The opening scene of Tom Hanks in free-fall, his character’s son’s vision of the actor falling from the Twin Towers on 9/11 in Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is as unsettling an opening scene as any film in recent memory. Following scenes in which Hanks’ character is portrayed as “the perfect father” are no less unsettling. Compensation is provided by newcomer Thomas Horn’s compelling portrayal of the surviving son and Sandra Bullock as his newly widowed mother.

The boy, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, discovers a key in his father’s closet in an envelope marked “Brown” and obsessively sets out to find the lock it fits. His journey of discovery involves numerous characters including Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright and Oscar nominated Max Von Sydow. According to the IMDb., Von Sydow turned down the role in Beginners which went instead to his friend Christopher Plummer, who won the Oscar over Von Sydow. I’m not sure this is accurate as Beginners was first shown at the Toronto Film Festival in September, 2010 whereas Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was still filming a year later. It’s more likely Von Sydow turned down the role Plummer played in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo which filmed in Von Sydow’s native Sweden at the same time as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close filmed in New York, but it makes for a nice anecdote.

Blu-ray extras include the filmmaker’s commentary, a making-of documentary; a portrait of young Horn by his co-stars, another of Von Sydow by his son and a documentary on family members of victims killed on 9/11 ten years later.

The friendship and eventual conflict between the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and his best known disciple, Carl Jung, are explored in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. The problem is that the film does not explore the complex relationship between the two men nearly enough, concentrating instead on the relationship between Jung and hysterical patient Sabina Spielrein, who becomes his mistress and later a psychologist of renown in her own right. It’s a problem because top-billed Keira Knightley doesn’t fully convince as Spielrein whereas Michael Fassbender as Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Freud are at the top of their respective games.

The Blu-ray features commentary by Cronenberg.

For nearly forty years, Roy Ward Baker’s 1958 film, A Night to Remember, was the definitive screen version of the sinking of the Titanic. Coming five years after Jean Negulesco’s melodramatic Hollywood version with Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb, the British film seemed so much more realistic, mixing documentary style footage with taut, emotional moments leading to the ship’s inevitable doom.

The cast is headed by Kenneth More as the Second Officer and Laurence Naismith as the Captain, with many familiar faces in support, from thirties veterans Frank Lawton and Anthony Bushell to fifties stalwart John Merivale to sixties Bond girl Honor Blackman to seventies star Alec McCowen to the still working David McCallum.

Blu-ray extras include audio commentary by Titanic historians; a making-of documentary; a 1990 BBC interview with then 85 year-old survivor Eva Hart who died in 1996, and several other documentaries on the disaster.

The theatrical release of James Cameron’s 1997 Oscar winning Titanic in 3-D opens this week and Julian Fellowes’ 2012 mini-series will soon follow as we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the disaster. The DVD release of the latter is scheduled for April 24th.

The first time I saw Casablanca must have been half a century ago or so. For years I wondered what all the fuss was about. Then with the third or fourth viewing I got it. The film is filled with clichés, but they are such golden clichés that they seem like the prototype for all such films when actually they were composites of things that had been screen staples since at least the 1920s.

Popular in its day, the film’s 1943 Oscar win came as a surprise. The film didn’t reach its zenith of popularity until the early 1970s after a decade of TV airings and revival movie theatre exhibitions when Humphrey Bogart’s brand of cynicism became the norm. Ingrid Bergman’s third Oscar win for 1974’s Murder on the Orient Express can in part be attributed to the film’s enduring popularity. The film is also the hallmark of the careers of director Michael Curtiz and many of the supporting cast including Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall and Dooley Wilson.

A home video staple since the early days of VHS and Beta tape, it was one of the first releases in the new DVD format of the late 1990s and a Blu-ray best seller since 2008. What, then, could be the reason for upgrading to Warner Bros.’ new 70th Anniversary Limited Collector’s Edition. The answer is plenty, starting with the new film-like picture and clearer than ever sound of the startling new transfer. Even the standard DVD version improves on the 2008 Blu-ray release.

