Florence Pugh’s two high profile films of 2022, The Wonder and Don’t Worry Darling, are both available for streaming now. The Wonder, which is the better of the two, is streaming on Netflix while Don’t Worry Darling is streaming on HBO Max and is also available for purchase on DVD and Blu-ray.

The Wonder is based on the 2016 novel by Emma Donoghue (The Room) with a screenplay by Donoghue, Alice Birch, and the film’s director, Sebastian Lelio (Fantastic Woman). It takes place in Western Ireland in 1862, ten years after the end of the Great Famine.

Pugh plays an English nurse who has been hired by the local town council to observe a young girl who hasn’t eaten in four months. She is not allowed to feed her against her will but may give her food if she asks for it. The girl, played by Kila Lord Cassidy, claims she is being kept alive by manna from Heaven. Although Pugh pleads with the family and the council that the girl be taken to a hospital, they refuse.

The girl’s parents believe that God takes the best young children to be his personal angels and they are blessed, having already lost their son and will be double blessed when their daughter is called as well. The council has motives of its own. The religious fanatics want to have the girl’s long pre-death survival without eating declared a miracle. The more scientific minded members of the council want to able to have her body autopsied to prove that the whole thing has been a hoax and that she had been fed small amounts of food on the long, slow road to her death.

Nominated for 12 British Independent Film Awards including Best Independent Film, Director, Lead Performance (Pugh), Breakthrough Performance (Lord Cassidy), Screenplay, Cinematography, Costume Design, Hair & Makeup, Score, Production Design, Sound, and Ensemble, the film doesn’t seem to be high on Oscar prediction lists, at least not yet.

Pugh and Lord Cassidy, the daughter of actors John Lord and Elaine Cassidy, who plays her mother in the film, are terrific together. The bond they form is reminiscent of the one formed by Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker. Not to give the ending away, but good triumphs over evil thanks to the tenacity of the film’s heroine beautifully underplayed by Pugh.

The character Pugh plays in Don’t Worry Darling, which takes place ninety years later in the 1950s, is anything but underplayed. This time, she’s the perfect wife with a perfect husband (Harry Styles) living the perfect life in a sunny company town controlled by founder Chris Pine in a very creepy performance.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, who plays Pugh’s next-door neighbor, the film is rich in atmosphere and gives Pugh, as its main player, a lot to do as she slowly realizes all is not what it seems in her bright new world. With underpinnings of The Stepford Wives and Pleasantville, she finally figures out what is going on and deals with it. It’s another tour-de-force for the actress but not one anywhere near as profoundly moving as the one she gives in The Wonder.

Co-directed by Maya Forbes and Wallace Wolodarsky, The Good House, now out on DVD and Blu-ray, is a film with a troubled production history.

Originally intended as a vehicle for Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro for Universal, the DreamWorks film ended up with Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline as the leads with a release by Lionsgate.

Weaver and Kline may not be as high profile as Streep and De Niro, but they are still actors of distinction acting together in their third collaboration following 1993’s Dave and 1997’s The Ice Storm. Neither, however, is used as effectively as they might have been in his rambling comedy-drama about a Massachusetts realtor played by Weaver and the wealthy local businessman who was once her lover, played by Kline. Kline is in and out of the story dominated by Weaver who constantly breaks the fourth wall to tell us what is really going on in scenes where people may not be telling the truth, which is very annoying.

The film’s comedy is labored, and the ending is a downer. For a better time, take in Nicholas Stoller’s Bros, which has been released on DVD and Blu-ray a month ahead of its scheduled release date.

Heavily promoted as the first gay romantic comedy to be given a wide release by a major studio, Bros was a box-office failure despite its strong reviews. It just didn’t sell in large swaths of the U.S.

Writer-director Billy Eichner has something of a strident personality but he’s fine in most of the film. Only in the scene in which he is high on steroids is he hard to take. His co-star, Luke Macfarlane, however, is his charming self throughout, delivering the kind of easygoing performance that has sustained his career through fourteen Hallmark movies following his breakout role on TV’s Brothers and Sisters in which he played the lover, then husband, of Matthew Rhys as Sally Field’s gay son.

Maintaining its position as the reigning purveyor of classic films on Blu-ray, Kino Lorber has released Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XI

Contained in this release are 1948’s A Woman’s Vengeance, 1950’s I Was a Shoplifter, and 1956’s Behind the High Wall.

Zoltan Korda’s A Woman’s Vengeance with a screenplay by Aldous Huxley from his novel, is a suspense classic with Charles Boyer as a ne’er-do-well convicted of the murder of his wife who may have committed suicide or been murdered by Boyer’s mistress (Ann Blyth), their neighbor (Jessica Tandy), or her nurse (Mildred Natwick).

Tandy is the standout in the film released at the time of her Broadway triumph in A Streetcar Named Desire but it did not translate to a major screen career. Although she would make occasional film appearances it wasn’t until 1985’s Cocoon and her subsequent Oscar-winning role in 1989’s Driving Miss Daisy that she became a genuine film star.

Charles Lamont’s I Was a Shoplifter is a routine thriller with an interesting cast. It stars Scott Brady as an undercover cop, Mona Freeman as the kleptomaniac daughter of a judge, Andrea King as the leader of a gang of thieves, and pre-stardom Tony Curtis as one of the bad guys. Rock Hudson has a bit part as a store detective.

Abner Biberman’s Behind the High Wall is a taut thriller that provided Tom Tully with a rare leading role as a warden who was also a thief. Sylvia Sidney plays his wheelchair bound wife with her trademark misty eyes. John Gavin, outstanding in only his second film, is the innocent kidnapped driver of a getaway truck sentenced to death as an accessory to the killing of a cop, the same incident for which he is suspected of stealing the money the warden stole.