Dark Waters may not be at the top of anyone’s list of the best films of 2019, but it may be the most important. Directed by Todd Haynes (Far from Heaven, Carol, Wonderstruck), the film is about Rob Bilott, the corporate defense attorney who successfully sued DuPont on behalf of its Parkersburg, West Virginia victims of toxic pollution.

Mark Ruffalo, Oscar-nominated for 2014’s Foxcatcher in which he played a victim of the DuPont family, stars as Bilott in one of his best performances. Oscar winner Anne Hathaway (Les Misérables) co-stars as his wife with Oscar winner Tim Robbins (Mystic River) and Bill Pullman (Battle of the Sexes) also receiving star billing, but it’s Bill Camp (Joker) as Bilott’s primary complainant who gives the film’s most riveting performance aside from Ruffalo as a bull of a man reduced to a cancer-ridden wheelchair-bound relic of his old self in the film’s later scenes.

Camp plays a farmer, a friend of Ruffalo’s grandmother, who lost 90 cows to a mysterious illness that eventually affects Camp and other residents of his community. Investigations lead to the discovery of DuPont dumping chemicals in the water near Camp’s farm. These chemicals are eventually found to be related to the chemicals used in the Manhattan Project to create the first atomic bomb which DuPont later used in everything from cookware to paint. Most damning of all, DuPont knew about the hazards of its chemicals and covered them up for decades. It’s estimated that these chemicals are now in 99% of the world’s population.

Camp’s case leads to a class action lawsuit against DuPont which agrees to a settlement contingent on medical analysis of members of the class which takes seven years to complete after which DuPont reneges on the agreement, arguing that each member of the class must sue separately. Ruffalo takes them on one by one, but after the first three result in larger settlements than DuPont anticipated, they agree to settle with all members of the class.

Worth noting are two more outstanding supporting performances, those of Victor Garber as a particularly odious DuPont executive and Mare Winningham as a woman whose first husband died of the “Teflon flu” related to his job at the chemical plant.

Dark Waters is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Both the title and merchandising of Brian Kirk’s 21 Bridges is misleading, giving the impression that the film takes place predominately on the twenty-one bridges leading to and from Manhattan. While there is some activity on the bridges, the title merely refers to the closing of the bridges for four hours from approximately 1 to 5 am while the police hunt for two police killers trapped within the confines of lower Manhattan.

Chadwick Boseman stars as a prominent detective, the son of a hero cop, who is put in charge of the investigation. Sienna Miller is the cop from the local precinct assigned to assist him and Oscar winner J.K. Simmons (Whiplash) is her precinct captain. The cop killers are played by Taylor Kitsch and Stephan James.

Boseman (Black Panther) and James (If Beale Street Could Talk) are both terrific in well-written roles, one as a sympathetic albeit wary veteran cop and the other as a sympathetic albeit weary young man drawn into a situation beyond his control. Simmons and Kitsch are also excellent. The one annoying cast member is New York-born, London-raised Miller (American Sniper) whose dese-dem-and-dose fake accent is beyond grating.

21 Bridges is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

A surprisingly accurate and good war movie, Roland Emmerich’s Midway is far superior to the heavily fictionalized 1976 film of the same name in which Charlton Heston was top-billed as a fictional character with Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, and Glenn Ford co-starred as admirals Nimitz, Halsey, and Spruance, respectively.

It had been feared that the notoriously uneven Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, Stonewall) would produce something as laughably fake as Michael Bay’s 2001 film Pearl Harbor, but that’s not the case. Emmerich’s Midway features lots of computer-generated imagery (CGI) but not mindlessly so, it consists mostly of genuinely moving, often frightening air and sea battles.

The excellent cast includes Ed Skrein, Patrick Wilson, Luke Evans, Nick Jonas, and Darren Criss as real-life, if not particularly well-known, heroes of the battle of Midway. Woody Harrelson, Dennis Quaid, and Jake Weber played Nimitz, Halsey, and Spruance, respectively. Aaron Eckhart played Jimmy Doolittle whose character was mentioned, but not shown in the 1976 film.

Both versions of Midway are available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Frozen II is one of the most beautifully animated films of all time. Its story is not much different from that of the original Frozen and its music similarly as lovely. It’s available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Arrow has released a Blu-ray update of Robert Altman’s Kansas City and Kino Lorber a two-for-one Blu-ray update of two Alec Guinness films, The Captain’s Paradise and Barnacle Bill.

Altman returned to the city of his birth to make 1996’s Kansas City, a crime drama set in 1934. Although it features a terrific jazz score, the narrative is a rather silly story about the wife of a gangster who kidnaps a politician’s wife in hopes of getting the kidnapped woman’s husband to negotiate the release of her husband from the black mob who kidnapped him and threatens to kill him for committing a robbery in blackface.

Harry Belafonte as the mob boss and owner of the jazz club, Michael Murphy as the politician, Miranda Richardson as his kidnapped wife, and Dermot Mulroney as the kidnapped gangster are all good, but the film is torture to sit through whenever Jennifer Jason Leigh as the gangster’s wife is on screen. Unfortunately, that’s most of the film.

Leigh is at her hammiest here, not only employing her well-known facial tics, but hunching her back, shrugging her shoulders, scrunching and rubbing her nose, and yelling and screaming her dialogue throughout.

1953’s The Captain’s Paradise is the better known of the two Guinness films. He’s delightfully droll as the seaman with a wife in one port and a sexy girlfriend in another. Celia Johnson, in a rare comic role, and Yvonne De Carlo in arguably her best role, are the wife and sexpot, respectively.

1957’s Barnacle Bill, released in the U.S. as All at Sea, features Guinness as a seasick captain with cameos as his seagoing father, grandfather, and great-grandfather in flashbacks. It’s a pleasant time-killer – nothing more, nothing less.

This week’s new releases include Bombshell and Uncut Gems.