Four new 4K Blu-ray releases from four different companies and a Blu-ray compilation of a mystery series from a poverty row studio show that home video releases are far from drying up.

The Criterion Collection has released a restored version of Jean Renoir’s once dismissed 1939 classic The Rules of the Game. MVD has released a restored version of Barry Levinson’s 1988 Oscar winner Rain Man. Paramount has released a remastered version of Sydney Pollack’s 1993 smash hit The Firm, and Kino Lorber has released a restored version of John Frankenheimer’s 1962 prophetic masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate as well as the Boris Karloff Mr. Wong Collection from 1939-1940.

Jean Renoir was at the height of his career in 1939 following the back-to-back successes of Grand Illusion and La Bete Humaine. His next film, a comedy of manners that takes place over a weekend at a country chateau called The Rules of the Game, was highly anticipated.

Renoir, who produced the film as well as directing and starring in it, sold the distribution rights to Gaumont, the premier French film company. When Renoir’s first cut came in at nearly three hours, Gaumont demanded that he cut it, suggesting that he scrap his entire performance. That he refused to do, but he did cut out much of it, coming in at 113 minutes. Still not happy, Gaumont had him make further cuts. The film premiered on a Friday in July at 94 minutes. Audience revulsion and scathing reviews forced Renoir to cut an additional 13 minutes over the weekend. That was the version that survived until 1959 when it was restored to 106 minutes.

Although the film is a comedy, it was clear to the mostly high society audience at the premiere that it was a rebuke of their lifestyle. One man in the audience started a fire intent on burning the theatre down. Poor attendance closed the film after just three weeks. In October, it was banned by the wartime French government as having an undesirable influence over the young.

The film’s negative was lost but a print of the film survived, and the film opened in New York in 1950 to mixed reviews. Its supporters, however, were strong enough to get the film placed on the British Film Institute’s first Sight & Sound Poll in 1952 as one of the ten greatest films ever made. The restored version kept it on the list, which is compiled once every ten years through 2012.

Extras on the criterion release include a side-by-side comparison of the two versions.

Barry Levinson’s Rain Man was nominated for 8 Oscars and won 4 for Best Picture, Director, Actor (Dustin Hoffman), and Screenplay. Based on the life of a real autistic savant, both Hoffman as the savant and Tom Cruise as his initially conniving newfound brother, deliver stellar performances that resonated emotionally with audiences of the day.

Although both actors give stellar performances, it’s Hoffman who received the lion’s share of awards. Already celebrated for such films as The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man, Lenny, All the President’s Men, Marathon Man, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Tootsie, he was easily considered the more accomplished actor. Cruise, who two years earlier superbly supported Paul Newman in his Oscar-winning role in The Color of Money, would have to wait until the following year to receive his first Oscar nod for Born on the Fourth of July, but he is every bit Hoffman’s equal in this.

The two-disc set includes numerous extras on the standard Blu-ray second disc.

Sydney Pollack’s The Firm, still the best film made from a John Grisham novel, gave Cruise another standout role as the young lawyer in over his head in a den of mob-controlled lawyers. He is ably supported by Jeanne Tripplehorn, Gene Hackman, Hal Holbrook, Ed Harris, David Strathairn, and Holly Hunter in a hilarious Oscar-nominated performance.

This is a movie-only 4K release from Paramount.

John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate looks the best of all four of these films, gloriously restored to look better than it has since its premiere 61 years ago.

Incredibly, the film received just two Oscar nominations, one for its editing and the other for Angela Lansbury’s film-career-high portrayal of one of the most venal female characters ever put on film. If you only know Lansbury from Murder, She Wrote and the Broadway versions of Mame and Sweeney Todd, you really don’t know her.

Frank Sinatra has the nominal lead as an Army intelligence officer, but it is Laurence Harvey as a brainwashed Korean War vet and Lansbury as his politically ambitious mother who are the standouts. Janet Leigh, who is billed over the title with Sinatra and Harvey, is wasted in what is really a minor role as Sinatra’s girlfriend. Lansbury should have gotten her billing. The inferior 2004 remake at least got the billing right – Denzel Washington in Sinatra’s role, Meryl Streep in Lansbury’s, and Live Schreiber in Harvey’s were given over the title billing in that one.

Kino Lorber’s extras discs imports most of the material from previous home video releases.

Attempting to cash in on 20th Century-Fox’s lucrative second feature market with their Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto Asian detectives, poverty row Monogram Studios came up with Mr. Wong, a vehicle for Boris Karloff.

The market for horror films had temporarily dried up in the late 1930s and Karloff was looking to change his image anyway. What better way to do that than follow in the footsteps of Warner Oland and Sidney Toler as Chinese Charlie Chan and Peter Lorre as Japanese Mr. Moto?

Karloff played the urbane San Francisco detective in five of the six Mr. Wong films. He was succeeded by Keye Luke, Charlie Chan’s number one son, the first Chinese-American actor to play a Chinese-American detective in the sixth film. Alas, Kino Lorber’s set only includes the Karloff films, all of which are tight little mysteries. They are Mr. Wong, Detective, The Mystery of Mr. Wong, Mr. Wong in Chinatown, The Fatal Hour, and Doomed to Die aka Mystery of the Wentworth Castle.

The only extra is the insightful commentary on the first film by film historians Tom Weaver and Larry Blamire which discusses the entire series and its place in film history.

Happy viewing.