One of the most anticipated films of last fall’s movie season, Scott Cooper’s Black Mass, failed to live up to its promise of Oscar nominations for Johnny Depp and Joel Edgerton. Although both these actors, as well as Benedict Cumberbatch, Kevin Bacon, Peter Sarsgaard, Rory Cochrane, Adam Scott, Corey Stoll, and others deliver strong performances, the film about the career of Boston criminal Whitey Bolger quickly becomes repetitious, if not downright monotonous. It introduces numerous characters who are given a brief moment to shine, only to be disposed of by Bolger or one of his cronies in ever increasingly grisly ways. It’s a film without a soul.

Black Mass is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Sam Mendes’ Spectre, his follow-up to the smash hit 2012 James Bond film Skyfall, is one of the lesser films in the Bond oeuvre. Nevertheless it has its moments, most of them attributable to the charm of the franchise’s recurring players, Daniel Craig as Bond, Ralph Fiennes as M, Ben Wishaw as Q, Naomie Harris as Moneypenny, and briefly, Judi Dench as the previous M. Léa Seydoux and Monica Bellucci are fine as this outing’s Bond girls but two-time Oscar winner Christoph Waltz makes a lackluster criminal mastermind. Adam Scott, Sherlock’s Moriarty, is featured as C, Fiennes’ duplicitous new superior.

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

Another highly anticipated film, Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Park, is a gorgeously textured gothic ghost story cum horror film, but becomes a bit of a letdown as it draws to its inevitable conclusion. Mia Wasikowska as the wealthy heroine, Tom Hiddleston as her charming suitor, and Charlie Hunnam as her old friend, now a doctor, are first-rate but the usually strong Jessica Chastain is stuck in the thankless role of the film’s obvious villainess. It’s worth seeing once, but isn’t likely to be something you’ll want to watch over and over again.

Crimson Park is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes takes an impassioned look at the housing crisis in Florida in 2010 through the eyes of Andrew Garfield as an unemployed construction worker who loses his home through foreclosure and then goes to work for the real estate agent who has the listing for his home. The film stacks the deck against the agent (Michael Shannon) by having him stealing air conditioners from foreclosed properties and charging Fannie Mae and Bank of America for replacing them. The film’s moral conscience is supposed to be Laura Dern as Garfield’s mother who refuses to live in the nice house Garfield has bought for them and his young son, but she’s a poorly developed character. The film ultimately raises more questions than it answers.

99 Homes is available on standard DVD only in the U.S.

Lily Tomlin has her first starring role in years in Paul Weitz’s Grandma in which she plays an aging but feisty lesbian still mourning the death of her life partner several years earlier. Ricocheting from a breakup with a new girlfriend, she takes to the road with her granddaughter (Julia Garner) in search of money to pay for the young woman’s abortion. Classified as a comedy, most of the film’s comedic moments are on display in the film’s trailer, but the film’s many moving dramatic scenes are just as memorable. Marcia Gay Harden, Judy Greer, Sam Elliott, Nat Wolff, John Cho, and the late Elizabeth Pena co-star.

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

Criterion has released the long requested Blu-ray upgrade of Jan Troell’s multi-award-winning 1971 film The Emigrants and its equally regarded 1972 sequel The New Land in one package. The first film focuses on a mid-nineteenth century Norwegian couple, Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, and their families and friends seeking a new life in the new world. The second film focuses on their lives in that scary new world. Extras include new interviews with Troell, Ullmann and co-star Eddie Axberg.

Kino Lorber has released a stunning Blu-ray upgrade of Jean Renoir’s best American film, The Southerner, mastered in HD from 35mm elements preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Zachary Scott, Betty Field, and Beulah Bondi star in this depression era classic which earned Renoir an Oscar nomination for Best Director. Included are the 1944 short film A Salute to France co-directed by Renoir and Garson Kanin and Pare Lorentz’s 1938 documentary The River which had a strong stylistic influence on The Southerner.

Warner Archive has released five classics from the Samuel Goldwyn Studios on standard DVD, three of them new to DVD, two of them reissues of out of print titles.

Included are the long requested These Three; the reissues of The Cowboy and the Lady and The Real Glory; the romantic drama My Foolish Heart; and the vastly underrated film noir Edge of Doom.

Merle Oberon, Miriam Hopkins and Joel McCrea star in 1936’s These Three, William Wyler’s reworking of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour later re-filmed by Wyler in 1961 with Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, and James Garner under its original title with its original themes intact. Even with the whispers directed toward a heterosexual relationship instead of a lesbian one, the film still packs a wallop with outstanding work from the three stars as well as Oscar-nominated Bonita Granville as the trouble-making brat, Alma Kruger as her grandmother, and Catherine Doucet as Hopkins’ supercilious aunt. Hopkins played the aunt in Wyler’s 1961 version and Fay Bainter received an Oscar nomination for playing the grandmother of the brat.

Oberon stars opposite Gary Cooper in H.C. Potter’s romantic comedy The Cowboy and the Lady from a story by Leo McCarey and Frank R. Adams. Patsy Kelly, Thelma Todd, Walter Brennan, and a jitterbugging Harry Davenport co-star in this often hilarious film.

Cooper stars in Henry Hathaway’s 1939 film The Real Glory about an outpost in the Philippines in 1906 at the end of the Spanish-American War. Cooper plays a doctor who battles cholera, the brass, and the enemy, a group of Moro invaders. Andrea Leeds, David Niven and Reginald Owen co-star in this exciting yarn.

Mark Robson’s 1949 romantic drama My Foolish Heart is best remembered for its Oscar-nominated title song, Susan Hayward’s Oscar-nominated performance, and as being the reason original author J.D. Salinger refused to allow Hollywood to film any more of his books or stories. Dana Andrews and Kent Smith co-star.

Robson’s 1950 film noir Edge of Doom provides Farley Granger with the role of his career as a young man who, in a fit of rage, kills his parish priest because of the priest’s high-handed attitude toward providing a “nice” funeral for his mother. Dana Andrews co-stars as a much more compassionate priest who tells Granger’s story in flashback. On the National Board of Review’s list of the year’s ten best films, this one’s more than ready for rediscovery.

This week’s new releases include Steve Jobs and Labyrinth of Lies.