Criterion has released a Blu-ray upgrade of Stephen Frears’ breakthrough film My Beautiful Laundrette. Although Frears had made his feature film debut with Gumshoe in 1971, his interim career had been spent mostly on British TV with only the 1984 British noir The Hit making it to the big screen.

Later renowned for Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, The Queen, and Philomena, My Beautiful Laundrette, like his later films, provided star power in a riveting social drama. In this case, the star was the soon to be legendary Daniel Day-Lewis, the social drama – class warfare, immigration issues, racial prejudice and homophobia.

The film centers on the ambitions of a British-born Pakistani (Gordon Warnecke) who sees a chance to get ahead when he takes over the running of one of his wealthy uncle’s (Saeed Jaffrey) laundromats or launderettes as they are called in the U.K. Roshan Seth plays Warnecke’s sickly father who would rather see his son get an education. Day-Lewis plays Warnecke’s childhood friend, now his employee and lover. Shirley Anne Field (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) has the fifth major role as Jaffrey’s long-time mistress. All five stars are excellent, but Day-Lewis is a revelation in the complete opposite of the role he played in the simultaneously released A Room With a View. Groundbreaking in its day, it’s still enjoyable today sans the urgency of its message.

Twilight Time has stepped up the pace of its Blu-ray upgrades of previously released DVDs. The boutique label’s July releases include five strong releases.

Robert Benton’s 1984 film Places in the Heart earned Benton his third Oscar and star Sally Field her second. They had previously taken home Oscars for 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer and Norma Rae respectively. Benton had won then for Best Picture and Director, this time he won for Best Original Screenplay based on his childhood remembrances of life in a Depression era Texas town. Field won her second Best Actress Oscar for playing an embattled farmwoman, besting two other former winners playing similar roles, Jessica Lange in Country and Sissy Spacek in The River.

Playing a character based on Benton’s grandmother, Field is at her most winning taking on the local banker and cotton buyer as well as the land and the weather. Danny Glover as an itinerant handyman and Oscar-nominated John Malkovich as a blind boarder both give unforgettable performances in the film’s key supporting roles. Oscar nominated Lindsay Crouse as Field’s sister carries the secondary plot which also involves Ed Harris as her philandering husband, Amy Madigan as the local schoolteacher and Terry O’Quinn as Madigan’s cuckolded husband. As per Field on the film’s revealing commentary, none of the actors wanted to take part in the film’s unusual ending which Benton said he wouldn’t use if it didn’t work. Despite their misgivings, it not only works it elevates the film to a higher plane than it would have been without it.

Real life brothers Jeff and Beau Bridges play piano-playing brothers who have been performing together in small clubs for 31 years in Steve Kloves’ The Fabulous Baker Boys. To add some spice to their act they hire singer Michelle Pfeiffer who unintentionally drives a wedge between the two. Both brothers are excellent with Beau earning the majority of the accolades including a Best Supporting Actor award from the National Society of Film Critics. The standout performance, however, was Pfeiffer’s as evidenced by her slew of awards including an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Her slow burn rendering of “Making Whoopee” is the film’s highlight.

Pat O’Connor’s 1987 film A Month in the Country received excellent notices when released theatrically in 1988 but has been largely ignored since then. The director of Cal and Dancing at Lughnasa won the Silver Rosa Camuna at the 1987 Bergamo Film Meeting for the film which starred Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh as emotionally scarred World War I veterans who are healed through their involvement in carrying out the wishes of a recently deceased old lady’s bequests to her church. Firth must restore a covered up painting, Branagh must find the grave of one of the old lady’s ancestors. Both endeavors reveal secrets that are inexorably linked. Natasha Richardson plays the wife of the local minister with feelings for Firth. All three stars give strong indications of the major talents they were soon to become.

A major box office success in 1964, George Roy Hill’s The World of Henry Orient focuses on teenagers Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth who spend their free time making life hell for playboy pianist Peter Sellers whose conquests include Paula Prentiss and Walker’s mother, Angela Lansbury. Tom Bosley is her milquetoast stepfather and Phyllis Thaxter is Spaeth’s widowed mother. It was nicely filmed in then-contemporary Manhattan.

Manhattan of five years earlier was the location of Jean Negulesco’s The Best of Everything, a superficial exploration of working girls in a publishing house. Hope Lange, Suzy Parker, Diane Baker, Stephen Boyd and Joan Crawford have the principal roles. The story isn’t much, but the actors acquit themselves well enough in the film version of what was a very popular novel of the day.

2015 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mario Monicelli, the prolific Italian director who passed in 2010 at the age of 95, having made his first film at 19 and his last at 91. In honor of his centennial, I recommend catching up on three of his films available for a while now on DVD, two of them on Blu-ray.

Nominated for Best Foreign Film of 1958, Big Deal on Madonna Street is a classic comedy about a bungled burglary that skewered the likes of The Asphalt Jungle and Rififi. No longer would caper films be taken quite as seriously. The cast was headed by Vittorio Gassman, Renato Salvatore, Marcello Mastroianni, Toto, and featured Claudia Cardinale. Released by Criterion in 2003, the film is available on standard DVD only.

Nominated for Best Foreign Film, 1964’s The Organizer also earned Monicelli a nomination for Best Screenplay. Based on the real-life turn-of-the-century textile workers strike over working hours, the film compares favorably to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley in tone, style and subject matter right down to its heartbreaking climax. Marcello Mastroianni and Renato Salvatori are also in this one but the standout is Franco Ciolli as the illiterate 12-year-old factory worker who struggles to save his 9-year-old brother from the same fate. Released by Criterion in 2014, the film is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Monicelli was again nominated for Best Screenplay for 1965’s Casanova ‘70 in which Marcello Mastroianni plays a lothario who needs danger for an aphrodisiac. Virna Lisi co-stars. It plays better than it sounds thanks to the witty screenplay and Mastroianni’s expert acting. Released by Kino Lorber in 2011, the film is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

This week’s new releases include Water Diviner and Home.