The first film featuring one this year’s Oscar nominated performances for Best Actor has hit the home video market. Robert Zemeckis’ Flight featuring a bravura performance by Denzel Washington is that film.

Washington has always been an interesting actor and in Flight he has his most complex role since Malcolm X twenty years earlier. While the actor’s seemingly effortless performances in other films of the past twenty years have usually been better than the films that contain them, Zemeckis’ film is as worthy of the actor as the actor is worthy of the film.

Washington’s Whip Whitaker is a commercial airline pilot with a drinking and drug problem. He goes on drunken binges for days and sobers up with several lines of cocaine before taking command of his plane. Eventually fate catches up with him. Despite his condition he saves a plane filled with passengers from crashing and killing everyone on board. The trick is to keep the facts of his condition from surfacing and having him declared the cause of the accident which was actually due to mechanical failure.

The film has a lot to say about taking responsibility for one’s deeds, something that eludes Whitaker until he is forced to face his demons at a packed hearing.

The special effects are riveting.

Flight, which is also nominated for Best Original Screenplay is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

There’s a line in Yaron Zilberman’s A Late Quartet in which Christopher Walken’s celebrated violinist and music teacher relates a story to his class in which the great Pablo Casals once told him his playing was excellent when it was really bad. Years later when he had gotten to know Casals he asked him why he had praised him for such mediocre work and the great Casals explained that there were a couple of things about his playing which were extraordinary. He chose to focus on those things rather than the bad.

That scene is symptomatic of the film itself which takes the high road most of the time in telling the story of a famed quartet that has been together for twenty-five years but must move on in the wake of cellist Walken’s having been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

Mark Ivanir plays the quartet’s first violinist and Philip Seymour Hoffman the second violinist while Catherine Keener, who is married to Hoffman, plays the viola. Complications ensue, including Hoffman’s insisting on splitting the first violin position with Ivanir and Ivanir’s newly consummated affair with Hoffman and Keener’s daughter. It all gets resolved in the end with the music drowning out the soap opera.

A Late Quartet is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Eric Bana gets top billing in Stefan Ruzowitsky’s Deadfall but his psycho serial killer is the least interesting character in this fairly decent film noir which takes place mostly in the snows of north Michigan on Thanksgiving.

The story is heavy on coincidence as Bana’s killing spree leads him to Sissy Spacek’s house. Spacek is home alone cooking the holiday dinner while husband Kris Kristofferson is out hunting and recently released jailbird son Charlie Hunnam is making his way home. The woman Hunnam has hooked up with along the way just happens to be Bana’s sister played by Olivia Wilde. There’s a subplot involving Kate Mara as a deputy sheriff who also figures in the story. She ends up at Spacek’s house as well. Spacek and Humman take the acting honors in this one.

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

Three major films from three different eras of Hollywood history have been given sparkling new Blu-ray upgrades.

The oldest of the lot is Otto Preminger’s Laura. The classic 1944 murder mystery from Vera Caspary’s novel is revered for David Raksin’s haunting score, its excellent art direction and costume design and of course, the near career high performances Preminger gets from Dana Andrews as the detective who falls in love the painting of the girl whose murder he is investigating; Clifton Webb, Judith Anderson and Vincent Price and Gene Tierney as the title character. Nominated for five Academy Awards including Direction, Screenplay, Black-and-White Art Direction and Supporting Actor (Webb), it won for Best Black-and-White Cinematography.

A film Walt Disney had wanted to make for years finally reached fruition in 1953 when his film of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan voiced by Bobby Driscoll hit theatres. Handsomely produced with breathtaking animation, the film has long been overshadowed by the Broadway musical version immortalized by Mary Martin. The 1960 TV version of the musical has long been a home video staple. The Disney film speaks primarily to kids whereas the musical version speaks to kids of all ages. At least that’s the way I’ve always seen it.

The Mary Martin version of Peter Pan is rare and hard to find and very expensive if you do. A newer version of the musical with Cathy Rigby is much easier to find and a lot cheaper so if you’re lucky enough to have an old copy of the Mary Martin version, hold onto it.

Bob Fosse’s film of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret is not just a great musical, it one of the great film of the 1970s.

Nominated for ten Academy Awards, it won eight to The Godfather’s three.

Rather than do a by-the-numbers translation of the Broadway musical from stage to screen, director Bob Fosse threw out the musical’s book and reverted back to Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and his play I Am a Camera eliminating characters and bringing in a mix of old and new ones. He also eliminated all the songs that were not performed on stage with one exception, giving the film a more realistic look than the stage version.

The one song that is sung off-stage is the Nazi anthem “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”.

The performances of Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem, Marisa Berenson, Frtiz Wepper and Joel Grey still hold up, especially the Oscar winning performances of Minnelli and Grey as seedy nightclub performers. The conceit is that although Minnelli’s character is not supposed to be a great performer, what makes it work is that the actress playing her is a really great performer, or at least was then.

New releases this week include Skyfall and The Sessions.