Two of last year’s best films, romantic love stories both, took place in the New York City of 1952. Brooklyn begins in the fall of 1951 and ends during the summer of 1952. Carol takes place in late 1952 and early 1953.

Irish writer Colm Toibin’s 2009 novel Brooklyn is the source material for John Crowley’s Oscar-nominated Best Picture of the same name. Toibin’s only previous work to be filmed was The Blackwater Lightship, a 2004 Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation that earned Angela Lansbury an Emmy nomination as the grandmother of a young man dying of AIDS. The screenplay is by Nick Hornby (About a Boy, An Education).

Brooklyn stars Saoirse Ronan in a charming Oscar-nominated performance as a young girl who comes to America with the urging of her sister and the help of a Catholic priest (Jim Broadbent) who runs a charitable organization in NYC. She works in a department store and lives in a boarding house run by Julie Walters. She meets and falls in love with a young Italian plumber (Emory Cohen) who she secretly marries before sailing home to Ireland in the wake of a family tragedy. There she develops a relationship with a local pub owner on the rebound (Domhnall Gleeson) and contemplates a cozy life with him until a confrontation with the local gossip brings her back to her senses and she returns home to her husband.

That’s the crux of the story, but the fun is in the way in which it plays out. It’s a specific, yet universal story with the time-tested moral, “you can’t go home again.” The entire cast is wonderful, especially the three leads (Ronan, Cohen and Gleeson) and Walters, although there is too little of her in the film. Fans of the film, however, should take heart now that the BBC is developing a series around Walters and the boarding house.

Brooklyn is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Although Brooklyn has a few scenes filmed in Coney Island and Manhattan, the bulk of the New York scenes were shot in Montreal. Carol has a more authentic 1950s New York look, but it was filmed mostly in Cincinnati, Ohio which substitutes for both New York and New Jersey locations.

Todd Haynes’ Carol is based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, originally published under a pseudonym, but republished as Carol under Highsmith’s name in 1990. The story of two women who meet in a NYC department store and begin a passionate affair, Highsmith wrote it between Strangers on a Train, which was published in 1950, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, which was published in 1955.

Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara both deliver extraordinary performances. Blanchett is the older woman going through a difficult divorce while Mara is the aspiring photographer currently employed a shop girl. In development since 1997, the screenplay is by Phyllis Nagy, whose only previous work was the 2005 TV movie Mrs. Harris for which she received Emmy nominations both for her writing and direction.

Haynes directs Carolwith the same richness of detail he brought to 2002’s Far from Heaven. The film received a total of six Oscar nominations, but won none. In a different world it might have swept the technical awards for Cinematography, Production Design, Costume Design, Makeup & Hair and Original Score, Nagy might have won for Adapted Screenplay, Mara might have been nominated for Best Actress along with Blanchett instead of being shoehorned into supporting and the film might have been nominated, as it should have been, for Best Picture and Director.

Carol is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

The film that did win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay was The Big Short, Charles Randolph and director Adam McKay’s adaptation of The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, a 2010 non-fiction book about the build-up of the housing and credit bubble of the previous decade. Written by Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The Blind Side), the book won the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights 2011 Book award given annually to an author who “most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy’s purposes” – his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity.

The Oscar-nominated film is not the book. It focuses on the four most cynical Wall Street denizens who took on the banks and beat them with their own greed. Oscar nominee Christian Bale, along with Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt and a huge supporting cast all give strong performances but there isn’t a single character in the film that is truly likeable. If you want a few laughs, see the film. If you want to understand what happened, read the book.

The Big Short is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Criterion’s 4K Blu-ray restoration of John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate is a film-lover’s dream. The 1962 film based on Richard Condon’s 1959 novel has never looked or sounded better. Withdrawn for 25 years by Frank Sinatra after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the film was re-released in 1988 which only enhanced its reputation. Sinatra stars in the film as a brainwashed Korean war veteran along with Laurence Harvey as a fellow prisoner of war groomed to be an assassin by the North Koreans. Third billed Janet Leigh is mere decoration in this, the film’s true leading lady is Oscar-nominated Angela Lansbury as Harvey’s bitch of a mother whose dimwitted, albeit virulent, anti-Communist husband (James Gregory) is running for President.

Perhaps even more relevant today, the film was the first of Frankenheimer’s three psychological political thrillers of the 1960s, followed in two-year intervals by Seven Days in May and Seconds.

Extras include an archival 1988 on-screen interview with Sinatra, Frankenheimer and screenwriter George Axelrod; Frankenheimer’s 1997 commentary; and three brand new on-screen interviews including one with 90-year-old Lansbury who is as sharp as ever.

This week’s new releases include The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 and Daddy’s Home.