With rare exception, Al Pacino’s films since winning an Oscar for Scent of a Woman on his eighth nomination twenty-two years ago have been disappointing. Aside from his occasional TV work, nothing he’s done in the intervening years has put him in awards contention. His latest, Danny Collins, won’t do that either, but it’s a better than might be expected family drama in which he plays a Neil Diamond-style aging rock star.

Pacino’s opening number, “Hey Baby Doll,” resembles Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” so closely it might be considered a rip-off. His only other number, “Don’t Look Down,” is reminiscent of Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue”. All other songs are sung on the soundtrack by John Lennon.

On his unmentionable birthday (Pacino is 75), his manager (85-year-old Christopher Plummer) presents him with a letter he somehow never got which was sent to him in 1970 by Lennon. The letter, in which Lennon encourages the younger singer, has a profound effect on Pacino, who cancels his tour and goes in search the grown son (45-year-old Bobby Cannavale) he’s never met. Hotel manager Annette Bening (58), who is more age appropriate than most of the women Pacino had been bedding, proves to be his romantic match while Jennifer Garner (43) pretty much sticks to the house as Cannavale’s wife. Subplots include a difficult pregnancy and a possibly life-threatening disease, but since this is supposed to be a lighthearted comedy-drama, you know everything is going to turn out all right in the end.

Danny Collins is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Since her return to acting ten years ago, Jane Fonda has been struggling to find a role worthy of her talents. In her latest, This Is Where I Leave You, she almost does. Had the script been tighter with fewer boob and poop jokes, it might have actually had some class. As it stands, it’s worth a look, but not a keep unless you’re really fond of Fonda. She and the rest of the cast have all done better work.

The narrative is actually a good one. Fonda, playing the Christian widow of an atheistic Jewish man tells her four grown children that their father’s dying wish was that they sit shiva, the seven day Jewish mourning period, with her. It comes as no surprise that the father made no such wish, that it was really Fonda who wanted an excuse to have her children near. They are played by Jason Bateman, who has just caught his wife in bed with his boss; Tina Fey whose husband spends more time with his business than his family; Corey Stoll as the sensible older son; and Adam Driver as the younger son with questionable tastes including bringing home a fiancé old enough to be his mother. Complications ensue. Some of the relationships are sorted out while others are not with Fonda having the last laugh.

This Is Where I Leave You is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Criterion, which previously released Z on DVD but not Blu-ray, has now released the other two films in Costa-Gavaras’ late 1960s, early 1970s political trilogy, 1970’s The Confession and 1972’s State of Siege in both formats.

The Confession, unlike the other two films, is not heavy on action. Whereas all three films are based on real-life incidents, they all have different settings. Z takes place in early 1960s Greece and State of Siege in early 1970s Uruguay. The Confession begins in 1951 Czechoslovakia and ends there seventeen years later.

Yves Montand, who despite star billing in the title role in Z, was only on screen for twelve minutes, has a considerably larger role in The Confession in which he is on screen for most of the film as a Communist Undersecretary who is kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured and made to confess to crimes he didn’t commit as part of Stalin’s purge of intellectuals from the Czech wing of the party. Of the fourteen accused that stood trial in 1952, eleven were executed and three were given life sentences. Montand’s character, as we learn about halfway into the film, was one of the survivors. Urged by friends in France in 1965, where he and his family have relocated, to write a book about his ordeal, he refuses until he is assured by the new Czech regime that the book would be welcome in his home country. He returns to Czechoslovakia on the day the Soviets invade once again.

Simone Signoret, Montand’s real life wife, plays his perplexed screen wife in her customarily effective low key acting style. Although it doesn’t detract from the overall enjoyment of the film, it is nevertheless regrettable that her part wasn’t larger.

Montand plays an American in State of Siege. He’s an advisor to the Uruguayan government and the father of nine who is kidnapped, held for ransom and eventually killed by the leftist Tupamaros. Sympathies which would ordinarily fall to Montand’s character are compromised when he is revealed to be a CIA agent who had a hand in the torture of citizens in another South American country. Highly controversial at the time, the film was initially set to open the American Film Institute’s Washington D.C. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, but was successfully banned by the Center’s director, George Stevens Jr. after a protest led by Charlton Heston and others.

The film’s extras include an interview with 82-year-old Costa-Gavras conducted just two days after the attack on Charlie Hebron in which he states that unlike today’s fanatics, you could negotiate with the South American terrorists depicted in the film.

Renato Salvatore (Rocco and His Brothers) plays the leader of the kidnappers.

When the BBC canceled the highly popular British TV series Ripper Street after just two seasons, Amazon U.K. stepped in and financed a third season, successfully streamed on Amazon and later shown on BBC America. The third season was so popular, in fact, that Amazon U.K. has just given the go-ahead for two more seasons. Now available on Blu-ray and standard DVD, we now have a third way of catching up with the 1890s detectives who are still dealing with major crime in Whitechapel in the wake of Jack the Ripper. Matthew MacFayden, Jerome Flynn and Adam Rothenberg continue to bring the complex major characters, two British detectives and an American-born doctor, to life.

While we wait and wait and wait some more for Warner Bros. to bring the long-delayed release of the three theatrical versions of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat to Blu-ray, the San Francisco Opera Company has beat them to the punch with an excellent full-scaled 2-hour-and-24-minute production of the beloved 1927 musical as performed in 2014.

Heidi Sober, Michael Todd Simpson, Bill Irwin, Patricia Racette, Morris Robinson and Angela Renée Simpson may not be household names, but they do splendidly as Magnolia, Gaylord, Cap’n Andy, Julie, Joe and Queenie respectively.

San Francisco Opera’s Show Boat is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

This week’s new releases include Woman in Gold and Slow West.