A huge hit early in the year, Pierre Morel’s Taken is a French film done in English with Liam Neeson as the U.S. government agent whose daughter (Maggie Grace) is kidnapped by slave traders while on vacation in Paris. The film is completely implausible from beginning to end. Neeson single-handedly kills so many bad guys it’s impossible to keep up, yet it’s compulsively watchable. Famke Janssen as Neeson’s ex-wife and the girl’s mother and Leland Orser as Neeson’s French counterpart in secret government operations make the most of their limited screen time.

Taken is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

One of two Anne Hathaway films released last fall, TV director Rodrigo Garcia’s Passengers pretty much slipped under the radar while Jonathan Demme’s overrated Rachel Getting Married got all the attention and Hathaway received an Oscar nomination. Passengers, in which Hathaway plays a grief counselor tending to survivors of a plane crash,is the more intriguing film. Patrick Wilson is the survivor with whom she steps over the proverbial professional line. David Morse, Andre Braugher and Dianne Wiest co-star in this superior psychological thriller.

Passengers is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

An unusual crime thriller, Brian Goodman’s What Doesn’t Kill You is about two Boston street punks who grow up to be small time gangsters who wind up in jail. One of them, Mark Ruffalo, in a semi-autobiographical portrayal of writer/director Goodman, wises up and goes clean. The other, Ethen Hawke, returns to his evil ways. Goodman himself plays a local Boston crime boss, Amanda Peet is Ruffalo’s long-suffering wife and Donnie Wahlberg is the cop who keeps a watchful eye on Ruffalo.

What Doesn’t Kill You is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Mining the same territory thirty five years earlier, Peter Yates’ ironically-titled The Friends of Eddie Coyle gave Robert Mitchum one of his best late-career roles as a small time Boston hood given an opportunity to mitigate his sentencing for another crime by informing on his pals. With an accent on character development rather than blood-spilling, Yates (Bullitt, Breaking Away) still manages plenty of eye-filling action. The first-rate cast also includes Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Steven Keats and Alex Rocco.

The Criterion DVD includes commentary by Yates and an informative booklet which includes a reprint of a 1973 Rolling Stone article on Mitchum’s career through the making of the film.

From the third version (the first successful one) of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon to the haunting evocation of James Joyce’s The Dead, John Huston spent much of his career making seemingly un-filmable works into great films. Near the top the list is his 1979 version of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, which has been given a first class restoration on the new Criterion DVD.

O’Connor’s 1952 novel about Southern Fundamentalism skewers organized religion while upholding man’s need for spirituality. Huston, not a religious man by any means, seems an odd choice to do justice to devout Catholic O’Connor’s masterpiece, but he does. Brad Dourif’s portrayal of the ex-Army drifter who starts the first Church Without Christ provides the actor with what is far and away the best performance of his idiosyncratic career. Harry Dean Stanton, as the false preacher, and Ned Beatty, as another con man, are also at the top of their game. It’s all played for laughs until that haunting, unforgettable ending.

Extras include Bill Moyers’ 1982 interview with Huston in which he discusses his career and a newly filmed interview with Dourif.

The fifteenth known attempt to assassinate Hitler, on July 20, 1944, is chronicled in Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, an exciting, suspense-filled drama starring Tom Cruise. Yes, we know Hitler didn’t die in the attempt, but we don’t necessarily know the details of the planning or what went wrong or how the planners are caught and executed, all of which is played out in the film’s spare two hour running time. Cruise is aided and abetted by a stalwart supporting cast that includes Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Terence Stamp.

Tons of extras are provided including alternate commentaries and five documentaries on the making of the film and the history behind it.

Valkyrie is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Fox has also released a Special Edition of Fritz Lang’s 1941 film Man Hunt, which begins with a failed attempt on Hitler’s life by British hunter Walter Pidgeon. Having failed in his attempt, Pidgeon is hunted by Nazis led by George Sanders and John Carradine for the remainder of the film. Joan Bennett, who would go on to star in Lang’s two best American films, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, gets a career makeover as the prostitute who helps him. Roddy McDowall, who would next co-star with Pidgeon in How Green Was My Valley, is also on hand.

The DVD features commentary by Lang scholar Richard Milligan as well as a making-of documentary.

A rousing adventure film, J. Lee Thompson’s North West Frontier was released to U.S. Theatres as Flame Over India in 1960, most likely to avoid confusion with Northwest Passge and North West Mounted Police, two films from 1940 then making the rounds on late night TV. Fox’s new DVD release restores the original title of the film about a perilous train ride through India in which the life of an infant prince is at stake. Lauren Bacall is at her no-nonsense best as his protector, ably supported by Kenneth More, Herbert Lom, Wilfrid Hyde-White and I.S. Johar.

Before there was The Manchurian Candidate, there was Time Limit, taken from a Broadway play about brainwashing by the Koreans leading to questions of collaboration and treason. Richard Widmark stars as an investigator for the Army’s Judge Advocate General and Richard Basehart co-stars as the subject of his investigation, a man who may or may not be put on trial for treason. Karl Malden, in his only directorial effort, does an admirable job directing the two men and such familiar supporting players as Martin Balsam and Rip Torn.

Paramount has released a box set of the original Kirk and Spock films, called the Star Trek Original Motion Picture Collection on Blu-ray to coincide with the theatrical release of the new Star Trek.

Included in the set are Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country as well as a seventh disc, Star Trek: The Captain’s Summit, in which Whoopi Goldberg interviews William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as well as Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes, and stars of the second TV series.

All six films are the original theatrical versions, each with a brand new commentary. Special Editions of some of the films provided for previous standard DVD releases are not included.

Also making its Blu-ray debut is Sydney Pollack’s 1975 suspense thriller Three Days of the Condor from James Grady’s novel Six Days of the Condor. Just thinking of the title change makes me giddy because it makes absolutely no difference to the plot whether it takes three days or six for a low-level CIA employee to figure out who wants him dead, and why.

Robert Redford is the book transcriber who is out to lunch when assassins kill his seven co-workers. Faye Dunaway is the woman he kidnaps as a cover, Cliff Robertson is the CIA boss who may or may not be in on the hit and Max von Sydow is the most urbane of paid assassins. It’s a thrill-a-minute ride filmed mostly in New York that looks absolutely great in the new format.

-Peter J. Patrick (May 19, 2009)