Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows) and Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless) were two of five French film critics and friends published in the influential Cahiers du Cinema before becoming directors who changed the direction of French cinema in the late 1950s. Along with Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, their movement, known as the French New Wave, lasted between five and ten years depending on who you ask. By 1973 only Rohmer (My Night at Maud’s) was still making films true to the style. Godard, who is still making films in his mid-80s, had gone in one direction while Truffaut had gone in another. Godard’s films had become more and more esoteric while Truffaut’s had become more mainstream. By the time of Truffaut’s most successful film Day for Night, given a pristine Blu-ray upgrade by Criterion, Godard was accusing Truffaut of selling out, and Truffaut was accusing Godard of putting down other directors’ films to build up his own reputation. Godard thought films were all about making money. Truffaut thought they were about magic.

Day for Night is about the magic, a detailed exploration of the making of a film. The film within a film is not very good, but the making of it is fascinating. Truffaut plays the director, Jacqueline Bisset his star, Jean-Pierre Leaud her character’s young lover, and Jean-Pierre Aumont his father and her new lover. The film is stolen by Oscar nominee Valentina Cortese as the aging actress who keeps forgetting her lines. Extras include a fascinating documentary on the rift between Truffaut and Godard, the extent of which was not known until after Truffaut’s death in 1984 at 52 and the publication of his private papers.

Truffaut’s most acclaimed French New Wave film, Jules and Jim, has also been given a Blu-ray upgrade by Criterion. Based on Henri-Pierre Roché’s autobiographical novel, the film follows the decades-long relationship between an unlikely pair of friends, an introverted Austrian (Oskar Werner) and an extroverted Frenchman (Henri Serre), whose love of the arts draws them together in the years before World War I. Jeanne Moreau is the enigmatic woman they both love before and after the war, with their relationship taking many turns before it comes to a tragic end.

Extras include the usual fascinating documentaries and interviews Criterion is famous for.

Technically not a member of the French New Wave, but clearly influenced by it, Alain Resnais was a documentary filmmaker whose part-documentary, part-narrative 1959 film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, became one of the staples of the movement.

The first quarter of the film is devoted to an examination of the horrors faced by the survivors of the atomic bomb and the birth defects of children born to those survivors. The remainder of the film is devoted to an examination of the brief affair of a French actress (Emanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) in Hiroshima after the war. The chemistry between Riva (Amour) and Okada (Woman in the Dunes) burns the screen with its intensity.

Extras on Criterion’s new 4K digital restoration Blu-ray include commentary by film scholar Peter Cowie and archival interviews with Resnais who died last year at the age of 91.

Originally titled Night of the Eagle, the 1962 cult British horror film did better business in the U.S. where it was called. Burn, Witch, Burn. Featuring Peter Wyngarde as a college professor whose wife (Janet Blair) dabbles in magic, the film’s scares are primarily limited to the flight of a stone eagle that comes alive to attack the professor. Kino Lorber’s nicely done new Blu-ray includes an interview with Wyngarde who claims that Cary Grant, Alex Guinness and Peter O’Toole all wanted the part of the professor but were turned down by director Sidney Hayers who wanted Wyngarde based on his menacing performance in 1961’s The Innocents.

An eerie coincidence connected with the film occurred when Blair was called away from the scene in which she watches her house burn down to take a call from her children in Los Angeles informing her that her own house had just burned down.

Strand Releasing’s Blu-ray upgrade of 2001’s Psycho Beach Party features a witty audio commentary by director Robert Lee King and screenwriter Charles Busch who adapted his long-running satirical stage-play. Lauren Ambrose, Thomas Gibson, Amy Adams, Matt Keeslar and Busch in drag as a female detective head the multi-talented cast about a homicidal maniac stalking beachgoers in 1962.

Twilight Time has released a Blu-ray upgrade of Stanley Kramer’s 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner with commentary by film historians Eddy Friedfeld, Lee Pfeiffer and Paul Scrabo that probably won’t tell you anything you don’t already know about the film. In case you don’t, however, I’ll remind you that it was Sidney Poitier’s third box-office smash of the year following To Sir, With Love and In the Heat of the Night. It was also Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn’s last of nine films together, Tracy having died two weeks after completing the film. The film was nominated for ten Academy Awards including one for Tracy and another for Hepburn. Hepburn, arguably giving her least demanding Oscar-nominated performance, won her second Oscar on her tenth nomination, her first since Morning Glory in 1933. She would go on to win a third and fourth on her eleventh and twelfth nominations for The Lion in Winter and On Golden Pond.

The film’s narrative is a simple one. An attractive young white woman (Hepburn’s real-life niece, Katharine Houghton) brings home a famous black doctor (Poitier) she met on vacation and announces to her parents (Hepburn and Tracy) that they will be getting married. Poitier, unbeknownst to Houghton, tells Tracy that they will only marry if he (Tracy) approves. Director Kramer and screenwriter William Rose would be pleased to know that the film barely merits little more than a shrug from today’s audiences. At the time, though, interracial marriage was still illegal in 16 states. The film stacks the deck quite a bit by casting saintly Poitier as the doctor. No one but a bigot would object to their daughter marrying him. That, of course, was the point.

The film features sterling supporting work from Roy S. Glenn and Oscar-nominated Beah Richards as Poitier’s parents; Oscar-nominated veteran character actor Cecil Kellaway as a priest right out of Going My Way; and soon-to-be-major TV star Isabel Sanford as Hepburn and Tracy’s wisecracking maid.

This week’s new releases include Two Days, One Night and the Blu-ray upgrade of The World According to Garp.