Kino Lorber has released 1945’s Blood on the Sun on Blu-ray.

Made by James Cagney’s production company, the film about a reporter’s efforts to expose Japanese Prime Minister Baron Gi-ichi Tanaka’s militarist strategic plan for world domination prepared for Emperor Hirohito in 1929, was the actor’s most successful film between his Oscar winning performance in 1942’s Yankee Dandy and his return to gangster roles in 1949’s White Heat.

Consigned to public domain hell in 1973, the film has only been available since then in badly sourced bargain basement videos until now. Although the Oscar winner for Black-and-White Art Direction and Set Design over The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Keys of the Kingdom looks and sounds great on its new release, the film itself does not live up to its once highly held reputation.

Celebrated as Hollywood’s first martial arts film, Cagney studied judo for his role of a tough reporter for which he did his own stunts, but the film doesn’t hold a candle to more modern martial arts films. The film has also fallen out of favor because of its casting of Caucasian actors in Asian roles. Sylvia Sidney, in her last starring role, plays a Eurasian double agent and Robert Armstrong (King Kong) plays Tanaka with false teeth that fit so badly he couldn’t be understood without later dubbing his own voice.

Frank Lloyd (Mutiny on the Bounty) would only direct two more films, both minor efforts in the mid-1950s. Sidney’s next important role would be her comeback in 1973’s Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams for which she received her only Oscar nomination. Cagney continued to be a major star but his days of starring in one hit after another were behind him. His best films to come, in addition to White Heat, include Love Me or Leave Me, Mister Roberts, Man of a Thousand Faces, Shake Hands with the Devil, and One, Two, Three, all produced between 1955 and 1960.

Paramount has released a 4K Ultra HD upgrade of Herbert Ross’ 1984 musical drama Footloose, based on a real-life incident in a religiously conservative Oklahoma town in 1978. This one continues to grab audiences thanks to a catchy score that includes two Oscar-nominated songs, “Footloose” and “Let’s Hear It for the Boy,” as well as the star-making performance of Kevin Bacon as the boy who refuses to sit still.

Lori Singer, John Lithgow, Dianne Wiest, Chris Penn, Sarah Jessica Parker, John Laughlin, Jim Youngs, and Frances Lee McCain co-star.

Choreographer-director Ross (The Turning Point, Steel Magnolias) made his directorial debut with the 1958 TV production of the Leonard Bernstein-Betty Comden-Adolph Green musical Wonderful Town in which Rosalind Russell reprised her Tony Award-winning role.

Russell is one of the stars featured in Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection Volume 4, featuring her and Cary Grant in 1940’s His Girl Friday; Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Sidney Poitier in 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner; Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer; Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen in 1984’s Starman; Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in 1993’s Sleepless in SeattlePunch-Drunk Love. All films are presented in pristine upgrades of previously released versions, each with an accompanying Blu-ray featuring mostly unique extras.

Running the gamut over a sixty-three-year period of Hollywood history, these films remarkably do not overlap in talent. No actors or directors are repeated across productions, although Grant does appear in a scene from 1957’s An Affair to Remember opposite Deborah Kerr in Sleepless in Seattle, which brought renewed popularity to Leo McCarey’s classic romance.

Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday is the celebrated remake of Lewis Milestone’s 1931 film of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s Broadway smash The Front Page in which the male reporter is changed to a female reporter with Russell and Grant reprising Pat O’Brien and Adolphe Menjou’s roles. Ralph Bellamy, who received an Oscar nomination for McCarey’s The Awful Truth three years earlier in support of Irene Dunne and Grant, delightfully plays pretty much the same role in support of Russell and Grant here.

The Criterion Blu-ray edition of His Girl Friday featured Milestone’s The Front Page as an extra. The Columbia edition does not, but does feature brief career histories of Russell, Grant, and Hawks among its many extras.

Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner imports commentary from Twilight Time’s previously released Blu-ray. The commentary dwells extensively on the careers of the film’s cast as well as Kramer’s. Although the three leads are covered in the then-contemporary Love Story for Today, the bulk of the extras on the accompanying Blu-ray relate mostly to Kramer.

Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer puts most of its extras on the 4K Ultra HD disc but does give us a making-of documentary on the accompanying Blu-ray.

In addition to Hoffman and Streep’s Oscar-winning performances, the extras also celebrate the Oscar-nominated performances of Jane Alexander and child star Justin Henry.

John Carpenter’s Starman is comprised of four discs, the feature in 4K Ultra HD and a Blu-ray with extensive extras about the film about an innocent alien in love with a human girl as well as two more 4K Ultra UHD discs featuring the 1986-1987 TV series produced by Michael Douglas starring Robert Hays (Airplane!) in the title role and 14-year-old Christopher Daniel Barnes (1994-1998’s animated Spider-Man series) as his estranged son, who joins him in his search for his long lost love, the boy’s mother.

Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle gives us Nora and Delia’s commentary from the film’s original DVD release as well as a 30th anniversary critic’s commentary with Karen Has and Davis Sims as well as a conversation on the film with Gary Foster and Meg Ryan.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love gives us six featurettes on the accompanying Blu-ray to the film in which Adam Sandler plays a socially impaired man dominated by seven sisters in his most acclaimed role. Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Luis Guzman co-star.

Happy viewing.