When Nicole Kidman won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival last fall for Babygirl, she joined a long list of contenders for the Best Actress Oscar. Nominated for an award here and there, she never broke through as one of the major contenders for the prize. Having finally seen the A24 release in its 4K UHD Blu-ray release, I can understand why.

Kidman’s portrayal of a highly successful CEO of a modern high-tech company who wants to be sexually dominated in her private life is a good one, but the film is not really about the sex life of an older woman in the way that 2022’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande was for Emma Thompson. Directed by actress-turned-director Halina Reijn, it plays more like Adrian Lyne’s distasteful 1993 film, Indecent Proposal in which Robert Redford offers a young married couple $1,000,000 to spend a night with the wife played by Demi Moore.

Only Esther McGregor as Kidman’s sweet-natured lesbian daughter comes across as a legitimate character. Kidman, Harris Dickinson as her seducer, Antonio Banderas as her clueless husband, and Sophie Wilde as her seemingly protective assistant all come across as stick figures in a seedy melodrama.

More interesting are four more-or-less forgotten films ranging from 1965 to 1997 released by Vinegar Syndrome on Blu-ray, three of them also on 4K UHD.

Vinegar Syndrome, jumped to the forefront of home video suppliers with its release of the long in demand Looking for Mr. Goodbar which I previously reviewed late last year. That 1977 film that along with her Oscar-winning performance in the same year’s Annie Hall catapulted Diane Keaton to major stardom. The 4K UHD-standard Blu-ray combo has since been given a wider release.

Newly released are 1965’s Who Killed Teddy Bear?, 1972’s The Possession of Joel Delaney, and 1973’s Bang the Drum Slowly in dual 4K UHD/standard Blu-ray combo packs; and 1997’s Touch on standard Blu-ray only.

Who Killed Teddy Bear? with the question mark at the end of the title was the film’s advertised title, the on-screen title drops the question mark, whether intentionally or not, has never been made clear.

The title doesn’t refer to a character with a provocative nickname, but rather to a child’s teddy bear whose neck has been slashed. Why eventually becomes clear in this one-of-a-kind thriller from Emmy-winning TV producer-director Joseph Cates, whose brother Gilbert Cates, was the somewhat better-known director of I Never Sang for My Father. Joseph was the father of Phoebe Cates and father-in-law of Oscar-winning actor Kevin Kline (A Fish called Wanda).

The film stars Juliet Prowse (Can-Can, G.I. Blues) as a disco hostess being stalked by a sexual predator played by Sal Mineo (Rebel Without a Cause, Exodus) in roles that might have revived their sagging film careers if the film had been successful. Alas, it wasn’t despite its groundbreaking cinematography showing the seedier side of NYC’s Times Square district at the time. It would take British director John Schlesinger to break through with his similar approach to the city four years later in the Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy with Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight.

There are only two other major characters in the film, a seedy vice cop played by TV game show host Jan Murray, and Broadway legend Elaine Stritch as Prowse’s predatory lesbian boss.

The Possession of Joel Delaney is a horror film that preceded William Friedkin’s similarly themed The Exorcist by a year in 1972. Directed by India-born British director Waris Hussein (Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx), the film stars Shirley MacLaine as a privileged New York divorcée with two impressionable children whose younger brother (Perry King) is possessed by the spirit of a recently deceased serial killer.

The film is not a great horror classic, but it has its moments, most of them belonging to MacLaine whose character isn’t particularly nice. She’s condescending to everyone, which limits her ability to get help when she needs it. Ironically, MacLaine was the inspiration for Ellen Burstyn’s character in The Exorcist. Had she played that part instead, she may have gotten her Oscar ten years earlier than she did.

An informative on-screen interview with now 87-year-old Hussein is included as an extra on the release.

Bang the Drum Slowly from a novel by Mark Harris (1922-2007) was originally done as a 1956 episode of the U.S. Steel Hour with Paul Newman and Albert Salmi as the major league baseball pitcher and his dying catcher that Michael Moriarty and Robert De Niro played in the film. Both actors were on the verge of major careers at the time. De Niro was also in Martin Scorsese’sMean Streets later that year while Moriarty starred opposite Katharine Hepburn in an acclaimed TV version of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie.

Still considered the best film about baseball ever made, Moriarty, De Niro, and Vincent Gardenia in an Oscar-nominated turn as their coach, are unforgettable.

Now-86-year-old director John D. Hancock provides an on-screen interview.

In 1997, Paul Schrader wanted to option an Elmore Leanard novel for the screen but the only one available was Touch about a former seminarian with a reputation for healing so he settled on that rather than one of Leonard’s crime novels, none of which were available to him.

Schrader put together an ensemble cast headed by Chritopher Walken, Briget Fonda, and Skeet Ulrich who was supposed to be the next Brad Pitt but never achieved that status.

Ulrich played the healer with Fonda as his love interest and Walken as his manager. Also in the cast were Gina Gershon, Tom Arnold, Paul Mazursky, Lolita Davidovich, Anthony Zerbe, Breckin Meyer, and more in this fascinating character study that is also a study of characters..

An on-camera interview with Schrader is included as an extra.

Happy viewing.