Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional Sherlock Holmes has been a consistent film and TV favorite since 1900. The character’s latest incarnation is in Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes starring Ian McKellen who Condon directed to an Oscar nomination in 1998’s Gods and Monsters, for which Condon won an Oscar for his screenplay.

Mr. Holmes, written by Jeffrey Hatcher (Stage Beauty) is a character study as well as a whodunit with McKellen playing the aging detective at the end of his career after the first World War and toward the end of his life after the second World War thirty years later. Both the 1918 and 1948 cases involve disappearances, one of which the venerable detective solves, one of which he pretends to solve to ease the pain of the missing person’s family. There’s also a case of a near-death seemingly caused by a bee attack that proves not to have been a bee attack.

McKellen gives an Oscar worthy performance, but one that sadly hasn’t been getting much attention. He’s almost matched by young Milo Parker as his housekeeper’s savvy son. Laura Linney as the housekeeper, Roger Allam as Holmes’ doctor, and Phil Davis as police inspector are the best known actors also lending support.

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

Multi-talented Amy Schumer started out as an actress, but turned to stand-up comedy to make ends meet. Those two talents combine with her gifts as a writer make Trainwreck the first film from prolific producer/director Judd Apatow that I actually like. Yes, it’s coarse and vulgar like all of Apatow’s films, but it’s also sweet and endearing as it follows the day-to-day life of Schumer’s self-effacing character, also named Amy.

Schumer plays a struggling writer who flits from one-night-stands to short-term relationships with one loser after another until she meets and falls in love with a famous sports doctor and surgeon played by Bill Hader. There’s also a subplot involving her love-hate relationship with her sister, nicely played by Brie Larson, and her dying father (Colin Quinn). Tilda Swinton is her bombastic editor and Ezra Miller is a sharp young intern at Schumer’s magazine. Basketball legend LeBron James is used to good effect as himself and 100-years-young Norman Lloyd has his best role in years as one of Schumer’s father’s friends.

Trainwreck is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Tarsem Singh’s Self/less is an up-to-date take on the themes of John Frankenheimer’s 1966 classic Seconds. Instead of John Randolph getting a new lease on life as Rock Hudson, we have Ben Kingsley’s consciousness imported to Ryan Reynolds’ body. As with the older film, all is not what the protagonist expected with his new life. For one thing, the Kingsley/Reynolds character learns that his new body was not made in a lab, but is in fact the body of a man who sold his body to evil doctor Matthew Goode in order to buy a life-saving operation for his young daughter. Unlike the older film, this one has a happy ending. How it gets there, though, is all the fun.

Self/less is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Prolific actor Joel Edgerton (Black Mass) is also an accomplished writer and director, whose first feature-length film, The Gift, is now available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Edgerton plays a man who ingratiates himself to a newly-transferred couple, from Chicago to Los Angeles, played by Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall, saying he remembered Bateman, who grew up in Los Angeles, from school. Did he, and if so, why doesn’t Bateman remember him, or does he? There are plenty of twists and turns before the film winds to its “is he or isn’t he?” conclusion.

The Gift is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

The critics weren’t kind to Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw when it opened in July and the film did not become the box-office hit that it was expected to. The derivative fight film does provide Jake Gyllenhaal with another opportunity to give a strong performance and he does, but the film goes exactly where you expect it to go. Forest Whitaker and Rachel McAdams co-star, but it’s child actress Oona Laurence as Gyllenhaal’s daughter who steals the show.

Southpaw is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Warner Archive continues to sporadically release their catalogue product on Blu-ray, but once again the releases are not of the Archive’s most stellar films.

Michael Curtiz’s 1944 Humphrey Bogart starrer Passage to Marseilles was sold as a follow-up to Casablanca. That’s a hard concept for any film to live up to, and this one doesn’t. Structurally the film is a mess, with flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks telling the story of French patriot Bogart’s false conviction for treason and sentence to Devil’s Island, his escape, and eventual return to glory as a French loyalist against the Vichy government.

Despite the weak structure, the film eventually gets where it’s going and Bogart is at his best doing it, as are Philip Dorn, Peter Lorre, Helmut Dantine, and George Tobias as fellow Devil’s Island escapees and loyalists. Michele Morgan as Bogart’s wife, Claude Rains as an anti-Nazi officer, and Sydney Greenstreet as a Nazi sympathizer are less impressive in their clichéd roles.

Sigmund Romberg’s popularity was fading in 1954 when MGM’s elaborate musical biography Deep in My HeartThe Student Prince, which contains the film’s title song is one many would prefer to see released on Blu-ray.

The film follows the pattern of such previous MGM musical biographies as Till the Clouds Roll By (Jerome Kern) and Words and Music (Lorenz “Larry” Hart). That is, a slight, mostly fictional background with plenty of their music, mostly as performed in various stage productions. In this one we get Jose Ferrer as the composer, Doe Avedon as wife, Helen Traubel as his mentor, and a slew of MGM favorites in the musical numbers from Jane Powell and Vic Damone to Tony Martin and Cyd Charisse and even Mrs. Ferrer at the time – Rosemary Clooney.

Warner Archive’s DVD-only release of Forbidden Hollywood – Volume 9 shows the formula losing steam. There’s nothing particularly forbidden in the five films contained in the package. Their only connection is that they were all released pre-Code. I couldn’t find anything in any of them to suggest something that wouldn’t have been allowed under the code.

The best of the batch is The Cabin in the Cotton in which an overage Richard Barthelmess plays a recent high school graduate who has to choose between the sharecropper’s plain daughter, played by Dorothy Jordan, and the plantation owner’s exuberant one, played by Bette Davis in the role that made her famous.

The other films are Big City Blues with Eric Linden and Joan Blondell; Hell’s Highway with Richard Dix and Tom Brown; When Ladies Meet with Ann Harding, Myrna Loy, and Robert Montgomery in roles later played by Joan Crawford, Greer Garson, and Robert Taylor; and I Sell Anything with Pat O’Brien and Ann Dvorak.

This week’s new releases include The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and the Blu-ray debut of The Apu Trilogy.