Extras include all those on the 2008 release as well as three feature length documentaries not available with any previous home video release of the film. They are You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story; The Brothers Warner and Jack L. Warner: The Last Mogul.

Frank Capra’s first major hit, 1933’s Lady for a Day, gets a spruced up Blu-ray release from the little known Inception Media Group.

Capra’s tale of Apple Annie, the old lady whose street vendor’s apples are a good luck charm for Dave the Dude in Damon Runyon’s tale is really Cinderella for oldsters. 75 year-old May Robson, the Australian born stage actress, was not, as Frank Capra, Jr. says in his commentary, unknown to film audiences. She had, in fact, been in films since 1916 and had even starred in the recent Mother’s Millions as well as having had major roles in such films as If I Had a Million and Strange Interlude. Her down-on-her-heels street vendor who gets a makeover would be, however, the film that made her a major Hollywood player and the film that brought her a Best Actress Oscar nomination.

The film, as expected, looks and sounds better than ever on Blu-ray. The commentary by Capra, Jr., who died in 2007, was recorded for a previous DVD release.

Robson’s last film, 1942’s Joan of Paris, has recently been released by Warner Archive. Robson plays a French resistance fighter in the film which stars Michele Morgan and Casablanca’s Paul Henreid and makes a good companion piece to that film.

Criterion’s David Lean Directs Noel Coward, available in both Blu-ray and standard DVD, is an important collection for several reasons. For starters, it marks the first availability on DVD in the U.S. for both In Which We Serve and This Happy Breed, both of which were given impressive restorations in Britain in 2008, and replaces, as well as improves upon, the long out-of-print Blithe Spirit, which had been selling for obscene amounts on E-bay.

Hired as editor on Lean’s epic war film, In Which We Serve, Coward promoted him to co-director to shoot the action sequences which he had neither the time nor desire to direct himself. Although Lean continued as editor, the screen credit for editing is given to his assistant, Thelma Myers, later Connell, who became a noted film editor of her own.

Three of the stars of In Which We Serve, Celia Johnson, John Mills and Kay Walsh (Lean’s then wife) have three of the four leads, along with Robert Newton, in the second Coward/Lean collaboration, This Happy Breed, for which Lean receives his first sole director credit. The story of a family and the house they live in between the two world wars is a poignant slice of British history and a rare non-epic of the day filmed in Technicolor. An immediate hit in the U.K., it was not released in the U.S. until 1947, after the enormous success of Brief Encounter, the fourth Coward/Lean collaboration.

In-between came Blithe Spirit, a bit of a flop in its day, but revered now in light of numerous stage productions that have enhanced its reputation. The film, made while Coward was in New York and unable to provide much input, is lighter than the stage version and its cynical ending is actually more suitable than the more cynical one coward employs in the stage version.

The one thing coward insisted on for the Technicolor film version was that Kay Hammond as the ghost of Rex Harrison’s first wife not be seen in the usual ghostly screen persona but presented in the garish green make-up the character wears on stage. The result is that she looks more like a ghoul than a ghost, but the lightness of the script makes it palatable. Constance Cummings as Harrison’s second wife and Margret Rutherford as the dotty medium add to the delight.

Based on Coward’s one act play, Still Life, Lean expands the simple story of a bored married woman (Celia Johnson) who has a liaison with a doctor (Trevor Howard) into Brief Encounter, the title of which may give away the film’s outcome, but not its many small pleasures. Johnson’s Oscar nominated performance was the highlight of her lengthy career.

The collection’s many extras include a delightful interview with Ronald Neame, Lean’s cinematographer on all four films, later a distinguished producer and director in his own right. The interview was recorded shortly before Neame’s death at 99 in 20010.

This week’s new DVD releases include the Oscar nominated War Horse and the long-awaited Blu-ray upgrade of Chinatown.