Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg are actors so associated with Boston, Massachusetts, the city of their birth, that it’s interesting to find them both expanding their repertoires to play characters from western states in their latest films.

Damon plays an out-of-work oil worker from Stillwater, Oklahoma who travels to Marseilles, France to help his estranged daughter serving a sentence for murder in Stillwater. Walhberg plays a working-class father from a small town in Oregon who embarks on a walk across the country in tribute to his deceased son in Joe Bell.

Damon’s character in Stillwater was an absentee father to daughter Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine) most of her life. She was brought up by her maternal grandmother who, too ill to visit her in the fifth year of her nine-year sentence for killing her roommate and female lover, finances a trip for Damon instead. The intended brief trip becomes an extended stay as Damon begins a search for the man Breslin has identified as the murderer but who the police can’t find. While doing so, he becomes involved with local actress Camille Cotton (Allied) and her young daughter, Lilou Siauvaud, becoming a surrogate father to the little girl. Tensions mount and the man is found, but was he the murderer?

Co-written by Tom McCarthy (Spotlight), who also directed, the film is both a good character study and an intriguing mystery up to a point. As to what that point is, let’s just say that Amanda Knox, whose real-life story it parallels, wasn’t pleased. Like all of McCarthy’s films, though, the acting is superb.

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

Walhlberg’s real-life character in Joe Bell loves his wife Connie Britton and sons Reid Miller and Maxwell Jenkins. He is supportive of his gay older son but is embarrassed by some of his actions and doesn’t take his complaints of bullying seriously until it’s too late. After Miller takes his own life, Wahlberg is despondent until he gets the idea to walk across country to New York which is where his son had wanted to go. Along the way he stops to give speeches in schools and other public places on bullying. Six months into his journey, he is stopped by a small-town Colorado sheriff played by Gary Sinise (Forrest Gump) with whom he has more in common than he could have imagined.

Although the film contains scenes of great power, its structure is awkward. Wahlberg’s speeches come across as preaching to the choir. Everybody loves him, if only he had shown that love to his son while he was alive is a theme that is repeated over and over. The screenplay by Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry, who won Oscars for Brokeback Mountain, is hampered by having to stay close to the real-life events without dramatic embellishment. It was McMurtry’s last credit before his death earlier this year at 84. It was directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green who is a strong contender for an Oscar nomination for the highly anticipated King Richard.

Joe Bell is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Warner Archive has released a Blu-ray of Dinner at Eight, one of the seminal films of the 1930s.

The 1933 film was MGM’s second all-star cast film following 1932’s Oscar-winning Grand Hotel. The star-studded cast is headed by Marie Dressler (Min and Bill) as a retired musical comedy star, John Barrymore (A Bill of Divorcement) as an aging film star, Jean Harlow (Red Dust) as the dimwitted wife of tycoon Wallace Beery (The Champ), Lionel Barrymore (You Can’t Take It with You) as a dying shipping magnate, and Billie Burke (Merrily We Live) as his supercilious party-giving wife. Also starring are Lee Tracy, Edmund Lowe, Madge Evans, Karen Morley, Louise Closser Hale, Grant Williams, Phillips Holmes, and those old scene-stealers May Robson (Bringing Up Baby) and Elizabeth Patterson (Sing You Sinners).

The screenplay by Frances Marion and Herman Mankiewicz was adapted from the play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. It was directed by George Cukor (The Women). It’s just as much a treat now as it was then and has been down through all the years since.

Less interesting is Warner Archive’s other new 1933 Blu-ray Mary Stevens, M.D. .

Of all the Kay Francis films at Warner’s disposal, including One Way Passage and Trouble in Paradise, it’s difficult to understand why they chose this by-the-numbers weepie to bring the largely forgotten Francis to Blu-ray in which she plays a dedicated female doctor opposite Lyle Talbot as her not so dedicated male counterpart. The best thing about it is Glenda Farrell (Mystery of the Wax Museum) as Francis’ supportive nurse.

Kino Lorber has also released unexpected Blu-rays of four films of the era as well.

1931’s The Cheat, directed by George Abbott, was a notorious flop starring Tallulah Bankhead, Irving Pichel, and Harvey Stephens in a remake of Cecil B. DeMille’s still potent 1915 silent film of the same name that made Sessue Hayakawa an international star as the Chinese seducer of a married white woman. Changing the character to a mid-western businessman steeped in Chinese artifacts dulls the impact and renders it ridiculous.

1932’s Devil and the Deep, directed by Marion Gering, gave Bankhead more to work with as the wife of tyrannical naval commander Charles Laughton who destroys the life of Cary Grant who may or may not have been having an affair with her, and then tries to do the same thing to Fredric March. All four stars acquit themselves quite well here, though all would soon go on to bigger and better things.

1932’s Hot Saturday, directed by William A. Seiter, stars Nancy Carroll as a virtuous small town bank teller whose life is all but destroyed by malicious gossip when she innocently spends the night at wealthy Cary Grant’s house after a party. Randolph Scott is her unsuspecting friend who returns to the town after being away for some time and almost marries her before learning of the scandal. Feisty Carroll survives it all with her natural charm while up-and-comers Grant and Scott almost match her verve.

1933’s Torch Singer, directed by Alexander Hall and George Somnes, gives us Claudette Colbert in her first starring role as an unwed mother who becomes a sensational nightclub singer and then an even bigger star in a children’s radio program. Will she find the child she gave up when she was down and out? Will David Manners (Dracula), the man who abandoned her not knowing she was pregnant, return? You’ll just have to see it to find out.

All four of the Kino releases contain highly informative commentaries.

This week’s new Blu-ray releases include Pig and The Crown: Season 4.