Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s multiple Oscar winner, Birdman, is an unusual take on show business. Filmed in what appears to be a single take, the film follows a washed up movie star (Michael Keaton) leading up to and during his Broadway debut in a dramatization of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”.

Keaton, who was famously Batman in 1989’s Batman and 1992’s Batman Returns plays a character whose most famous role was a similar action hero, the titled Birdman. The actor he plays is in the midst of a nervous breakdown with his fictitious character becoming more and more real to him as the film progresses. The film can be taken either as a straight drama with comic overtones or as a very dark comedy. It also has one of the best ensemble casts working seamlessly together in a very long time. Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Zach Galifianakis, Naomi Watts, Amy Ryan and Andrea Riseborough are all excellent in their own right.

Birdman is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

I love a good biography as much as the next person, but James Marsh’s The Theory of Everything, the biography of Stephen Hawking, left me cold. It may be that Marsh, who is best known as a documentary filmmaker, was the wrong director for the project. For one, he uses too may musical montages that either drown out or cover up the lack of dialogue. For another, although the film is about a great scientist, very little time is spent on scientific thought and research. The film’s central love story is not always convincing. Felicity Jones who plays Jane Hawking seems to me to have more chemistry with Charlie Cox who plays the choir director with whom she supposedly had an arms-distance relationship until he becomes her second husband after she is jilted by Hawking. As Hawking, Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne does a perfect impersonation of Hawking, but to me it’s more an imitation of life than the real thing.

The Theory of Everything is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Theodore (Ted) Melfi’s St. Vincent is a welcome surprise. The year-end comedy release received numerous awards recognition for its four stars. Bill Murray and Melissa McCarthy were nominated for Golden Globes, Naomi Watts for a SAG award and Jaeden Lieberher for numerous juvenile performance awards.

Murray has his best role in years as an unregenerate alcoholic and gambler who babysits impressionable Lieberher after school. McCarthy, eschewing her usual schtick, is Libnerher’s hard-working single mother, essentially a straight man for Murray. Watts, in a very funny performance, is a pregnant Russian “lady of the night” with a carefully concealed heart of gold. The comedy, the drama and the schmaltz are all nicely blended in one of last year’s genuinely funny comedies.

St. Vincent is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Hilary Swank, who won Oscars for Boys Don’t Cry and Million Dollar Baby, gives a performance in Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman that is worthy of a third. Her lack of traction is this year’s awards races is probably attributable to the film’s lack of strong box-office and the fact that most of her films outside of her previous award-winning ones have been largely disappointing, but it’s been ten and fifteen years since she won those previous Oscars. Are they going to make her sit out future awards shows for the rest of her life for having the audacity to seemingly come out of nowhere to win twice in a six-year period?

Swank plays a plain, somewhat bossy, no-nonsense frontierswoman who takes on what was considered a man’s job, the transport of three mentally ill married women back East to be turned over to their birth families for their future care. Along the way she helps to redeem alcoholic claim-jumper Jones who becomes her reluctant assistant on the trip. The trip, however, is a hazardous one that doesn’t end happily for all concerned. As in real life, bad things can happen to good people including the hungry baby at the beginning of the film who is thrown to his death head-first down the hole in the outhouse by his crazed mother. Two later scenes top that one for outright sadness and horror and the film ends on a truly sorrowful note, but it’s well worth the journey.

Grace Gummer (Meryl Streep’s daughter), Maria Otto and Sonja Richter are excellent as the three crazy ladies. James Spader, Hailee Steinfeld and Streep herself have cameos.

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

One of 2014’s most acclaimed foreign language films, Sweden’s Force Majeure, is supposed to be a comedy, but there’s nothing funny about a movie in which the father runs from what appears to be an oncoming avalanche, leaving his wife and children behind. That’s not the whole movie, but it’s the bone of contention that drives a wedge between the husband and wife that is only resolved when he later rescues her when she is lost in the snow while the family is out skiing.

There is one particularly frightening scene in the gorgeously shot film when a bus driver who can’t drive properly almost crashes his bus going downhill on a swerving mountain. If that’s meant to be funny, it isn’t. The film, however, should be seen for its gorgeous cinematography and flawless acting by a cast I’m totally unfamiliar with. I know nothing of director Ruben Ostlund’s other works to know whether the film is typical of his output or not.

Force Majeure is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Roger Ebert was an influential film critic from his first reviews in the Chicago Sun-Times in 1967, but it was TV that gave him his greatest exposure, first with the PBS show Sneak Previews (1975-1982) in which he and co-host Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune would give thumbs up or down to the week’s new releases. The bickering duo later created the syndicated At the Movies beginning in 1982. That show lasted through several iterations until Siskel’s death from brain cancer in 1999, his condition kept from Ebert and the Disney organization which was then the show’s producer. The show continued with Ebert and a series of co-hosts for several more years. Vowing not to keep his own impending death from his fans, Ebert went public with his gruesome health problems from 2002 on, his eleven year battle with cancer ending with his death in 2013. The new documentary Life Itself with the catch-phrase, “the only thing Roger loved more than the movies,” chronicles his last battle with the disease and looks back on his extraordinary life, warts and all. CNN, which produced the film, recently aired an edited version. The new Blu-ray/standard DVD release features the complete award-winning documentary.

This week’s new releases include Whiplash and Big Hero 6.