All About Eve and Now, Voyager, the two films containing Bette Davis’ greatest performances, have been given new 4K transfers for their Criterion Collection Blu-ray releases, both with tons of extras.

All About Eve was the first film to receive 14 Oscar nominations, the most of any film through 1950. Its record has since been equaled by 1997’s Titanic and 2016’s La La Land, but never topped. It was also the first film since 1942’s Mrs. Miniver to receive five acting nominations and remains the only film to have received four female acting nominations which went to Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter. It won 6 of its nominations including Best Picture, Supporting Actor (George Sanders), and both Direction and Screenplay for Joseph. L, Mankiewicz, who won the same two awards the previous year for A Letter to Three Wives. Mankiewicz’s back-to-back wins in both categories has never been equaled.

Based on a 1946 Cosmopolitan short story by Mary Orr called “The Wisdom of Eve,” the film about an ingénue who insinuates herself into the lives of a famous Broadway actress and her circle of theatre friends was supposed to have starred Claudette Colbert as the star and Baxter, who resembled her, as the ingénue but Colbert injured her back filming Three Came Home and had to drop out. Davis took over the role with just two weeks’ notice, resurrecting her then dormant career.

The new release contains so many extras that a second disc had to be included to accommodate them. Imported from Fox’s 2010 Blu-ray release are two commentaries, a feature-length documentary from 1983 about Mankiewicz, episodes of The Dick Cavett Show from 1969 and 1980, a 2001 documentary on the making of the film and a second documentary on Mankiewicz from 2010. New features include an interview with costume historian Larry McQueen.

1942’s Now, Voyager was made at the height of Davis’ reign as the queen of the women’s picture after both Irene Dunne and Ginger Rogers turned it down.

Davis plays a repressed spinster cowering under the heels of her tyrannical mother (Gladys Cooper). She is given a new lease on life by a kindly psychiatrist (Claude Rains) and a shipboard romance with an unhappily married man (Paul Henreid). She returns home a completely changed woman no longer in fear of her mother. Both Davis and Cooper received Oscar nominations for their towering performances. Composer Max Steiner (Gone with the Wind, Casablanca) received the second of his three Oscars for his rapturous score. The others were for 1935’s The Informer, and 1944’s Since You Went Away.

Extras include two radio adaptations, an interview with critic Farran Smith Nehme on the making of the film, and a 1971 episode The Dick Cavett Show featuring Davis who pays tribute to Cooper who died the day before.

The Bells of St. Mary’s, given a 4K restoration for its Olive Signature Blu-ray release, was a rare A picture sequel from Hollywood’s Golden Age, which, like The Bride of Frankenstein a decade earlier, was superior to the film it followed.

James Whale’s 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein featured several of the same characters as his 1931 Frankenstein but only the director and star Boris Karloff were connected to both films. Conversely, Leo McCarey’s Oscar-winning 1944 film Going My Way only featured one of the characters, the easygoing priest played by Bing Crosby, that made it into 1945’s The Bells of St. Mary’s.

Despite Crosby’s top billing, the heart and soul of The Bells of St. Mary’s is Ingrid Bergman at her most luminous as the Sister Superior who clashes with Crosby over just about everything. Only the director of the Our Gang comedies, the man who introduced Laurel to Hardy, directed the Marx Brothers in their greatest film (Duck Soup), and gave Cary Grant his screen persona in The Awful Truth would have made the highlights of his film an extended improvised scene between kids six and under providing their own interpretation of the Nativity and an equally extended scene in which a nun (Bergman) teaches a bullied kid to box so that he can beat the priest’s favorite next time he picks on him.

The biggest box office hit of 1946 features superb supporting performances from, among others, Henry Travers as the local skinflint, Joan Carroll as a complicated student, and Una O’Connor, who was also in The Bride of Frankenstein, as Crosby’s wisecracking housekeeper.

Bergman won the New York Film Critics Circle award and a Golden Globe for her performance but had to settle for an Oscar nomination as did McCarey, Crosby, and the film itself. Crosby became the first actor to receive an Oscar nomination for playing the same character twice.

Extras include audio commentary from Crosby biographer Gary Giddens, “Faith and Film” in which film critic Sister Rose Pacette discusses the things the film got right and the things it didn’t, and “Before Sequel-itis” in which Professor Emily Cannon discusses the film in its historical Hollywood context.

Kino Lorber has released Blu-rays of The Holly and the Ivy and Christmas in July

Released in the U.K. in 1952, the U.S. in 1954, George More O’Ferrall’s The Holly and the Ivy is about as somber a Christmas movie as you are ever likely to find. Although it revolves around a family reunion, it is not a happy one, but if anything, it’s even more relevant today than it was then.

Celia Johnson is at her best as the put-upon middle-aged daughter of an Anglican parson who is the sole support of her recently widowed father (Ralph Richardson) and whose fiancé (John Gregson) must relocate due to his job. Her future happiness depends on whether her successful sister (Margaret Leighton) will quit her job and take her place so that she can marry Gregson. The alternative of finding outside help for the somewhat senile Richardson is out of the question. There are strong performances from all including Denholm Elliott as Johnson and Leighton’s soldier brother, Margaret Halston as Richardson’s worldly-wise widowed sister-in-law, and Maureen Delaney as his abrasive spinster sister.

Commentary is provided by film historian Jeremy Arnold.

Preston Sturges’ 1940 screwball comedy Christmas in July about a young slogan writer (Dick Powell) who wins a windfall in a radio contest was only his second film as a director, but it already had critics comparing him to Frank Capra. The trouble is, the Capra film it most resembles is Pocketful of Miracles, Capra’s last and least successful comedy. Sturges, however, would soon make his masterpieces, The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels.

Commentary is provided by film historian Samm Deighan.

This week’s new releases include The Goldfinch and The Story of Temple Drake.