quirky friend and walking companion make this a lot more fun to watch than last year’s overwrought and over-praised Wild. Emma Thompson is charm personified as Redford’s wife, but she doesn’t have much to do. Mary Steenburgen stands out as a waitress in the supporting cast.

A Walk in the Woods is available on both Blu-ray and DVD.

Giuseppe De Santis’ 1949 Italian film Bitter Rice, released in the U.S. in 1950 and nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Story, was at the time of its release given the same high praise as Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, but has not held its lofty reputation primarily because it is not a purely realistic drama, but rather a mix of neorealism and melodrama. Criterion’s magnificently restored Blu-ray may change all that.

The film stars, in order of their billing, Vittorio Gassman as a handsome thief; Doris Dowling as his conscience-stricken accomplice; Raf Vallone as a young soldier about to be released from the Italian Army; and Silvana Mangano as an earthy itinerant rice picker working the annual harvest in Northern Italy. The film depicts the hardships of the women, including Dowling, who work the rice fields but throws in a subplot involving robbery, murder and suicide. The film made major stars of Gassman, Vallone and Mangano, who also married the film’s producer Dino De Laurentiis with whom she had four children and whose granddaughter Giada De Laurentiis is a well-known star of TV’s Food Network.

Criterion has also done a great restoration job on Wim Wenders 1977 film The American Friend based on Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game. Wenders had become obsessed with Highsmith’s novels and tried in vain to option one but found they were all already optioned by major Hollywood studios. Intrigued, Highsmith gave him the manuscript for the then-yet-to-be-published Ripley’s Game which he immediately optioned and turned into an international critically acclaimed thriller.

Initially planned as a film in which Ripley’s character is as central to the plot as picture framer Jonathan Zimmermann, the finished film concentrates mostly on Jonathan’s character because Dennis Hopper, who plays Ripley, caused delays in filming, first because of overtime on Apocalypse Now and then because he had to be detoxed when he finally arrived in a high state of drug addiction. It doesn’t detract from the film, though, because Bruno Ganz (Downfall) is so thoroughly watchable as a dying man compromised into killing rival gangsters to provide for his wife and child after his impending death.

The film is noteworthy for Robby Muller’s (Breaking the Waves) brilliant cinematography and the unique casting of Wenders’ fellow directors in all the gangster roles. Two of them, Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause) and Samuel Fuller (Pickup on South Street), were living legends.

The latest installment of the Benedict Cumberbatch-Martin Freeman Holmes and Watson British TV series, Sherlock: The Abominable Bride, has been released as a stand-alone Blu-ray and DVD as it was filmed between the third and fourth seasons of the show which take a long time to produce. It’s quite an intriguing episode as it takes place both in the present and a hundred years ago as Holmes goes back in time under a drug induced coma.

The Golden Globe winning TV drama series Mr. Robot – Season 1 has also been released on both Blu-ray and DVD. The series starts off with a brilliant pilot episode and doesn’t let up for the next nine episodes. Golden Globe nominee Rami Malek is outstanding as the protector of credit data by day and hacker by night. Golden Globe winner Christian Slater has his best role in years as Malek’s nemesis, leading a strong supporting cast that also includes Martin Wallstrom, Carly Chaikin, Michele Hicks, Portia Doubleday, Ben Rappaport, and Michel Gill.

The Golden Globe-nominated TV drama series Outlander – Season 1 is also available on Blu-ray and standard DVD in two separate volumes. The highly popular new series stars Golden Globe nominee Caitriona Balfe as a World War II nurse who goes back in time where she finds Scottish hero Sam Huegan and villain Tobias Menzies who also earned a Golden Globe nomination in the dual role of an ancient villain and Balfe’s husband in the 1945 present.

This week’s new releases include Straight Outta Compton and The Diary of a Teenage Girl.