Yesterday is Danny Boyle’s latest attempt at duplicating the success of Slumdog Millionaire. With a better script from Richard Curtis (Love Actually) he might have succeeded but the film is just too cute for its own good.

Newcomer Himesh Patel is excellent as seemingly the only living person who remembers the Beatles. As such, he builds a career singing Beatles songs that he pretends to have written himself on the fly. Lily James (Cinderella) is his friend and manager who stays behind in England while he goes on to international success in Hollywood thanks to his pushy new manager, Kate McKinnon in a dreadful performance. Her brand of satire, which works brilliantly on TV’s Saturday Night Live, is off-putting and annoying in the extreme when extended over the course of the film.

The film gets away with its conceit because Patel’s character is supposedly living in an alternate universe. The film’s most talked about sequence which leads to his redemption as a human being contains a spoiler that can’t be revealed here. That sequence, though, like the rest of the film, is underplayed. The film is redeemed only by Patel’s performance and the bountiful soundtrack of Beatles covers.

Yesterday is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD as well as 4K Blu-ray.

Newly released Blu-ray upgrades of films previously released on DVDs include The Circus from Criterion; The Major and the Minor from Arrow Academy; My Favorite Year, The Letter, and The Set-Up from Warner Archive; and The Ida Lupino Filmmaker Collection from Kino Lorber.

Criterion has previously released Blu-rays of Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux, and Limelight, making The Circus the last of his major films to receive a Blu-ray upgrade.

1928’s The Circus was the last film Chaplin made during the silent era, but not his last silent. City Lights and Modern Times had musical and effects soundtracks but no spoken dialogue. Chaplin was nominated for Oscars for his direction and performance at the first Academy Awards, but the nominations were withdrawn, and he was given an honorary award instead. Extras on the Criterion Edition include Chaplin’s original score for the film’s 1969 re-release, a 1969 interview with Chaplin, and a new on-camera interview with his son Eugene at the Chaplin estate in Switzerland which is now a museum open to the public.

The gag-filled film in which the Little Tramp joins the circus and soon becomes its star is one of Chaplin’s best. Criterion’s 4K digital restoration does it proud.

Arrow Academy’s brand new restoration of Billy Wilder’s 1942 film The Major and the Minor includes an audio commentary by film scholar Adrian Martin. The comedy, in which a struggling working girl pretends to be a 12-year-old in order to purchase a train ticket at half price, strains credulity from the beginning, but the screenplay by Wilder and Charles Brackett along with the performances of Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland as the commandant of a boys’ school keep it afloat. This was Wilder’s first Hollywood film as a director. He had previously contributed to the screenplays for such films as Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka and Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire.

Peter O’Toole received the seventh of his eight Oscar nominations for his delightful take on an Errol Flynn style movie star in 1982’s My Favorite Year, the year in question being 1954.

Centered around a TV variety show in which the alcoholic actor is scheduled to make an appearance, the film, directed by Richard Benjamin, features strong supporting work form Mark Linn Baker, Jessica Harper, Joseph Bologna, Bill Macy, and Lainie Kazan among others. Benjamin provides the audio commentary.

Bette Davis received her fourth Oscar nomination, her fifth if you count her write-in nod for 1934’s Of Human Bondage, for 1940’s The Letter directed by William Wyler who two years earlier directed her to her second Oscar win for Jezebel. The film, previously made in 1929 as a vehicle for Jeanne Eagels, is based on W. Somerset Maugham’s 1927 play written for Gladys Cooper who would receive the first of her own three Oscar nominations as Davis’ mother in the 1942 film Now, Voyager being given a Criterion Blu-ray release next month.

The Letter opens with Davis shooting dead a man on her veranda. She claims he made unwanted advances toward her, but it soon becomes apparent that the man was her lover. The film ends with another shocking murder. In-between is one of the best melodramas ever to come out of Hollywood with Davis delivering a performance that was topped only by her work in Now, Voyager and All About Eve, which is also being given a Blu-ray release by Criterion next month. She is ably assisted by Herbert Marshall, James Stephenson, and Gale Sondergaard.

Robert Wise’s 1949 film The Set-Up was a thrilling film noir about an aging boxer and the crooked fight managers around him who want him to take a dive in his next match. Wise and Milton Krasner, the film’s cinematographer, won prizes at Cannes and the film was nominated for a Best Picture award at the BAFTAs. Oscar ignored it in favor of another fight film that year, Mark Robson’s Champion starring Kirk Douglas.

The Ida Lupino Filmmaker Collection features remastered editions of four of the actress-turned-director’s early films, 1947’s Not Wanted, 1950’s Never Fear, and 1953’s The Hitch-Hiker and The Bigamist.

The Hitch-Hiker, previously released on Blu-ray, and The Bigamist, previously released on DVD only, are genuine film noir classics, the less said about them, the better. See them and enjoy them. Edmond O’Brien, Frank Lovejoy, and William Talman star in the former. Joan Fontaine, Lupino, and O’Brien in the latter with Edmund Gwenn in a prominent supporting role.

The seldom seen Not Wanted and Never Fear, both starring Sally Forrest and Keefe Brasselle, are problematic. The former is a labored film about an unmarried pregnant teenager (Forrest), the bad guy who got her pregnant (Leo Penn), and the good guy who tries to help her (Brasselle). The latter is an equally ponderous tale about a dancer (Forrest) who develops polio, her choreographer boyfriend (Brasselle), and a fellow patient at the hospital she goes to for treatment (Hugh O’Brian). The subject matter covered in these two films has been done many times and much better in other films and on TV.

Kino Lorber is releasing all four films separately as well as together.

This week’s new releases include Spider-Man: Far from Home and The House of Hitchcock Collection.