Universal has released I’ll See You in My Dreams on Blu-ray and DVD at the same time that the independent film from Bleecker Street Media goes out free as the year’s first screener to Academy and Screen Actors Guild members. Seventeen years after her daughter Gwyneth Paltrow won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, Blythe Danner is making a bid to win one of her own. I don’t see it happening.

Stage and screen veteran Danner is a fine actress. She won a Tony for 1969’s Butterflies Are Free and three years later starred opposite current Screen Actors Guild president Ken Howard as Martha Jefferson in the film version of 1776, the same year that Goldie Hawn starred in the film version of Butterflies Are Free. She and Howard then starred in a TV series based on Adam’s Rib, the classic Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn film. In subsequent years she has enjoyed major stage success with Broadway revivals of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1988 and Follies in 2001 as well as the off-Broadway revival of Suddenly, Last Summer in 2007 along with many other productions. On screen she had her biggest critical success with 1980’s The Great Santini and her greatest commercial success with 2000’s Meet the Parents. She and Meet the Parents co-star Robert De Niro are currently filming dueling TV movies about Bernie Madoff. De Niro stars opposite Michelle Pheffier in one while Danner stars opposite Richard Dreyfuss in the other.

In I’ll See You in My Dreams, Danner plays a widow of twenty years whose dog has just died of old age. She drinks a lot wine; is frightened by a rat; hangs out with friends Rhea Perlman, Mary Kay Place and June Squibb; meets charming bachelor Sam Elliott; forms a friendship with much younger pool guy Martin Starr; and adopts another old dog. That’s about it. While director Brett Haley and his writing partner Marc Basch have written some clever dialogue, the characters are not really developed beyond their stereotypes. Danner’s performance is decent enough, but she’s basically playing straight woman to a group of scene stealers.

The late Robin Williams gives one of his best performances in Boulevard, which has been released on Blu-ray and standard DVD less than two months after its theatrical release.

Williams plays a 60-year-old closeted gay man, a banker in a marriage of convenience with Kathy Baker, who falls hard for a troubled hustler played by Roberto Aguire.

There really isn’t much more to it than that. The film seems like it could have been made forty years ago. Except for the use of cell phones and home computers, the house that Williams and Baker live in looks like it was furnished a long time ago. Does anyone still put doilies on their sofas?

Not much happens in the film. Aguire will have sex, but won’t be touched – no hugging, no kissing. Williams just wants to look at him. They have nowhere to go but Aguire acts as the catalyst for a change in Williams’ hapless life. In the end he and Baker will move on. Enjoyment of the film comes from the nuanced performances of the three stars despite a script that doesn’t provide them much support.

Williams’ dramatic breakthrough, 1982’s The World According to Garp, has been given a nice Blu-ray upgrade by Warner Archive. The film, which earned Oscar nominations for John Lithgow and Glenn Close in her film debut, remains a richly satisfying experience as we follow the trials and tribulations of an aspiring writer and wrestler forever in the shadow of his highly accomplished mother (Close). Williams, Close, Lithgow as a transgendered former football player, and Mary Beth Hurt as Willims’ wife all give outstanding performances under the assured directorial hand of Oscar winner George Roy Hill (The Sting).

Movie and TV biographies often suffer from trying to cram too much into their running times and then fall short in leaving out scenes we expect to see. Dee Rees’ Bessie, from a story by Horton Foote (To Kill a Mockingbird, The Trip to Bountiful), doesn’t rise above the pitfalls of the genre but is smashing entertainment as far as it goes.

The real Bessie Smith was a major recording star from 1923 on. Her records included such major 1920s hits “T’aint Nobody’s Bizz-ess If I Do,” “After You’ve Gone,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” She never played Carnegie Hall, although she does in the mid-1930s in the biopic. The film ends on a tranquil note ignoring her horrific 1937 auto accident and death. In that respect, it’s highly reminiscent of Robert Wise’s 1968 biopic of Gertrude Lawrence with Julie Andrews called Star! in which Lawrence’s career stops well short of her amazing comeback in The King and I, death and burial in her ball gown from the show.

What the HBO film, newly released on Blu-ray and standard DVD, does have is Queen Latifah as Bessie in all her bisexual glory, singing and loving her heart out. The film really soars when Latifah and Mo’Nique as Ma Rainey are on screen together, whether singing, dancing or just plain acting up a storm. The film has been nominated for 9 Emmys and should easily win for Best Television Movie. Latifah and Mo’nique may have a harder time winning as they are up against strong competition in their categories from equally fine actresses in Miniseries, a separate category only in Production. Latifah, for instance, is up against Frances McDormand in Olive Kitteridge and Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Honorable Woman.

Mad Max: Fury Road, newly released on Blu-ray, 3D Blu-ray and standard DVD, is a soulless piece of crap that somehow managed to capture the enthusiasm of critics and audiences with no discernment. It’s an ugly film both in look and storyline. Did theatre audiences actually munch on popcorn watching Tom Hardy swallow what looked like a live iguana and carefully remove armor from a dead guy’s hand so he could eat his finger? Charlize Theron is being talked of in certain circles as being Oscar worthy for her equally badass female lead. Please tell me it isn’t so. Surely the great expanse of the Australian outback can be used to make better films than this.

This week’s new releases include The Age of Adaline and the Blu-ray upgrade of The Man Who Wasn’t There.