Two of the screen’s great fantasy films, Frank Capra’s nearly 80-year-old Lost Horizon and Nicholas Meyer’s nearly 40-year-old Time After Time, have been given very welcome Blu-ray upgrades.

1937’s Lost Horizon was originally released at 132 minutes, but over time lost 25 minutes of its running time mostly due to cuts made during the second World War to downplay its pacifist message. An intact soundtrack was found in the 1970s, but not all the footage had been found for the 1985 restoration which included stills to fill in the missing footage. The Blu-ray was made from a 2014 4K restoration that includes more of the missing footage. It is a region-free Australian release that is playable on U.S. machines.

The film itself ranks alongside Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, and It’s a Wonderful Life as one of the great ones about one man against the world. It was a highly anticipated film from the best-selling novel by James Hilton, who later wrote Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Random Harvest.

Ronald Colman stars as the British diplomat who, along with four others, stumbles onto the hidden world of Shagri-La in Tibet where life is good, aging is slowed down and people live to be over 200. Jane Wyatt, Margo, John Howard, Thomas Mitchell, Edward Everett Horton, Isabel Jewell, and especially H.B. Warner and Sam Jaffe turn in fine supporting performances. The meetings between Colman and Jaffe as the High Lama provide the film’s most stirring moments.

Lost Horizon on Blu-ray looks and sounds better than it ever has.

1979’s Time After Time is a one-of-a-kind treat about Jack the Ripper escaping to then contemporary San Francisco from 1893 London in H.G. Wells’ time machine with Wells hot on his trail. Malcolm McDowell gives one of his finest performances as Wells, matched by David Warner as the Ripper and Mary Steenburgen as the woman in peril in this deftly written sci-fi thriller filled with dollops of humor and real heart, not least of it surrounding the blossoming romance of McDowell and Steenburgen who met on the set and married the following year. The marriage would last ten years and produce two children.

Extras include a highly informative commentary from Meyer (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) and McDowell (A Clockwork Orange).

Kino Lorber has released another batch of films labeled as film noir on Blu-ray, but two of the three do not fit comfortably into that subgenre.

1945’s The House on 92nd Street, directed by Henry Hathaway, was the first of the docudramas that Twentieth-Century Fox produced in the late 1940s. The elements of film noir are there, but they are often in conflict with the archival news footage and the sonorous narration about the FBI that permeate the film. William Eythe (The Ox-Bow Incident, The Song of Bernadette) stars as the double-agent who infiltrates a Nazi spy ring in Manhattan. Signe Hasso (A Double Life) is the second in command of the ring. The first in command doesn’t appear until the shocking ending. It’s an excellent film, but only marginally a film noir.

1947’s Daisy Kenyon, directed by Otto Preminger, is first and foremost a woman’s picture of the kind they stopped making not long after. Joan Crawford is the woman in the middle of Dana Andrews as her married lover and Henry Fonda as her shell-shocked husband. There’s a subplot involving Andrews’ wife (Ruth Warrick) and her mistreatment of their children (Peggy Ann Garner, Connie Marshall), but there’s nothing really noirish about it other than the reteaming of the director and star (Andrews) of a genuine film noir, 1944’s Laura.

1948’s Cry of the City, directed by Robert Siodmak, is the only one of the three that is a true film noir. Victor Mature and Richard Conte star as the cop and the cop killer who were once childhood friends. Both actors are at their best, as are the film’s numerous supporting players, including Debra Paget, Betty Garde, Hope Emerson, Shelley Winters, Fred Clark, and Tommy Cook. Paget, in her film debut, was just 14 when she played 36-year-old Conte’s girlfriend, although studio publicity claimed the actress from a show business family was 18.

Olive Films has given us two major new Blu-ray releases in One of Our Aircraft Is Missing and Houdini

1942’s One of Our Aircraft Is Missing was the second film collaboration of Michael Powell, who received sole directorial credit on both while his future co-director Emeric Pressburger’s sole credit was as screenwriter on both. Nominated for Oscars for both, Pressburger would win for 1941’s 49th Parallel a.k.a. The Invaders, which was released in the U.S. in 1942, the same year as One of Our Aircraft Is Missing.

Both films are highly effective propaganda pieces, 49th Parallel is about a German U-boat crew stranded in Northern Canada while One of Our Aircraft Is Missing is a about a British flight crew stranded in the Netherlands. Previously unavailable on DVD in the U.S., One of Our Aircraft Is Missing stars Googie Withers as the farmer’s wife who leads the crew, including Godfrey Tearle, Eric Portman, and Bernard Miles, to safety.

1953’s Houdini, directed by George Marshall, is a highly entertaining biography of the legendary magician and illusionist starring Tony Curtis as Harry Houdini and Janet Leigh as his wife, Bess. The film starts out on a high note as Houdini and Bess meet cute several times over. The film, however, doesn’t shirk from Houdini’s dark turn into the occult after the death of his beloved mother (Angela Clarke) or from his dying promise to his wife that he will return. It does, however, skirt the issue of Jewish Erich Weiss (Houdini’s birth name) and his marriage to the Catholic Bess which caused a schism between Houdini and his mother.

Being something of a curmudgeon when it comes to animated films, I am probably not the best one to chime in on Disney/Pixar’s Finding Dory fish story, but I found this a total waste of time for all audiences, kids as well as adults. Dory, a supporting character in 2003’s more interesting Finding Nemo takes center stage here, but her short attention span makes her and her story rather one-note.

Finding Dory is available on Blu-ray 2D, Blu-ray 3D and standard DVD.

This week’s new releases include Hell or High Water and Kubo and the Two Strings.