Nostalgia reigns supreme with the Blu-ray and DVD release of Guy Ritchie’s update of the classic 1960s TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and the new-to-Blu-ray upgrades of films originally released from eleven to sixty years ago.

The original TV version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. ran for four seasons beginning in 1964. Inspired by the James Bond films, Goldfinger in particular, the series featured not one, but two super-cool agents of UNCLE (the United Network Command for Law-Enforcement). They were played by Robert Vaughn as the American Napoleon Solo and David McCallum as the Russian Illya Kuryakin. Their handler, the British Alexander Waverly, was played by Leo G. Carroll. They survived with wit, charm and the aid of assorted gadgets, most of which were invented for the series.

Ritchie’s film goes back to the early 1960s to bring the characters together beginning with a high adrenaline escape from East Berlin to West, that stars Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer hint in the film’s on-set extras could be the start of a series. With a budget in excess of $75 million and a box-office take of only $45 million, that seems highly unlikely.

While critics generally liked the film, they found it to have more style than substance. British actor Cavill as the American Solo and American actor Hammer as the Russian Illya certainly have enough wit and charm to bring it off, as does Hugh Grant as Waverly, so it’s a real shame we won’t be seeing more of the combination. Although the film’s frantic pace overwhelms some scenes, it’s notable that all the gadgets used in the film are devices that either the CIA or the KGB actually had at their disposal at the time, not the far-fetched inventions of the TV series.

The only disappointment from my perspective is the is-she-or-isn’t-she a good girl waste of Alicia Vikander as the daughter of a Nazi scientist, which starts out as a variation on Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, but veers off in at least one direction too many.

Chazz Palminteri’s only directorial big screen film, Noel, was not well received by the critics at the 2004 Toronto Film Festival. It opened in limited release on November 12, 2004 and made its TV debut two weeks later on November 28, 2004. Nevertheless it has developed a cult following on DVD and in subsequent TV showings, made all the more poignant by the shocking deaths of two of its stars.

Robin Williams appears unbilled as an ex-priest who saves lonely Susan Sarandon from committing suicide because, as he says, he doesn’t want to die alone. Paul Walker plays a hot-tempered young cop who waiter Alan Arkin believes to be the reincarnation of his wife, killed in a horrific car accident twenty-five years earlier. The film, which also stars Penelope Cruz as Walker’s fiancé, has many parallels to Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and expounds on that film’s theme of every life having a meaning. Centered around a New York City hospital on Christmas Eve, the film provides good opportunities for up-and-comers Marcus Thomas as a victim of child abuse, Daniel Sunjata as a young stud who fails to seduce Sarandon, and Billy Porter as a helpful hospital orderly.

A 1988 film that takes place in 1951, Peter Yates’ The House on Carroll Street is an atmospheric 1940s-style film noir which begins with a hearing of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The Committee’s chairman, Mandy Patinkin, has journalist Kelly McGillis blacklisted for not turning over her sources to the Committee. Fired from her job at a highly influential New York-based news magazine, she resorts to taking a job reading for an old lady who is losing her eyesight (Jessica Tandy). While strolling in the old lady’s garden, she overhears a loud discussion between Palminteri and young Christopher Buchholz at a neighbor’s window. She decides to follow the young man and finds he is writing down the names of recently deceased Jewish men in a Bronx cemetery. When the young man is killed, no one believes her story except FBI agent Jeff Daniels who helps her get to the bottom of the obviously dirty business which involves the smuggling of former Nazis into the country as Jewish refugees.

Yates (Bullitt, Breaking Away) directs the action with his usual skill and McGillis, who had a bigger hit with her next film, The Accused, was still riding high from the recent successes of Witness and Top Gun. Daniels was still riding high from the recent successes of The Purple Rose of Cairo and Something Wild. Tandy would soon begin filming Driving Miss Daisy.

Peter Weir’s 1985 film, Witness, in which McGillis plays the young Amish mother opposite Harrison Ford as a Philadelphia cop, finally gets its U.S. release on Blu-ray. Prior to the current release, the only available Blu-ray version was an all-region Korean import. It’s one of two Paramount films newly released on Blu-ray by Warner Brothers, who now has distribution rights to most of the Paramount library.

The other new Warner Bros. Paramount release is John Ford’s 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Long regarded as one of Ford’s great works, the film, although popular in its initial release, split critics and fans over the casting of its two fifty-five-year-old stars, James Stewart as a twenty-five-year-old greenhorn lawyer, and John Wayne as his thirty-year-old mentor. The story, however, is the thing and it holds up better than those of most westerns.

Told in flashback, the film begins with now-famous Senator Stewart returning to the once lawless town for Wayne’s funeral. Lee Marvin, Vera Miles and Edmond O’Brien provide strong support.

Two decades after their original negatives were burned in a fire, the three films that make up Satyajit Ray’s landmark Apu Trilogy have been restored by the collaboration of the Academy Film Archive of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and L’Immagine Ritrovata and released in a stunning 4K release by Criterion.

The three films that make up Ray’s trilogy – 1955’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) (his film debut), 1956’s Aparajito (The Unvanquished), and 1958’s Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) follow the life of a free-spirited child who becomes an adolescent urban student and finally a sensitive man of the world. Released in the U.S. in 1958, 1959 and 1960, respectively, these hallmarks of the golden age of international art-house film remain essential viewing.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray debuts of John Ford’s The Hurricane and Akira Kurusawa’s Ikiru.