Warner Home Video has released a 4K UHD upgrade of Jan de Bont’s 1996 disaster film, Twister.

The film opens in 1969 during a devastating tornado that destroys a small Oklahoma town culminating in the death of the father of a young girl as he is sucked out of the family’s storm cellar. The girl grows up to be Helen Hunt, a quarter of a century later, the leader of a group of Oklahoma storm chasers, still trying to grapple with her father’s death.

The then-contemporary portion of the film begins with Hunt’s estranged husband Bill Paxton coming to pick up divorce papers so that they can be filed, and he can marry new fiancé Jami Gertz, a psychiatrist who has accompanied him on his quest.

During Paxton and Gertz’s visit, the first in a series of tornadoes strike the area, Hunt and her team are off with Paxton and Gertz in tow.

Co-written by the prolific Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, Coma) and his former wife, actress Anne-Marie Martin whose only writing credit it was, this was cinematographer de Bont’s first film as a director two years after his directorial debut with the 1994 thriller, Speed.

Twister’s script isn’t exactly brilliant writing, but the film does a good job of mitigating the film’s most terrifying scenes with well-placed humor,

Nominated for two Oscars for Sound and Visual Effects, the now 80-year-old de Bont says in a new interview accompanying the film that the star of the movie was the tornado(es). Perhaps, but the actors were impressive as well. Paxton, the year before Titanic and Hunt the year before As Good as It Gets make an engaging pair of battling former marrieds who you know still love each other. Gertz is a good sport as the other woman.

The supporting cast includes Philip Seymour Hoffman three years before Magnolia, Jeremy Davies two years before Saving Private Ryan, and Todd Field five years before directing In the Bedroom, as members of the crew. The great Lois Smith, who appeared opposite James Dean in East of Eden and Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, is a standout as Hunt’s aunt, graciously feeding the unexpected crew in her kitchen during a break in the storm.

The long-awaited sequel, Twisters reaches theaters 29 years later this week.

Sony Home Video has released a 4K UHD upgrade of John G. Avildsen’s 1984 coming-of-age action drama, The Karate Kid

Ralph Macchio starred as a Newark-to-Los Angeles transplant who is bullied by the kids in his new high school and in order to defend himself, is taught karate by his apartment house maintenance man played by veteran character actor Noriyuki “Pat” Morita in an Oscar-nominated performance.

The film also provided an early showcase for future Oscar nominee Elisabeth Shue (Leaving Las Vegas) as the girl Macchio has a crush on. William Zabka as the film’s principal villain caused almost as much of a sensation as Macchio.

The film, which still holds up, spawned three sequels and thirty-four years after the first film, the highly successful TV series, Cobra Kai starring Macchio and Zabka. The series begins its sixth season on Netflix this week.

The Criterion Collection has released a 4K UHD upgrade of David Lynch’s highly influential 1986 thriller, Blue Velvet.

Dark and disturbing, the film is an examination of the rot beneath the ruby of late twentieth century suburban America. Kyle MacLachlan, two years after Lynch’s Dune was supposed to make him a star, becomes one this time out.

MacLachlan plays a college student who finds a severed human ear in a field in his bucolic North Carolina town. He goes to the police, but the detective in the case tells him to do nothing, that they will handle the investigation. Working with a classmate, the detective’s daughter (Laura Dern), MacLachlan learns that the case involves a nightclub singer (Isabella Rossellini) known for her velvet voice.

Hiding out in Rossellini’s apartment, MacLachlan discovers that she is at the mercy of her gas-huffing, psychotic boyfriend (Dennis Hopper) and his gang of thugs that include Dean Stockwell and Brad Dourif, who have abducted her child.

Blue Velvet won numerous year-end awards for the film itself, Lynch’s direction, and the performances of Hopper, Rossellini, and Dern, as well as its breathtaking cinematography but shockingly received just one Oscar nomination for Lynch’s direction. Hopper received an Oscar nod for in the same year’s Hoosiers instead.

Criterion’s release comes with a ton of extras, most if not all, imported from previous home video releases of the film.

Kino Lorber has released another set of films given a Blu-ray upgrade in its Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema series. The nineteenth set of three includes Dark City, No Man of Her Own, and Beware, My Lovely.

1950’s Dark City, directed by William Dieterle, is best remembered as Charlton Heston’s first film. He plays an amoral bookie whose role in covering up the suicide of a gambling victim leads to the mayhem in this revenge drama featuring Lizabeth Scott, Viveca Lindfors, Harry Morgan, Dean Jagger, Jack Webb, and Ed Begley.

1950’s No Man of Her Own, directed by Mitchell Leisen, stars Barbara Stanwyck as a woman escaping from her gangster boyfriend, who is mistaken for a woman traveling on the same cross-country train with her husband to meet her wealthy in-laws in San Francisco. The woman and her husband are killed when the train crashes and Stanwyck pretends to be the dead woman. John Lund, Jane Cowl, Henry O’Neill, Phyllis Thaxter, Richard Denning, and Lyle Bettger co-star.

1952’s Beware, My Lovely, directed by Harry Horner, takes place in 1918 with Ida Lupino as a resourceful World War I widow playing cat-and-mouse with mentally disturbed Robert Ryan.

All three feature newly recorded commentaries. No Man of Her Own has two.

Happy viewing.