Three classics from the 1970s through the 1990s have just been released on 4K Ultra HD while a fourth, recently given a 4K restoration, has been newly released on standard Blu-ray.

Nominated for 14 Oscars, tying All About Eve’s then 47-year-old record, winning 11, tying Ben-Hur’s then 38-year-old record, James Cameron’s 1997 film, Titanic, also became the highest grossing film of all-time, a record it held until Cameron’s 2009 film, Avatar, eclipsed it.

The lead characters played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are fictional, but many of the subsidiary characters, including Molly Brown played by Kathy Bates, are not. The scenes set in 1912, which comprise most of the three-hour-plus film, have a total length of two hours and forty minutes, the exact time it took for Titanic to sink. The collision with the iceberg reportedly lasted 37 seconds, which is how long the collision scene is in the movie.

1930s star Gloria Stuart (The Invisible Man, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm) was cast by Cameron to play Winslet’s character at 100 after he rediscovered her doing commentary on the DVD release of The Old Dark House. At 87, she became the oldest actress nominated for an Oscar, surpassing both Eva Le Gallienne and Jesica Tandy who were 82 when they were nominated for Resurrection and Fried Green Tomatoes, respectively. She lived to be 100 in real life, dying later that year.

Although the film catapulted the careers of both Winslet and DiCaprio, neither much cared for their performances in the film. Winslet, who was Oscar nominated for hers, thought her American accent was horrible, and DiCaprio thought his character was too much of a young punk. Winslet has also said that she hates the film’s Oscar-winning theme song, “My Heart Will God On.” No one, however, complains about the film’s technological accomplishments. Every one of the two hundred million dollars spent on the film is visible on screen.

Extras on Paramount’s 4K UHD release include 16 hours of bonus content including a new documentary on the making of the film, as well as interviews with Cameron, Winslet, and others. The film itself includes five separate commentaries.

Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple, was nominated for 11 Oscars, losing all of them, tying the record previously set by Herbert Ross’s 1977 film, The Turning Point. Even more shockingly, Spielberg was not nominated for Best Director.

Criticized by critics at the time for being too colorful in its telling of what was essentially a study of the depressing lives of a group of African American women over a forty-year period, the film nevertheless gave us three extraordinary performances by Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Margaret Avery. Goldberg and Winfrey, making their film debuts, performed their roles as though they had been acting their entire lives.
Goldberg was the central character, Celie, a woman who was raped as a teenager by her widowed father who took her babies away, then sold her to an abusive husband she called Mister who, after the attempted rape of her younger sister, sent the young girl away. Winfrey played Sofia, the take-no-prisoners wife of Mister’s son from his first marriage. Avery played Shug, Mister’s sometime girlfriend.

Celie’s struggle to find her identity is long in coming but is rewarded in the film’s highly emotional ending.

The film made huge stars of both Goldberg and Winfrey. It became a Broadway musical in 2005, and again in 2015, the film version of which will be released on Christmas Day.

Warner Bros.’ 4K UHD release includes extras from previous releases.

Nominated for 4 Oscars and winner of 1 for Néstor Almendros’ cinematography, Terrence Malick’s 1978 film, Days of Heaven, took three years to make, one year to film, and two for Malick to edit it.

The story of a hot-tempered farmhand (Richard Gere) who convinces his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) to marry their dying employer (Sam Shepard) so that she can inherit his fortune, was so exhausting for the director that it took him twenty years to find the energy to direct his next film, 1998’s The Thin Red Line.

Concerned that the straight story telling was incoherent, Malick threw out much of the filmed dialogue and replaced it with narration by teenaged Linda Manz as Gere’s little sister. The change worked so well that Malick has relied heavily on narration in all his subsequent films.

Gere filmed this before Richard Brooks’ 1977 film, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which made him a major star but wasn’t released until a year after Goodbar because of all the production delays.

The Criterion Collection’s 4K UHD release imports extras from Criterion’s original Blu-ray release of the film.

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay by writer-director Bernardo Bertolucci, his 1970 film The Conformist, released in the U.S. in 1971, fared better with the National Society of Film Critics which gave it their awards for Best Director and Best Cinematography for Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now). NSFC also nominated it for Best Film, Actor (Jean-Louis Trintignant), Actress (Dominque Sanda), and Supporting Actress (Stefania Sandrelli).

Trintignant plays the title role, a member of the secret police in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, who is ordered to go to Paris to assassinate his former professor, now a political dissident. Sandrelli is his lamebrained wife and Sanda is a former prostitute now married to the professor that Trintignant knew in her previous occupation and falls in love with all over again while playing cat and mouse with the professor. Will he carry out his assignment?

The film was Bertolucci’s international breakthrough, leading to Oscar nominations for 1972’s Last Tango in Paris and wins for 1987’s The Last Emperor.

The Kino Lorber Blu-ray contains two discs, one presenting the newly restored version and the other presenting the 2011 restoration for comparison. Audio is available in both Italian and English on both discs. Extras are also included on both.

Happy viewing.