Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner was nominated for four 2014 Oscars for its Cinematography, Production Design, Costume Design and Score. BAFTA nominated it for four awards as well, substituting Make-up and Hair for Score. Neither body nominated Timothy Spall for his portrayal of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), England’s greatest landscape painter. Spall did start out awards season with two important wins, having captured both the New York Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics awards, but the days are long gone when winning those prestigious awards was automatic entry into the Oscar race.

Spall’s performance is splendid, but there isn’t a lot of dramatic heft to his story. The film’s mastery lies in its technical perfection which may be why he didn’t do well in the reminder of awards season. I personally rank him as the year’s fifth best actor behind Brendan Gleeson in Calvary, Michael Keaton in Birdman, Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game and Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler and well ahead of Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything.

The film is one of Leigh’s best, ranking up there with Secrets & Lies and Vera Drake, but unlike those largely improvised films, everything in this one appears to have been perfectly planned out.

Mr. Turner is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Ava DuVernay’s Selma came into awards season with great expectations. The late year release had been expected to be an awards magnet. It started out the season with some recognition for DuVarnay, lead actor David Oyelowo as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the film itself, but by the time the Oscar nominations came along it seemed lucky to get a Best Picture nomination along with an expected nod for Best Song. What went wrong?

It seems that most of the early positive reviews were from those least familiar with the time of the Selma marches. Seasoned critics and organizations were more critical of the film’s historical inaccuracies. Some, like me, were able to appreciate the film’s sweep and the grandeur of its “big” scenes while disparaging the callous disregard for accuracy in the dramatic scenes.

I don’t know whether it was DuVarnay or Cinematographer Bradford Young who was most responsible for the church bombing scene, other muted scenes of violence and the marches themselves, but those scenes were beautifully done. The dramatic scenes were not. King’s speeches are owned by Dreamworks, the studio that plans its own King biopic at some point, which meant that his famous published speeches had to be reinterpreted by the screenwriters, making them less momentous in the process. The big confrontation scene between Martin and Coretta Scott King never happened. She ignored rumors of his infidelity throughout their marriage and denied them for the remainder of her life after his assassination. Worst of all was the false playing of Lyndon Johnson as King’s enemy during the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Movement because the director didn’t want to make another movie in which a white man is the hero of a black man’s story. While this is certainly admirable, it was grossly misplaced in this instance. See the 1978 miniseries King with Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson for a more nuanced rendering of the subject.

Selma is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Mike Binder’s Black or White is the kind of family film audiences claim to want but don’t bother to go to see when one comes along.

The story of a white recently widowed grandfather and a black widowed grandmother fighting for custody of a mixed-race eight-year-old girl ends as upliftingly as you expect it to, but there are twists and turns that keep you interested in the family dynamics as the film plays out. Kevin Costner delivers his best performance in years and Octavia Spencer continues her winning streak of finely detailed characterizations. Jillian Estell as the girl and Mpho Kaoho as her math tutor stand out in key supporting roles.

Black or White is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film of E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey gives its intended female audience what it expects, a lot of talk about bondage sex, a little eroticism, a little spanking and a pouty heroine with enough gumption to keep the hope of romance with a seemingly disinterested 26-year-old billionaire alive.

Jamie Dornan’s Christian Grey may have the looks and money to attract just about any woman, but Dakota Johnson’s Anastasia Steele hardly seems worth the effort. The daughter of Melanie Griffith (Working Girl) and the granddaughter of Tippi Hedren (The Birds) seems to have inherited her grandmother’s cool standoffish personality rather than her mother’s warm come-hither one.

Fifty Shades of Grey unrated edition is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Time has been kind to Arthur Hiller’s 1984 film Teachers, which has been newly released on Blu-ray. What once played as satire now seems like a documentary about modern schools in which the teacher’s job is not to teach, but to pass kids through school. Nick Nolte stars as a teacher who cares. JoBeth Williams is his former student, now a lawyer suing the school for graduating a student who can’t get a job because he can neither read nor write. Allen Garfield is a teacher with a hidden conscience while Royal Dano plays one who is dead in his chair for several periods before anyone realizes he is no longer alive. Ralph Macchio, Crisipin Glover and Laura Dern are troubled students. Judd Hirsch is the Assistant Principal, Morgan Freeman the school’s lawyer and Lee Grant the School Superintendent. They’re all quite memorable.

Mill Creek Direct has released a Blu-ray of Luis Puenzo’s 1989 film, Old Gringo. A major flop in its day, 51-year-old Jane Fonda won a Razzie for her portrayal of a dewy-eyed virgin opposite 33-year-old Jimmy Smits as a general in Pancho Villa’s army. 72-year-old Gregory Peck plays journalist Ambrose Bierce upon whose disappearance the tale spins. Pedro Armandariz Jr. is Villa. This was the only English language film directed by Argentina’s Puenzo (The Official Story).

Speaking of Pancho Villa, Warner Archive has released Jack Conway’s 1934 film Viva Villa! on made-to-order DVD. It had long been hoped that an archive release would restore the six minutes of footage missing from the film since the 1980s, but the footage, containing the famous scene in which Wallace Beery whips Fay Wray in silhouette, couldn’t be found. Beery is Villa, Wray one of his conquests, Leo Carrillo his right-hand man and Stuart Erwin the reporter who chronicles his career as bandit/hero of Mexico.

This week’s new releases include Still Alice and the Blu-ray upgrade of Make Way for Tomorrow.