Rumor has it that Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s When Marnie Was There will be Studio Ghibli’s last theatrical release. If so, the Japanese animation giant will have gone out in grand style. Yonebayashi was a long-time collaborator of Hayao Miyazaki, having worked on Spirited Away and other classics, acting as key animator on such films as Howl’s Moving Castle and finally coming into his own as director of The Secret World of Arrietty. With When Marnie Was There he surpasses all his previous achievements.

This beautifully drawn masterpiece looks in on the summer of an awkward 12-year-old Japanese girl, gangly and out of place with her blue eyes (voiced in the U.S. release version by Hailee Steinfeld). Suffering from melancholia, young Anna is sent to the country for the summer by her loving if equally misunderstood foster mother (Geena Davis). There she forms an unlikely friendship with a young Eurasian girl with long flowing blonde hair (Kiernan Shipka). Is she an imaginary friend, a ghost or what? An elderly artist (Vanessa Williams) holds the key.

There are also nicely drawn (both figuratively and literally) characters voiced by John C. Reilly and Grey Griffin as Anna’s warm-hearted country hosts, Raini Rodriguez as a popular if somewhat bratty girl Anna’s age, Kathy Bates as Raini’s no-nonsense mother, Ava Acres as the new girl in Marnie’s house, Ellen Burstyn as Marnie’s mean grandmother, and Catherine O’Hara as a nice old lady near the film’s end.

When Marnie Was There is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon began his career as a personal assistant to Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and other film giants. After a career mostly in TV, his second film as director, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, from Jesse Andrews’ novel, puts him in the big time.

The film is an uneasy mix of comedy and drama in which the protagonist/narrator Greg (Thomas Mann) keeps saying that the dying girl his mother coerces him into befriending isn’t going to actually die. The girl, Rachel, sensitively played by Olivia Cole, is of course going to die, but unbeknownst to him she does something that will make her live in his heart forever.

The comic elements are mostly filler, but the film soars to dramatic heights as it reaches its climax with the completion of the amateur film Greg and his friend Earl have made for Rachel and the discoveries that Greg makes about her after her death. This is one of the better young adult novels to reach the screen.

Blu-ray and DVD extras include an insightful 30-minute conversation between Gomez-Rejon and Scorsese who talks about his being fired from his early films including Woodstock on which he was an editor and The Honeymoon Killers on which he admits he was wrong to have tried to interject his own flourishes.

Last year, the film version of Gillian Flynn’s overrated Gone Girl was a major box-office hit and awards magnet, but this year’s release of Dark Places is already out on Blu-ray and DVD just two months after its theatrical release. It’s a shame because Dark Palces is a much better film.

The villain in Gone Girl was obvious from the start, but the villains in Dark Places are a lot harder to figure out, as they should be in a thriller..

Charlize Theron stars as a woman in her late thirties whose testimony as a child twenty-eight years earlier led to the conviction of her older brother (Tye Sheridan as a teenager, Corey Stoll as a middle-aged man) for the murder of their mother (Christina Hendricks) and their sisters. Nicholas Hoult is the young sleuth who gets Theron to jog her memory and help find the real killer or killers. Chloe Grace Moretz is Sheridan’s pregnant girlfriend.

Dark Places is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

I can’t say that Magic Mike XXL is a bad film; it’s just not much of anything. The story is trite, the dialogue is gibberish, and the dancing is at best okay. Director Gregory Jacobs has been working in films since the early 1990s, mostly as an assistant or second assistant director. That’s what the film resembles, second unit work with the main story off somewhere else.

Channing Tatum’s stripper dude is just not very interesting this time around. Joe Maganiello, Matt Bomer and Adam Rodrigues have their moments, but nothing really comes of them. Better luck next time, guys.

Magic Mike XXL is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film My Own Private Idaho is thematically halfway between 1969’s Midnight Cowboy and 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, bridging the gap quite nicely as it follows the exploits of two street hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves), one of whom suffers from narcolepsy.

Phoenix is the one who falls asleep at the oddest of times and wakes up in a different place most of the time. Who is it that carries him from Seattle to Portland or rescues him from the interstate highway in Idaho? The film ends with someone in a car picking him up from along the highway, but who is it? The released film never explained it but Van Sant’s explanation has been available in an extended scene since the 2004 DVD release. All the excellent extras on that disc have been transported to Criterion’s newly restored Blu-ray edition. Phoenix’s career best performance never looked so good. Reeves, looking and acting more animated than usual, is also very good, but his character suffers somewhat from his having to deliver Shakespearean lines out of his comfort zone. The film is a composite of three stories, one of which is Shakespeare’s Henry IV: Parts I & II as filtered through Orson Welles’ Falstaff: Chimes at Midnight. Reeves’ character is a reinterpretation of Prince Hal.

Idaho also gives us a number of interesting supporting characters, most notably William Richert as the Falstaff character, Udo Keir as a wealthy client, and James Russo as Phoenix’s brother and father, father and brother.

Universal has spared no expense in restoring one of its most popular films, 1960’s Spartacus, which was given a theatrical restoration in 1991, then appeared in a series of Laserdisc, DVD and Blu-ray releases which left something to be desired. The new 4K restoration clears up all the color inconsistencies and other issues with the previous releases.

The most literate of the so-called sword and sandal epics of the 1950s and early 1960s, Spartacus starred Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, John Gavin, and Tony Curtis in the tale of a rebel Roman slave and gladiator. It was produced by Douglas, and directed by Stanley Kubrick with a script by Dalton Trumbo from Howard Fast’s 1951 novel. The Blu-ray includes a new on-screen interview with 98-year-old Douglas and a documentary on the restoration which was led by Robert Harris who was responsible for the 1991 theatrical restoration in concert with Douglas and Kubrick.

This week’s new releases include San Andreas and the Blu-ray release of Aladdin.