Studios and other rights holders continue to be stingy with new video releases. You must either see new films in theatres or streaming on your TV. Blu-ray and increasingly 4K UHD Blu-ray upgrades of films previously released on DVD make up the bulk of home video releases now.

Among the new 4K UHD releases, all of which look and sound better than they ever have, in reverse chronological order, are Martin Scorsese’s 2006 Oscar winner The Departed; Gus Van Sant’s 1995 sendup of TV celebrity To Die For; Herbert Ross’s 1989 tearjerker Steel Magnolias; Joel Coen’s 1985 breakthrough film Blood Simple; and Robert Altman’s 1971 new style western McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

Most critics will tell you that Martin Scorsese’s best films were 1980’s Raging Bull and 1990’s GoodFellas, both of which lost Oscars to films directed by actors making their directorial debuts, Robert Redford’s Ordinary People and Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves. Both Redford and Costner took home Oscars for their direction while Scorsese had to wait 26 years after losing to Redford and 16 years after losing to Costner to win his own Oscar for directing The Departed which also won Best Picture.

On a technical level, the critics may be right that Raging Bull and GoodFellas are more cinematic but on a pure enjoyment level, The Departed is more fun. The film’s two hours and thirty-one minutes zip by without a dull moment unlike Scorsese’s more recent films, 2019’s three hours and twenty-nine-minute The Irishman and 2023’s three hours and twenty-six minute Killers of the Flower Moon, both of which are extremely bloated.

The Departed is a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs about an undercover policeman infiltrating the mob and a mole in the police department feeding information to the same mob.

Scorsese’s film is set in South Boston and the mob is an Irish gang led by Jack Nicholson.

Leonardo DiCaprio is the undercover cop and Matt Damon is the mole. Mark Wahlberg and Martin Sheen are the high-level police officers who are the only ones who know that disgraced former cop DiCaprio is working undercover for them. Vera Farmiga is a police psychiatrist treating DiCaprio while having an affair with Damon. They are all performing at their terrific best with Wahlberg shockingly the only one of the cast who was nominated for an Oscar. DiCaprio, who was an expected nominee, was nominated instead for the inferior Blood Diamond.

Gus Van Sant was a well-established director of videos and short films when he made his acclaimed feature film debut with 1989’s Drugstore Cowboy, starring Matt Dillon, followed by 1991’s even more highly critically acclaimed My Own Private Idaho, starring River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves. After his 1993 flop, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, he returned to critical favor with 1995’s To Die For, starring Nicole Kidman, Joaquin Phoenix, Casey Affleck, and Matt Dillon.

Kidman, already an established star in such films as Dead Calm and Billy Bathgate advanced her career considerably with her portrayal of a not-too-bright smalltown New Hampshire TV weather girl who tires of her sweet-natured husband (Dillon) and plots to have him killed by teenage fans Phoenix and Affleck.

Played as a black comedy, the film is based on a book that was itself based on a real-life 1990 murder. Van Sant cast Casey Affleck over his brother Ben and their friend Matt Damon because he still had the Boston accent that both Ben and Matt had lost. It was Casey who brought him Ben and Matt’s script for Good Will Hunting, which would be his next film.

Herbert Ross’s Steel Magnolias was marketed as a comedy and does have many comic moments, but it is essentially a tragedy based on Robert Harlin’s play about the death of his sister.

Sally Field and Oscar-nominated Julia Roberts star as mother and daughter not unlike Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger in 1983’s Terms of Endearment for which MacLaine won an Oscar and Winger was nominated. Already a two-time Oscar winner for Norma Rae and Places in the Heart, Field was not expected to receive an Oscar nomination this time and she didn’t.

The supporting cast is headed by Dolly Parton as the local hairdresser, MacLaine as the town big mouth, Daryl Hannah as the new girl in town, and Olympia Dukakis as a devil-may-care widow. Ross had previously directed MacLaine and Tom Skerritt, who plays Field’s husband, as a married couple in 1977’s The Turning Point.

Joel Coen’s first film Blood Simple was a film festival hit in 1984 and early 1985 before going into general release in 1985. It was also the first film of Frances McDormand who auditioned for the part of the film’s leading lady at the suggestion of Holly Hunter. She and Coen fell in love and married upon completion of the film before its release.

Basically, a four-character piece, John Getz, McDormand, Dan Hedaya, and M. Emmet Walsh play, respectively, a bartender, his boss’ wife, his boss, and a private detective hired by the boss to find out who’s been sleeping with his wife. Infidelity leads to murder and murder leads to additional mayhem in this engrossing thriller.

Robert Altman was a veteran TV director whose 1970 film M*A*S*H made him a film director of the highest order. His new style war movie, one without a single battle scene, led to his new style 1971 western, McCabe & Mrs. Miller based on a novel called McCabe about an entrepreneur at a turn of the 20th Century in a Washington State mining town. He’s played by Warren Beatty in the film. Mrs. Miller, whose name was added to the title to emphasize the participation of Julie Christe who played the town’s new madam.

Despite Christie’s billing, her role isn’t very big. Her Oscar nomination that year should have been for her more substantial performance in The Go-Between, not for this film, which doesn’t really become interesting until the last half hour.

The Departed was released on 4K UHD by Warner Bros., Steel Magnolias by Sony, and To Die For, Blood Simple, and McCabe & Mrs. Miller by Criterion.

Happy viewing.