The Criterion Collection has released a 4K Blu-ray edition of Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise. This is the first time since the film had a home video release since the MGM 20th anniversary edition of the 1991 film was released on standard Blu-ray in January 2014. This is the best the film has ever looked or is likely to look.

Nominated for 6 Oscars including Best Director, two Best Actresses (Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis), Original Screenplay, Cinematography, and Editing, its only win was for Callie Khouri’s screenplay.

Sarandon and Davis play friends who decide to go on a weekend adventure without telling the respective men in their lives and end up finding more than they bargained for.

Davis is molested in the parking lot of an Arkansas roadhouse where she is rescued by Sarandon who shoots and kills the attacker. The two hit the road intent on driving to Mexico, but first they have to get their hands on money. Sarandon, a waitress in a diner who has saved $6,500, calls her musician boyfriend (Michael Madsen) and asks him to wire that amount to her in Oklahoma City and she will reimburse him when she gets back. Instead of wiring the money, he shows up to give it to her. Sarandon spends the night with him while entrusting the money with Davis who unbeknownst to her has hooked up with a hitchhiker (Brad Pitt) who steals the money. In order to make up for the lost money, Davis holds up a gas station and is caught on camera making things much worse. That’s only the beginning.

The thrill-a-minute film boasts fine performances not only from Sarandon and Davis, but Harvey Keitel as a dedicated policeman, Madsen, Pitt, and Christopher McDonald as Davis’ dimwitted husband.

The Criterion release also includes a standard Blu-ray and a second Blu-ray with all the extras you could want.

Kino Lorber has released a 4K Blu-ray edition of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter. This is the first time the 1955 release has had a home video release since Criterion released it on Blu-ray in April 2014.

A critical and commercial failure in its original release, the film has long held a hallowed place in film history.

Laughton’s film is a superb look at good and evil in the midst of the Great Depression. Robert Mitchum stars as a misogynistic serial-killer preacher with a sharp switchblade whose latest targets are the widow (Shelley Winters) and children (Billy Chapin, Sally Jane Bruce) of a fellow thief who had killed two people and was hanged for his crimes after letting it slip to Mitchum that he told his son where the money from his last robbery was hidden.

Lillian Gish in a great late career performance plays a kindly woman who has adopted many lost children since the beginning of the depression. Chapin and Bruce seek her out after Mitchum has murdered their mother. She will become their sole protector.

From James Agee’s screenplay from Davis Grubb’s novel to Stanley Cortez’s superb cinematography to Laughton’s assured direction, this is a one-of-a-kind film. Sadly, Laughton’s first film as a director would be his only one thanks to the film’s failure.

Special features are on an accompanying standard Blu-ray.

Warner Archive has released four new-to-Blu-ray upgrades, one from each decade from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina was Greta Garbo’s return to film after having briefly retired, having retreated back to Sweden. Featuring one of her best performances, MGM premiered it in New York at the end of 1933 but did not release it in Los Angeles until January 1934, effectively keeping it out of both the 1933 and 1934 Oscar races.

Louis B. Mayer was forced to give in to Garbo’s demands and cast Garbo’s friend and Mayer’s nemesis John Gilbert opposite her. Together, they were magic again as the Swedish queen and Spanish envoy she loves but Mayer continued his petty vendetta against Gilbert by listing him as a supporting player in the film and ignoring him in the trailer, listing only Garbo and several supporting players who were billed below him. The film has rightfully long been considered one of Garbo’s and Gilbert’s greatest.

Joseph Losey’s The Boy with Green Hair had a similar fate. RKO’s vindictive new owner, Howard Hughes, who unsuccessfully tried to mute the film’s anti-war message, opened it in late 1948 in New York to strong reviews but held back its Los Angeles opening until 1949.

Dean Stockwell had one of his many great child roles as the title character, a World War II war orphan whose overnight hair color change delivered a strong message against war, racism, and intolerance. Pat O’Brien was equally fine as Stockwell’s caregiver, a former vaudevillian, now a singing waiter. Robert Ryan and Barbara Hale co-starred as a doctor and a teacher, respectively.

Co-directed by Compton Bennett and Andrew Morton, 1950’s King Solomon’s Mines was the most successful of the many film versions of H. Rider Haggard’s famed novel. Nominated for 3 Oscars, including Best Picture, Color Cinematography, and Editing, it won in the latter two categories.

Filmed on location in Africa over the course of five months, Stewart Granger starred as hunter and guide Allan Quartermain opposite Deborah Kerr as the woman who hires him to find her missing husband. Richard Carlson, Hugo Haas, and Lowell Gilmore co-star with native Africans, mostly from Nigeria and the Congo, fillin out the remainder of the cast.

Vincente Minnelli’s 1963 film The Courtship of Eddie’s Father was a showcase for 8-year-old Ronny Howard, acting since he was 2, and then a major TV performer in The Andy Griffith Show (1960-1968).

Howard is terrific as the precocious kid who plays matchmaker between his widowed father (Glenn Ford) and the kindly neighbor across the hall (Shirley Jones). The property later became a popular TV series from 1969-1972 with Bill Bixby as the father and Brandon Cruz as Eddie.

The story itself is pleasant but predictable. Jones’ character was not in the TV series in which the principal female character was Bixby’s maid played by Miyoshi Umeki.

Happy viewing.