Listed among the top ten independent films of 2025 by the National Board of Review, Max Walker-Silverman’s Rebuilding has been released on Blu-ray by Bleeker Street.

The film is set in a FEMA camp set up in the wake of the San Luis Valley wildfires of 2018. The valley runs through Colorado and New Mexico. The film is set in Colorado where a young, recently divorced farmer, played by Josh O’Connor, has lost everything.

After selling his surviving cattle at auction for $5,000 which he will need to start rebuilding his life, he is given access to a small trailer in a FEMA camp along with four other such occupied trailers.

At first, forlorn O’Connor doesn’t want to have anything to do with his equally down on their luck neighbors, coming and going instead to the nearby town where his ex-wife (Meghann Fahy) and 12-year-old daughter (Lily LaTorre) are staying with his cancer stricken former mother-in-law played by Amy Madigan. Slowly, he develops a fondness for his neighbors including Independent Spirit Award nominee Kali Reis whose husband disappeared in the fires.

Nothing momentous happens in the film, but it is a sweet character study with a bittersweet ending that will leave you rooting for the wonderful characters.

O’Connor won several awards for his 2005 body of work which included his performances in this,
The Mastermind, The History of Sound, and Wake Up Dead Man.

Warner Archive has newly released five classic films from 1934-1956 on Blu-ray. They are 1934’s The Gay Divorcee, 1940’s It All Came True, 1941’s Honky Tonk and The Man Who Came to Dinner, and 1956’s Tea and Sympathy.

Directed by Mark Sandrich, The Gay Divorcee was the second pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers who stole 1933’s Flying Down to Rio from stars Gene Raymond and Dolores Del Rio and the first in a string of successes through 1939.

Based on a 1932 Cole Porter musical titled Gay Divorce starring Astaire and Claire Luce, the newly enforced Production Code would not allow such a frivolous title but had no problem with adding an “e” to “divorce” and making it about a frivolous character rather than trivializing divorce in general.

The film is as much a screwball comedy as it is a musical which retains just one of Porter’s songs, the beloved “Night and Day”. The films’ other songs were newly written for the film by other composers including the first Oscar winner for Best Song, the 17 and a half-minute long “The Continental”. The suburb farceurs supporting Astaire & Rogers include Alice Brady, Edward Everett Horton, and from the Broadway cast, Erik Rhodes and Eric Blore.

This is just the second of the ten films Astaire and Rogers made together to be given a Blu-ray release following Criterion’s release of 1936’s Swing Time

Directed by Lewis Seiler, It All Came True is a showcase for Ann Sheridan as a failed Broadway star who returns to the boarding house where she was raised alongside Jeffrey Lynn who returns at the same time along with his boss, criminal Humphrey Bogart who needs to hide out after a gang killing.

The three stars are all good but it’s the film’s supporting cast that takes it above and beyond the material. The boarding house is co-owned by Una O’Connor as Sheridan’s no-nonsense mother and Jessie Busley as Lynn’s see-no-evil mother. Tthey are both delightful, especially the always reliable O’Connor. Their tenants include Zasu Pitts as a man-hungry spinster and Felix Bressart as former vaudeville star.

Directed by Jack Conway, Honky Tonk was a box-office smash featuring the first pairing of Clark Gable and Lana Turner in a western setting with Gable as a fast-talking con man and Turner as his Boston-bred wife. Its strong supporting cast is led by Frank Morgan as Turner’s father, a retired judge, and Claire Trevor as dance hall hostess with whom Gable has crossed paths before.

It may be standard fare but the film’s star power lifts it above the mundane.

Directed by William Keighley, The Man Who Came to Dinner, is based on the smash hit Broadway play that made a star of Monty Woolley.

The play has no name players. Veteran Woolley in the title role became an overnight sensation but still wasn’t a name that could carry an expensive picture so Warner Bros. cast Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan in supporting roles and gave them billing over Woolley. It worked. The film was an even bigger hit than the play.

Woolley’s character, Sheridan Whiteside, is based on flamboyant theatre critic Alexander Woolcott. In the play, written by Philip Kaufman and Moss Hart, Whiteside slips and falls at the home of an Ohio couple played in the film by Grant Mitchell and Billie Burke, and can’t be moved until he is able to walk. Julius Epstein’s screenplay replaces theatre references with film references that everyone at the time knew. Mary Wickes is the only other cast member transferring from Broadway in her film debut. Davis plays Wooley’s secretary. Sheridan plays a thinly disguised version of Getrude Lawrence and Reginald Gardiner plays an equally thinly disguised version of Nolel Coward. Jimmy Durante plays a fictionalized version of himself.

The film is still fun after all these years. Stage versions of the play are still being performed.

Directed by Vincente Minnelli, Tea and Sympathy is the film version of Robert Anderson’s 1953 Broadway hit that starred Deborah Kerr as a boy’s prep school den mother and John Kerr (no relation) as a sensitive student she takes under her wing. Leif Erickson who played Kerr’s insensitive husband, the school’s football coach, on Broadway, also reprises his stage role. Edward Andrews as the boy’s equally insensitive father, Darryl Hickman as his roommate, and Norma Crane as the local floozie lead a stellar supporting cast.

John Kerr won a Tony for his performance. Deborah Kerr lost to Audrey Hepburn in Ondine. They were succeeded on Broadway by Joan Fontaine and Anthony Perkins. Ingrid Bergman played the female lead in a Paris production. Bergman won the 1956 Oscar for Best Actress for Anastasia. Perkins was nominated for his role in Friendly Persuasion and Deborah Kerr was nominated that year for The King and I. John Kerr was ignored altogether.

The film, like the play, was supposed to end with Deborah Kerr seducing John Kerr but the censors insisted on a ridiculous coda in which she writes a letter telling him that what she did was wrong. It would be eight years before older woman Anne Bancroft’s seduction of student Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate would get past the censors without complaint.

Happy viewing.