I’ve never been a big fan of films starring Saturday Night Live alumni including those of Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, but The Skeleton Twins, in which the two star, is worthy of exception. Winner of the newly named Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, this comedy-drama co-written by the film’s director Craig Johnson and Black Swan co-writer Mark Heyman, is one of the year’s nicest surprises.

Hader and Wiig play estranged twins who attempt suicide 3,000 miles apart, he in Los Angeles, she in New York. He is found clinging to life after slitting his wrists in his bathtub. She is about to swallow a bottle of pills when the phone rings. It’s his emergency room nurse telling her to come to Los Angeles. The out-of-work actor and the two-years-married housewife haven’t seen each other in ten years but still have that old familial bond. He comes back to New York to temporarily live with her and her husband, an amiable Luke Wilson. Complications ensue including her affair with her scuba instructor (Boyd Holbrook) and his reuniting with the former schoolteacher who seduced him at fifteen (Ty Burrell). They also have a tension-filled reunion with their mother from Hell (Joanna Gleason). As in real life, not all their problems are solved by the time they part company.

All the actors are first-rate, especially Hader and Wiig who both provide award-caliber performances.

The Skeleton Twins is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight may not be one of the celebrated writer-director’s biggest hits, but it is a thoroughly engaging little charmer about two natural enemies, a middle-aged magician and a young spiritualist who fall in love against the odds.

Colin Firth and Emma Stone are the protagonists while Hamish Linklater as Stone’s wealthy suitor, Jacki Weaver as Linklater’s mother, Marcia Gay Harden as Stone’s mother, and Eileen Atkins as Firth’s aunt provide solid support. What makes it extra special, though, are the film’s production values which brilliantly capture life on the French Riviera in the 1920s. The period score is a series of meticulously-picked gems including “You Do Something to Me”, “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”, “The Sheik of Araby”, “Who”, “Sweet Georgia Brown”, “It All Depends on You” and “I’ll Get By”.

Magic in the Moonlight is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

A high-adrenaline science fiction thriller, Joon-ho Bong’s Snowpiercer gives us a microcosm of society in a futuristic setting aboard a fast-moving train representing the sole survivors on Earth in 2031.

This is one of today’s rare all-star-cast films in which the principal actors all turn in memorable performances. Among them are Chris Evans, Jamie Bell, Ed Harris, John Hurt, Octavia Spencer and especially Tilda Swinton who is winning most of the year’s Best Supporting Actress awards that are not going to Patricia Arquette in Boyhood. It’s been quite a year for Swinton who also provided memorable performances in Only Lovers Left Alive and The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Snowpiercer is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow takes the premise of Groundhog Day and applies it to a science fiction scenario in which Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt die so many times it’s difficult to keep track of the number. Each death, though, brings them greater knowledge of how to deal with an alien force. What seems simplistic at first grows in interest as it moves along with Cruise turning in one of his best performances. It’s also quite funny in spots.

Bill Paxton and Brendan Gleeson have featured roles.

Edge of Tomorrow is available on 3D Blu-ray, 2D Blu-ray and standard DVD.

One of the myriad of young adult adventure novels that have been made into films lately, Wes Ball’s film of James Dashner’s The Maze Runner starts slowly but grows in interest as it deals with events that will be familiar to fans of such classic films as 1932’s The Most Dangerous Game and 1963’s Lord of the Flies, which thrilled both contemporaneous and successive generations.

The cast is headed by Dylan O’Brien and Will Poulter.

The Maze Runner is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Chloe Grace Moretz continues her rise to major stardom with another outstanding performance in the film version of yet another young adult novel, If I Stay.

Moretz plays a high school senior, a gifted cellist, whose life is literally put on hold when she is injured in an auto accident that also involves her parents and eight-year-old brother. She has an out-of-body experience in which she sees her own injured body on the side of the road while her parents’ and brother’s lives hang in the balance. One by one her family members succumb to their injuries forcing her to decide whether she wants to join them in the afterlife or stay and hopefully have a future with her rock band boyfriend.

Moretz’s father, Joshua Leonard, was a local rock musician who gave up his band and sold his guitar in order to buy his daughter the cello she longed for. Her mother, Marielle Enos, was a band groupie. Her boyfriend, Jamie Blackley, must decide between staying in Portland, Oregon with his band or take his chances in New York while Moretz studies at Julliard.

If I Stay is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

This week’s new releases include The Good Lie and Pride.