Martin Scorsese deserves respect as one of the premier film preservationists of our time. As a film-maker himself he has had one of the longest and most successful careers of any of his contemporaries except perhaps Steven Spielberg, but if Spielberg’s limitation is, as some would say, that he pulls his punches, Scorsese’s is that he seemingly has no limitation, he will cram just about anything into his films, like it or not.

Spielberg has been criticized for holding back on the dark side of life in such films as The Color Purple and War Horse while Scorsese is sometimes criticized for wallowing in the muck as far back as his critical breakthrough, 1973’s Mean Streets.

Scorsese’s latest, The Wolf of Wall Street, out now on Blu-ray and standard DVD, is certainly guilty of that wallowing. A three hour tale of sex, drugs and money, the film shocked many members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who saw it in previews and railed against it, vowing to keep it from winning any Oscars. There is, however, nothing in the film that you can’t find in your favorite cable TV series. What is shocking is the film’s point of view or more precisely lack of point of view. It is three hours of debauchery without let-up. The film is told from the perspective of its protagonist, brilliantly played by Leonardo DiCaprio, a hedonist with no moral compass. He makes millions at the expense of people who lose their life savings in his schemes. He spends that money on houses, cars, boats and hookers and on the drugs that go up his nose and into the orifices of the various hookers. When he’s finally caught at one of his frauds he spends two years in a country club prison thanks to ratting out his friends, after which he finds a new scheme to bilk people of their hard earned money. The only character in the film with a sliver of decency is the FBI agent (Kyle Chandler) who finally takes him down. The screenplay, however, presents Chandler’s character as something of a schmuck. The last shot of him is on a subway train looking sad and lonely, giving credence to DiCaprio’s depiction of him as having a dull, boring life outside of his job.

The film is never as shocking as it is soulless. It’s my least favorite Scorsese film since 2002’s Gangs of New York, the first of five films to date the director has made with DiCaprio.

While Gangs of New York wallowed in violence as relentlessly as The Wolf of Wall Street wallows in greed, my main objection to it was its historical inaccuracy which made Civil War era New York look like such a hapless and hopeless place that it’s sheer wonder that the city survived let alone became the cultural center of the world it is. The Wolf of Wall Street may be more historically accurate but its New York is one of license and privilege that is just as far removed from most people’s every-day reality that in the end it seems just as phony as DiCaprio’s character. The saving grace of viewing it on home video is that you can pause or stop it, take a break and get back to it later. It beats being forced to sit and watch it straight through its three hour length.

Much easier on the senses are two of last year’s best foreign language films, also new to Blu-ay and standard DVD.

Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is in every way a tribute to the great Italian writer-director, Federico Fellini. Stylistically it resembles Fellini’s late color masterwork, Amarcord (I Remember); thematically it resembles his mid-career black-and-white masterwork, La Dolce Vita (the sweet life) albeit in reverse. La Dolce Vita was about a middle-aged reporter (Marcello Mastroianni) seduced by the Roman high life of the day. The Great Beauty is about a man who has just turned sixty-five who was seduced by that life years ago, a writer who has written only one book because he has been too busy having fun.

The film is dazzling in its imagery from tourists dropping dead while taking pictures to pretentious performance artists to the rich and famous dancing their nights away in discoes. Whereas La Dolce Vita seemed to be in awe of its religious symbols while poking fun at them – the Pope’s private rooms at the Vatican and the Christ statue being flown by a helicopter – The Great Beauty seems to be in awe of its religious figures while shaking a finger at them – a senile Cardinal said to be in line to be the next Pope and a saintly 103 year-old nun, a dead ringer for Mother Theresa who sleeps on the floor and eats only roots.

One can’t help but think that this is exactly the film Fellini would be making were he still alive and working in his early 90s.

It must have been a daunting task for Asghar Farhadi to come up with a worthy follow-up to his award-winning 2011 film A Separation but he proves more than up to the task with The Past, an emotionally riveting story about an Iranian man returning to his French Parisian wife in order to finalize their divorce.

Bérénice Bejo, Oscar nominated for 2011’s The Artist gives an award-worthy portrayal of a woman planning on entering into a fourth marriage as soon as her third is ending. She’s matched by Ali Mosaffa as her third and Tahar Rahim as her potential fourth. Pauline Burlet also impresses as her eldest daughter.

The film is presented as a mystery, though not a murder mystery. There are no bodies and no murders to solve, just ever-changing relationship issues.

Blu-ray upgrades of vintage films controlled by MGM consisting of post-1990 MGM films and United Artists films going back to the 1950s as well as Orion and other minor company releases are becoming more frequent. Two exceptional such new releases are Criterion’s sumptuous packaging of Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 classic, Persona and Twilight Time’s update of Sidney Lumet’s impactful 1977 film, Equus.

Persona is perhaps the second most analyzed film in history. Only Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane has been written about more.

Bergman’s film about spiritual and emotional transference between two women, an actress suddenly gone mute and her garrulous nurse, featured great performances by Bergman muses Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann. The packed Criterion release includes a visual essay of the film’s prologue by Bergman scholar Peter Cowie and new interviews with Ullmann and writer/director Paul Schrader as well as archival interviews with Bergman, Ullmann and Andersson. It also includes a 2012 documentary, Liv & Ingmar and a booklet containing among other things a 1977 interview with Andersson on the film’s mysteries.

Richard Burton earned his seventh Oscar nomination and Peter Firth his one and only for the highly combustible screen version of Peter Shaffer’s London and Broadway success, Equus directed by Sidney Lumet. Twilight Time’s stunning release includes an isolated soundtrack and commentary by film historians Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman.

One of actress-director Ida Lupino’s best remembered films, 1953’s The Bigamist has been restored for DVD by Film Chest, the distributer best known for Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Edmond O’Brien stars as the travelling salesman with a wife of eight years in San Francisco and a new one in Los Angeles. The performances of O’Brien and Joan Fontaine and Lupino as the wives make it compulsively watchable. Edmund Gwenn and Jane Darwell appear in support.

This week’s new releases include a re-mastered Blu-ray edition of Fargo and the Blu-ray debut of Once.