The Weinsteins (Harvey and Bob) are notorious for making drastic changes to films before their release, none more so than the 1998 Miramax release 54, which had been written and filmed by its writer-director Mark Christopher as Saturday Night Fever meets Cabaret but came across as a poor man’s Thank God It’s Friday. The gutted release version appalled audiences and critics alike. Instead of a two-hour film in which character development forms the crux of the narrative, we got a version that excised 45 minutes of plot and substituted 35 additional minutes of anonymous people dancing to disco music.

Seventeen years after the fact, Miramax, which in the interim had undergone several leadership changes, allowed Christopher access to an incomplete working print of the film to which he added several lost scenes from his own daily VHS prints. He also had star Ryan Philippe record a new voice-over opening and re-record several muted dialogue scenes as well. Released in 2015, 54: The Director’s Cut is a film that while far from great, gives us something a lot more substantial than the travesty that was originally unleased upon us.

The film centers on three employees of Studio 54, New York City’s world-famous trendy nightclub from the fall of 1979 to the winter of 1980 when it was closed and its owners sentenced to prison for tax evasion. The three protagonists are played very effectively by Philippe as a bartender, Salma Hayek as a hatcheck girl, and Breckin Meyer as a busboy, all of whom are given thwarted chances at becoming something more. Most of the Weinstein-imposed cuts were on any and all suggestions that Philippe’s character was bisexual. The physical attraction between Philippe’s character and the married Hayek and Meyer characters was played way down in the original release version, but not in the restored director’s cut.

The film’s most talked about performance was that of comedian Mike Meyers in his first serious role as Steve Rubell, the sleazy, flamboyant co-owner of the nightclub, which he played to the hilt. His character comes through even stronger in the director’s cut. Neve Campbell, a major TV star at the time of filming, receives star billing for appearing in three short scenes. Sela Ward weaves in and out of it as Philippe’s older paramour while Ellen Albertini Dow, 84 at the time of filming, steals scenes as the club’s most energetic dancer. The longtime character actress acted until she was 100, dying last year just before the release of the director’s cut at 101.

54: The Director’s Cut is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD and has been available since its release last year on Amazon streaming.

Robert Altman (M*A*S*H, Nashville) had been one of the most admired directors of the 1970s, but fell out of favor in the 1980s. The success of his more recent TV work and the independent 1990 film, Vincent and Theo, about Vincent Van Gough and his brother Theodore, led to 1992’s The Player, his first major film in more than a decade.

The noirish comedy-drama is a full throttled attack on the “new” Hollywood of the era starring Tim Robbins as a studio executive who murders a writer who he assumes is the man who had sent him an anonymous threatening postcard. It features a stellar supporting cast including Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg, Peter Gallagher, Vincent D’Onofrio, and a virtual who’s-who of Hollywood at the time in cameos as themselves. The film started out awards season well with wins from the New York Film Critics for Best Picture, Director and Cinematography and Golden Globe wins for the film and Robbins. It was nominated for three Oscars for Best Director, Screenplay and Editing, but came away empty-handed.

The Player was originally produced for home video by the Criterion Collection on laserdisc in 1993, but video rights subsequently went to other companies. The new Criterion edition on both Blu-ray and DVD reinstates the original laserdisc commentary by Altman, writer Michael Tolkin, and cinematographer Jean Lépine along with other extras from that release. It also adds numerous other extras including new on-camera interviews with Robbins, Tolkin and others.

Before L.A. Confidential made director Curtis Hanson a household name in 1997, there was 1990’s Bad Influence, another edge-of-your-seat crime thriller in the mode of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. Bad Influence has been newly released on Blu-ray by Shout Factory.

Instead of Robert Walker making Farley Granger’s life a living hell, we get Rob Lowe doing similar things to wreck James Spader’s life. The screenplay is by David Koepp (Death Becomes Her, Apartment Zero) so you know you’re in for a wicked good time. Special features include an interview with Koepp.

Russell Crowe had been a child actor since the age of 8, well known in Australia, but not yet the U.S., when he burst on the scene in the 1994 screen version of David Stevens’ play The Sum of Us about the close relationship between a working-class father (veteran actor Jack Thompson and his gay son (Crowe) which causes problems both in the father’s relationship with a woman his age (Deborah Kennedy) and the son’s would-be relationship with a young gardener (John Polson). The character study co-directed by Geoff Burton and Kevin Dowling is well worth your time but you may want to turn on the English language subtitles to understand the rapid-fire dialogue delivered with a heavy Australian accent by Thompson and Crowe which often ends in muttering.

The Sum of Us is now available on Blu-ray from Olive Films.

Olive Films has also released The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, restored by the UCLA Film Archive, on Blu-ray.

Guy de Maupassant’s novel is given a first-class production by director Albert Lewin (The Picture of Dorian Gray) in this 1947 production with George Sanders as the titled rogue. While Sanders excels at playing a cad, one is a bit hard-pressed to understand what all the women who fall for him see that we don’t. Among them are Angela Lansbury, Ann Dvorak, Katherine Emery, Susan Douglas, Frances Dee, and Marie Wilson. John Carradine plays the film’s most sympathetic character, Sanders’ old friend whose wife (Dvorak) becomes one of his conquests. Also prominent in the supporting cast are Hugo Haas, Albert Basserman, Richard Fraser, and Warren William, who, had the film been made ten years earlier, would have made an excellent Bel Ami.

This week’s new releases include Wim Wenders: The Road Trilogy and Federico Fellini’s late career City of Women.