Australia’s Imprint label has released a Blu-ray of Paramount’s 1954 classic The Country Girl on a region-free Blu-ray.

Like How Green Was My Valley, which has suffered fools for decades who denigrate it for daring to win the Oscar over Citizen Kane, generations of Judy Garland fans have dismissed Grace Kelly’s Best Actress win for daring to win over Garland in A Star Is Born.

Garland may have been favored to win, but Kelly, who had already won the National Board of Review, New York Film Critics award, and the Golden Globe, the only Oscar precursors of the day, didn’t come out of nowhere. She did not win, as her detractors have long held, for putting on glasses and looking dowdy in an old sweater. She won for a deeply moving performance as the put-upon wife of an alcoholic showboating actor, played by Bing Crosby in the dramatic role of his career.

Crosby won the National Board of Review award for Best Actor, but along with fellow Oscar nominee Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny was considered a longshot for the Oscar. Bogart had previously won for The African Queen as had Crosby for Going My Way. They were up against Marlon Brando who had received his fourth consecutive nomination for On the Waterfront. Brando won as expected.

Ironically, Crosby’s other 1954 film, the musical White Christmas, was the year’s biggest box-office hit and has remained popular ever since, while The Country Girl has languished in near obscurity.

Also starring William Holden as a hotshot Broadway director, the film is basically a three-hander in which all three stars excel. Unlike the stark Clifford Odets play on which it is based, writer-director George Seaton (Miracle on 34th Street) took advantage of Crosby’s participation by turning his character into a singer as well as an actor, providing him with songs by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin who were nominated for an Oscar that year for Garland’s showstopping “The Man That Got Away” from A Star Is Born.

The only scene in the film that plays less brilliantly than it should is the last one in which Kelly is glammed up the way audiences remembered her from Rear Window earlier in the year. The actress fought against it, but the studio wouldn’t budge.

Extras include an excellent brand-new commentary from scholar Jason A. Ney.

Taking place entirely in a church, most of it in a room in the church basement, the excellently acted Mass, new on Blu-ray and DVD from Decal, is an acting tour-de-force in which four actors, Martha Plimpton, Ann Dowd, Jason Isaacs, and Reed Birney, enact two couples meeting for the first time to discuss a school shooting from several years before in which the son of one of the couples killed, among others, the son of the other couple.

You won’t find a better acting ensemble this or any other year than the work performed here by the film’s four stars. Plimpton is especially moving as the mother of the victim but Dowd, as the mother of the shooter, is almost as good.

Acclaimed first-time writer-director Fran Kranz is himself a working actor with 74 credits on IMDb. His first film was 2001’s Donnie Darko in which he had a small role. He’s had mostly small roles since, but post-Mass he has the lead in two forthcoming films.

Another highly dramatic film new to Blu-ray and DVD is Pablo Larain’s Spencer, also from Decal.

Unlike the broadly appealing Mass, Spencer is a matter of taste.

The best I can say about the film is that it has excellent cinematography. The fanciful story, however, is something else. Taking place during Britain’s Princess Diana’s last attendance at a Christmas get-together of the royal family at the Queen’s Sandringham Estate, the screenplay explores what might have happened in the days before “the people’s princess” split from Prince Charles. Kristen Stewart, in a blonde wig, mostly mopes around and throws up between fits of pique in which she refuses to leave her room to attend family functions. The rest of the actors playing members of the royal family just mope around. Timothy Spall and Sally Hawkins have meatier roles as servants but even they fail to lift this one beyond the bizarre.

Looking and sounding great on UHD 4K Blu-ray, Warner Bros.’ Dune is several steps up from the streaming version shown on HBO Max.

This is the third major filming of the Frank Herbert science fiction classic. The first attempt was a universally derided 1984 film from legendary director David Lynch. The second was a well-received 2000 TV miniseries.

This one, based on the first half of Book One of the three book series, handles its big scenes beautifully, but unlike the 1984 film, which crammed too much into its 2-hour and 17-minute running time, this 2-hour and 35-minute film spends so much time on its spectacular action sequences that the quieter dramatic moments tend to suffer in comparison. Nevertheless, this is a serious contender for Oscars in all technical categories as well as Best Picture and Director, Denis Villeneuve (Arrival).

The film that Villeneuve’s Dune most reminded me of is Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 3-hour and 40-minute classic The Ten Commandments, which has been given a spectacular upgrade of its own on UHD 4K Blu-ray.

Other films looking better than ever on newly released UHD (ultra-high definition) Blu-rays include 2001’s Mulholland Dr., David Lynch’s enigmatic mystery released by the Criterion Collection, and 1963’s The Great Escape, John Sturges’ World War II prisoner-of-war drama that Criterion upgraded to Blu-ray less than two years ago, looking even better on its UHD 4K release from Kino Lorber.

This week’s new Blu-ray releases include Edge of Darkness and Song of the Thin Man.