Nothing in Otto Preminger’s filmography suggests that he would be the right director to helm one of the most sensitive films of all time, but he proves to be just that with his 1970 adaptation of Marjorie Kellogg’s Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon.

The director of Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, and Advise and Consent among many others, gets fine performances from Liza Minnelli as a physically and emotionally scarred former party girl, Ken Howard as an epileptic boy in a man’s body, and Robert Moore as a paraplegic gay man who bond together in a hospital and become roommates in a run-down little house after their release.

This was only Minnelli’s second film, her first was The Sterile Cuckoo, which netted her an Oscar nomination following the death of her mother, screen legend Judy Garland. In mourning during the filming, she hated working with Preminger who she called a bully, but whatever means he took to get there, he manages to get the best straight dramatic performance out of her, ever. None of her trademark quirks are there in this one.

Howard came to the production after his acclaimed Broadway role as Thomas Jefferson in the 1969 musical 1776. This was Moore’s first and only film as an actor. He would make more films as a director, most notably 1976’s Murder by Death.

The film has one of the most eclectic supporting casts of any film you can think of. James Coco, who would later work for Moore on Murder by Death, is the local fishmonger who befriends the trio and becomes their protector. Minnelli’s godmother, Kay Thompson (Funny Face), is the trio’s landlady. Former football star Fred Williamson (M*A*S*H) is a beach boy who helps them. Ben Piazza (The Hanging Tree) is the psycho date who pours battery acid on Minnelli, causing her disfigurement. Anne Revere (National Velvet), in her first film since being blacklisted twenty years earlier, is a friendly social worker who does what she can to help Moore and, by extension, the others as well.

Kino Lorber has released this long unavailable film on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Kino Lorber has also brought writer-director Brian Dannelly’s 2004 debut film, Saved!, to Blu-ray.

This is a much needed, hilarious send-up of religious hypocrisy in a Christian high school as exemplified by Mandy Moore as the leader of the Christian Jewels, a play on the Plastics in Mean Girls. Moore is intolerant and mean while the school’s pastor and principal, Martin Donovan, is portrayed as conflicted. He’s seen as well-meaning but wrong-headed. His main squeeze, Mary-Louise Parker, whom Dannelly later directed along with Donovan in TV’s Weeds, is equally confused, but comes around in the end.

Jena Malone is the film’s protagonist, Parker’s daughter and Moore’s friend until the two have a falling out over Moore’s bump-on-the-head inspiration from Jesus to sleep with her platonic boyfriend (Chad Faust) to allay his concerns that he may be gay. She doesn’t. He is. But her attempt leaves her pregnant while he is enrolled in one of those church-run programs meant to “cure” gays where he finds a boyfriend instead. Enter Malone’s new boyfriend, Patrick Fugit, who Moore also has her eyes on. Moore’s crippled brother, an excellent Macaulay Culkin, and his Jewish girlfriend (Eva Amurri) come to Malone’s aid against Moore who goes off the deep end before it all comes to a happy ending.

Malone (Into the Wild) was nominated for a Satellite Award for Best Actress in a Comedy, but Moore (A Walk to Remember) and Culkin (Home Alone) are equally impressive as is indeed the entire cast.

Extras imported from the old MGM DVD include two separate commentaries, one by Dannelly and producer Sandy Stern, and one by Malone and Moore.

Disney has reissued its 2012 35th Anniversary Blu-ray release of Pete’s Dragon in conjunction with the theatrical release of the remake.

I re-watched the film in light of the critically well-received remake, but still found it as cheesy as I did when it was first released. The best I can say about the film is that Sean Marshall, who plays Pete, was a wholesome child actor, while Helen Reddy makes a lovely lighthouse keeper’s daughter, and Mickey Rooney is not as grating as often could be, but the rest of the cast is so over-the-top ridiculous as to be totally cringe-worthy. Shelley Winters is particularly insufferable. I will say, though, that if they’re going to remake films, remaking one like this that misses the mark is a much better idea than remaking one that they got right the first or second time like Ben-Hur.

Recent Oscar winner Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl) voices fellow Swede Ingrid Bergman reading from her letters and diaries in Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words, an unusual Hollywood biography in that it is more about the private life of a legendary star than her fabled career. I’m not sure why this was released theatrically and has now been given a Criterion release with tons of extras when it’s really the kind of thing that is typically released as an extra itself to accompany one of its subject’s films.

What is different is that Bergman’s father was a painter and photographer and filmed her from an early age. Bergman herself took up the camera and filmed herself very effectively over the years. What emerges is basically Bergman’s love affair with the camera which is as forthright as the uncompromising actress was in other aspects of her life. One might think that her relationship with her four children was like that of the character she played in Autumn Sonata in which her daughter (Liv Ullmann) bitterly regrets her mother’s abandonment of her for her career. Not so with any of Bergman’s real-life children who were left to their other parent or nannies much of the time while Bergman pursued her career. They saw her as more of a friend than a mother. None of them will ever write a Mommie Dearest style exposé.

Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray releases of Woman in the Dunes and A Taste of Honey.