A film with a warped sense of humor, Yorgos Lathimos’ The Lobster had a limited run in the U.S. earlier this year after earning the Jury Prize at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival; praise on the festival circuit; a BAFTA nod for Best British Film; and British Film nominations for Best Actor (Colin Farrell), Supporting Actor (Ben Whishaw), Supporting Actress (Oliva Colman) Direction, and Screenplay by Lathimos and his writing partner Efthymis Filippou last year, with Colman winning for her portrayal of the manager of the hotel lonely singles go to in order to find a mate or be turned into an animal of their choosing.

Farrell is a recent widower who selects the lobster as his animal of choice because lobsters live to be over 100 years old, have blue blood like aristocrats, and stay fertile all their lives. Whishaw and John C. Reilly are co-inhabitants of the hotel he befriends and Rachel Weisz is the mate of his choice. This is the kind of film that you watch all the way through waiting for something meaningful to happen, but nothing does. To me, it’s more of an acting exercise than a fully developed piece of work. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to see it more than once.

The Lobster is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

More satisfying is a quartet of recently released Blu-ray upgrades of classic westerns from Kino Lorber: The Mark of Zorro, The Ox-Bow Incident, Yellow Sky, and Rawhide.

Set in Old California of 1820, 1940’s The Mark of Zorro, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, predates the era of the gunslinger in westerns. Tyrone Power is the dashing hero masquerading as a fop in order to fool the bad guys in this stylish remake of the 1920 Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler that solidified Power as Fox’s top box office star. Linda Darnell is his love interest, Basil Rathbone his sword wielding nemesis, and Eugene Pallette his confessor and confidant.

Extras include the 1996 A&E biography of Tyrone Power, narrated by Richard Kiley, with interviews with Power’s first two wives, Annabella (Suez) and Linda Christian (Green Dolphin Street), as well as former co-stars Terry Moore (King of the Khyber Rifles) and Piper Laurie (The Mississippi Gambler).

Critically acclaimed, but commercially unsuccessful at the time of its release, William Wellman’s now revered 1943 masterpiece The Ox-Bow Incident was one of a handful of films to be nominated for Best Picture but receive no other Oscar nominations.

Henry Fonda, in one of his greatest roles, is a transient cowboy who, along with his partner, Harry Morgan, stumbles upon a town setting out on an unofficial posse to track down the killers of a local farmer. The mob, led by Frank Conroy and Jane Darwell against the wishes of Harry Davenport and others, find three men with horses that belonged to the late farmer and automatically assume they are guilty of his murder. Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn, and Francis Ford are the three suspects. Should they hold them for the sheriff or hang them?

Extras include the documentary Henry Fonda: America’s Quiet Hero featuring, among others, Jane and Peter Fonda.

Wellman also directed 1948’s Yellow Sky, a tense, exciting western about a gang of bank robbers led by Gregory Peck who come upon a ghost town with an old prospector (James Barton) and his granddaughter (Anne Baxter) living there. Peck falls hard for Baxter and changes his evil ways, putting him at odds with Richard Widmark, Robert Arthur, and others of his gang.

Extras include commentary by William Wellman, Jr., who also participated in the commentary on The Ox-Bow Incident.

Henry Hathaway’s 1951 western Rawhide is a fiercely acted film that belies its humble location, a stagecoach station on the California-to-Missouri mail run. Tyrone Power is in charge of changing the mule teams, Susan Hayward a stranded passenger waiting for the next day’s stagecoach, and Edgar Buchanan the doomed station manager. Hugh Marlowe is an escaped convict who has robbed another stagecoach and killed the driver. He and his gang, comprised of dim-witted Dean Jagger, George Tobias, and psychopathic Jack Elam, take over the station in anticipation of a heavy payload coming through on the next day’s stagecoach. Elam was a replacement for Everett Sloane whom Hayward, in her first Fox film, had fired because he played too rough in the scene in which his character smacks her around.

Extras include a brief biography of Hayward.

One of the most successful mystery series in the world, Canadian TV’s Murdoch Mysteries, is now in its tenth season.

Newly released on Blu-ray and standard DVD, Murdoch Mysteries – season 9 sees the series’ four main characters, Detective William Murdoch (Yannick Bisson), Inspector Thomas Brackenreid (Thomas Craig), Dr. Julia Ogden (Helene Joy), and Constable George Crabtree (Johnny Harris) back where they were when the series began in 2008.

Season 8 ended with a cliffhanger as Crabtree was arrested for the murder of his sweetheart’s already presumed dead husband. As we suspected, he took the blame for her thinking she was the killer and she kept quiet because she believed he was really guilty. As it turns out, neither of them did it, but while the resolution gets Crabtree released from jail and reinstated in his job, it also tears the lovers apart, presumably forever.

Crabtree is in for another shock when he learns that the other woman he was sweet on, coroner Dr. Emily Grace (Georgina Reilly), has a lesbian lover with whom she is planning to relocate to England. Her departure sets the stage for her predecessor, Dr. Ogden, now finally married to Det. Murdoch, to take up the scalpel again. The heart of the season’s dramatics surrounds the adoption of an adorable baby boy by William and Julia, a baby they are destined to give up when it is learned that his parents were not deceased killers who they learn stole him from a woman who died in childbirth and her carpenter husband.
The mysteries, now set in 1903, continue to spotlight the many innovations of the day. Fingerprints, then called finger marks, still help solve the majority of the cleverly written mysteries.

This week’s new releases include A Hologram for the King and the Blu-ray upgrade of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.