Searching, which won the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is a first-rate suspense film about a Korean-American father (Film Independent Spirit Best Actor nominee John Cho) who searches for his missing daughter on the internet while the police do the legwork.

Filled with Hitchcockian level suspense, the film starts out innocently enough as Cho and his wife (Sara Sohn) introduce their young daughter to a computer and support her interest in piano.

Following his wife’s death from cancer in 2015, Cho and his now teenage daughter (played by Michelle La) have grown somewhat apart. He doesn’t know any of her friends or if she even has any. When she leaves home one day without her laptop, skips school, and doesn’t come home that night, he becomes alarmed and searches the internet for clues before calling the police. Eventually he does and the detective on the case (Debra Messing) and he work well together until he becomes too closely involved and is told to let the police do their job. Fortunately for the audience, as in all good mysteries, he doesn’t. This, however, leads him to follow a red herring until a chance conversation with a minor character leads him back on the trail of the actual culprit.

Although this is not the first film to heavily involve the use of the internet, it is the first one that treats it realistically. There are no involved contrivances, fake websites, or implausible exaggerations that require special knowledge to figure it all out. The protagonist is just an ordinary guy doing everyday searching to find the answers to his questions and finding heartbreak, sadness, and eventually help and hope along the way.

Cho is excellent, with fine support from the entire cast but especially Messing as the detective, La as the daughter, and Joseph Lee as Cho’s pothead brother. Cho’s disapproval of his brother’s use of weed will bring a smile to anyone who remembers Cho in his breakthrough role in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle in which he was the pothead.

One of the National Board of Review’s Top Ten Independent Films of 2018, Searching is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Classic films newly upgraded to Blu-ray include The Magnificent Ambersons, The Wrong Box, Georgy Girl, The Killing of Sister George, and Mame.

The Criterion Edition release of Orson Welles’ 1942 masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons is a beautifully done 4K restoration with two commentaries and a load of extras including Welles’ radio play in which he played central character George Minafer, played in the film by Tim Holt.

The film which was given two disastrous previews had fifty minutes cut from Welles’ finished film by RKO, which tried to get Welles to return from Brazil where he was filming It’s All True. Welles had wanted editor Robert Wise to fly to Brazil so that Welles could instruct him on what to do, but when that proved impossible, Wise was given the responsibility of re-editing the film which included changing the ending. Although film historians have long derided Wise’s happier ending, it is in fact closer to the ending of Booth Tarkington’s novel than Welles’ more somber one.

Filled with fine performances by Holt, Dolores Costello as his mother (Minafer nee Amberson), Joseph Cotton as her long-lost love, Anne Baxter as Cotton’s daughter, and others, it is Agnes Moorehead’s haunting portrayal of Holt’s old maid aunt that is most responsible for making this an acting showcase like few others.

A disappointment at the box-office, it may have been because the slow pace of the film and its anti-industrialization stance at a time when the country was forging ahead with industrialization due to World War II. It was, however, well-liked by the critics. Moorehead won the New York Film Critics award for Best Actress over Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver. The film later received four Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Supporting Actress (Moorehead), Cinematography, and Art Direction.

Indicator has provided high definition remastered releases of both The Wrong Box and Georgy Girl. The two British comedies were among the biggest hits of 1966 and long overdue on Blu-ray.

The Wrong Box is a delightful comedy of errors about two elderly brothers (John Mills, Ralph Richardson) and the race to see which one dies first thus allowing the other one to inherit a fortune that Richardson’s greedy nephews (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore) want to get their hands on while Mills’ adopted grandson (Michael Caine) and Richardson’s adopted granddaughter (Nanette Newman) fall madly in love. Director Bryan Forbes throws everything but the kitchen sink into it, but somehow it all works beautifully.

Georgy Girl earned Lynn Redgrave the New York Film Critics award for Best Actress in a tie with Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. She’s a delight from start to finish as the mod Londoner dodging dirty old man James Mason while falling in love with roommate Charlotte Rampling’s lover, Alan Bates. Director Silvio Narizzano keeps it light and breezy from the opening strains of the instant hit title song to the ironic ending.

What do 1968’s The Killing of Sister George and 1974’s Mame have in common? They’re both films that might have starred Angela Lansbury but didn’t.

Direct Robert Aldrich had wanted his What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte star Bette Davis to play the fired soap actress in Sister George but she turned him down, saying Beryl Reid, then in the Broadway version, should play the part. He then asked Lansbury who turned him down, thinking the part wasn’t right for her at the time. Both Davis and Lansbury a decade later made Death on the Nile together and Aldrich ended up casting Reid who is terrific in the part.

Given a gorgeous 4K restoration, the Kino Lorber release of this groundbreaking film features Susannah York as Reid’s lesbian lover and Coral Browne who all but steals the film as the predatory BBC executive who goes after York.

Browne was of course Vera Charles, the celebrated actress friend of Rosalind Russell’s Auntie Mame in the 1958 film version of the famous novel and play made triumphant again by Angela Lansbury in the 1966 Broadway musical, titled simply Mame.

Against all reason, Warner Bros. made Mame into a film starring Lucille Ball instead of Lansbury. Ball, born in 1911, would ironically have been a more appropriate choice for the 1958 version in her late forties, but in her early sixties in 1974, she was too old for the part which required large amounts of Vaseline and gauze on the camera to hide her wrinkles. Her singing voice, which was not all that great to begin with, was beginning to croak. It should have been dubbed or at the very least, been blended with that of another singer as Rosalind Russell’s voice had been in Gypsy, a highly successful revival of which Lansbury was starring in at time of the filming of Mame.

Despite Ball’s miscasting, the film works thanks to a terrific production design and the supporting cast, particularly Beatrice Arthur as Vera and Jane Connell as Agnes Gooch. Warner Bros.’ eye-popping Blu-ray is much easier to look at than the original DVD with its faded colors.

This week’s new releases include Support the Girls and Mission Impossible – Fallout.