The title of Quentin Tarantino’s eighth film, The Hateful Eight, is a play on words just as Federico Fellini’s eighth full film 8 1/2 was. Fellini, whose film took shape as it went along, had a severe case of writer’s block after the success of La Dolce Vita and wrote the screenplay for 8 1/2 on the fly. Tarantino, never at a loss for words, had no such problem. The Hateful Eight, an epic western set in the days after the Civil War, is full of words as well as action. Many of the words are hateful, even hurtful. At almost 3 hours, there are far too many of them hurtling at the audience, but that’s what you get from Tarantino. Anyone who finds the film offensive doesn’t know the writer-director.

There are eight billed stars, each with an air of hatefulness about him or her. Samuel L. Jackson is a former Union officer now a bounty hunter; Kurt Russell a rival bounty hunter; Walton Goggins a former Confederate soldier on his way to a sheriff’s position; Tim Roth a transplanted British hangman; Demian Bichir a Mexican drifter; Michael Madsen a mysterious stranger; Bruce Dern a retired Confederate general; and Jennifer Jason Leigh a prisoner apprehended by Russell on her way to be hanged. Channing Tatum has a cameo.

The acting is way over the top, most of it delightfully so, but Australian stuntwoman-turned-actress Zoe Bell really grates in a small role. Leigh was the only one to score an Oscar nomination but for my money, Jackson and Goggins are the film’s best acting assets. Robert Richardson’s Oscar-nominated cinematography is breathtaking and Ennio Morricone’s Oscar winning score is a total delight.

The Hateful Eight is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Will Smith gives his best performance to date in Peter Landesman’s Concussion as Dr. Bennett Omalu, the Nigeria-born pathologist with eight degrees who discovered Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive degenerative disease found in people with a history of repetitive brain trauma, particularly football players. Omalu’s attempts to get the Pittsburgh Steelers and the National Football League to accept his findings and do something about them forms the crux of the story. Thwarted at every turn, he ends up in Lodi, California where the recently-naturalized American citizen is content to act as the chief medical examiner for San Juaquin County.

Journalist-turned-screenwriter and director Landesman’s previous films, Parkland about John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Kill the Messenger about the death of journalist Gary Webb, were modest successes at the box office as was Concussion, which failed to be the awards magnet predicted. That’s a shame because Smith really did deserve an Oscar nomination for his performance. Forget the hype about no black actors being nominated this year. That was largely the result of sour grapes on the part of Smith’s actress wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, the snub was really the result of a late-year opening in the midst of the busy holiday season which didn’t allow the film to get the amount of traction it should have gotten.

Concussion is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

This is both the 20th anniversary of Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins and the100th anniversary of Ireland’s Easter Rising that began the career of the IRA revolutionary who lived and died by the gun.

Liam Neeson had one of his best roles as Collins who was not seen by the British as one of the leaders of the 1916 Irish Rising for which sixteen participants in the bombing of the General Post Office in Dublin were executed. With his face unknown to the British investigators he was able to move about freely during the Irish War of Independence AKA the Civil War after which he was selected to negotiate a peace settlement in London. Ironically it was during a peace mission that he was he assassinated by his former comrades in 1922.

Alan Rickman as America-born Irish leader Eamon de Valera [delivers a fine performance] as does Aidan Quinn as Neeson’s best friend, but Julia Roberts strikes such a sour note as the woman who comes between them that every time she makes an entrance you’ll want to say “not her again”.

Michael Collins is now available on Blu-ray for the first time from the Warner Archive.

Criterion has provided a 4K restoration of Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief on Blu-ray under the now more generally accepted title of Bicycle Thieves which was its release title in Great Britain.

The film is rightly regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. Filmed on location in poverty-stricken postwar Rome in 1947, the film followed Roberto Rossellini’s war trilogy of (Rome) Open City, Paisan and Germany Year Zero as well as De Sica’s own Shoeshine and Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema in defining Italian neorealism. While those five films also evoked emotional clarity, social rectitude and brutal honesty, Bicycle Thieves offered a ray of hope denied most of the protagonists in the previous five films. Perhaps that is why it resonated more with audiences around the world.

Both the original Italian title Ladri di biciclette and the original American release title focused on a singular thief, but the truer-to-the-story British title casts a wider net, including not only the thief who stole the protagonist’s bicycle on his first day of work in some time, but on the protagonist himself who in desperation steals someone else’s bicycle.

De Sica’s Shoeshine, a 1947 release in the U.S., was the first film to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, then an honorary award. The Bicycle Thief received that same distinction two years later. The Bicycle Thief was the fourth consecutive Italian neorealist film to earn a Best Screenplay nomination following (Rome) Open City Shoeshine and Paisan.

Shoeshine and La Terra Trema are available on standard DVD as is Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy, but that set should be upgraded to Blu-ray by Criterion at some point. They have, after all, previously released the later 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini starring Ingrid Bergman on Blu-ray.

This week’s new releases include Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Mojave .