Alfred Hitchcock came to America on an exclusive contract with the famously controlling American producer David Selznick. Three of the four films from that strained partnership between the perfectionist British director and the micromanaging producer –  Rebecca (1940), Spellbound (1945), and Notorious (1946) — arrive on Blu-ray and you can see the two creative personalities battle for control throughout.

The gloriously gothic melodrama Rebecca (MGM), a handsome marriage of the literate and the visual, remains their most financially successful collaboration and Hitchcock’s most studio-like film. Laurence Olivier delivers a fine performance as the haunted de Winter, still under the shadow of his controlling first wife even after she’s died, while Joan Fontaine’s naïve little girl in the big mansion is a bit precious but effective nonetheless.  It’s an elegant production, beautifully photographed and designed like a dream house shrouded in mourning, but it also favors the pictorial over the cinematic and surface over subtext. Ironically, it’s Hitch’s only Oscar winner, and the Oscar went to producer Selznick; Hitch lost Best Director to John Ford for “The Grapes of Wrath.” Features commentary by film critic Richard Schickel, screen tests, two featurettes, three radio play adaptations, and archival audio interviews with Hitch.

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The Academy Award nominations are now out (see full list here). Now let the guessing games begin. Predictions and kibbitzing are all part of the fun (my annual accounting of contenders who missed the Oscar cut is here on MSN) and catching up on all the nominees before Oscar night is, for many, part of the ritual.

While many of the front-runners were released late in the year and are still playing in theaters — best picture nominees “The Descendants,” “War Horse,” ” Hugo,” “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” and ” The Artist” should all get a boost this weekend — just as many are already available for home viewing on DVD, Blu-ray, digital download and/or pay-per-view. Here’s a list of those you can see now on a small screen near you. Click on the titles to get to the DVD/Blu-ray reviews.

“Moneyball” (Sony), arguably the brainiest sports movie ever, came away with six nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Brad Pitt), Best Supporting Actor (Jonah Hill) and Adapted Screenplay. The Blu-ray and DVD editions offer a few peaks behind the production. Also On Demand.

“Midnight in Paris” (Sony), the grown-up romantic fantasy that unexpectedly became Woody Allen’s most financially successful film ever, earned four nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. On Blu-ray and DVD with minimal supplements, and On Demand.

“The Tree of Life” (Fox), Terrence Malick’s portrait of one boy’s education growing up in Texas set against nothing less than the origins of life in the universe, picked up nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography, and it is a stunning looking film on Blu-ray, which also features the supplements (there are none on the DVD). Also On Demand.

The rest of the available titles on Videodrone.

DVD and Blu-ray

50/50 (Summit) is what Joseph Gordon-Levitt puts his chances of survival at when he’s diagnosed with cancer in the comedy inspired by the real-life ordeal of producer/screenwrite​r Will Reiser. With best friend Seth Rogen and therapist-in-trainin​g Anna Kendrick as his support group and Angelica Huston as his lonely, clucking mother, he faces chemotherapy, surgery, and the possibility that he may not have much of a future. But while the film explores mortality with a sense of humor, this is not a black comedy or a morbid piece of filmmaking. while the comedy is wrapped around palpable feelings of helplessness, anger and fear, it is also a reawakening of sorts, a wake-up call just before what may be final call, if you will, and Gordon-Levitt beautifully walks the wobbly path between the conflicting feelings.

Features commentary by director Jonathan Levine, screenwriter Will Reiser, and actor Seth Rogen, three featurettes and deleted scenes. DVD and Blu-ray, day-and-date availability at Redbox.

For more releases, see Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs, Blu-rays and streaming video for January 24

Clara Bow took top billing in the 1927 Wings (Paramount), the film that won the very first Academy Award for Best Picture, but the real star of this World War I drama is the amazing aerial spectacle: the dogfights in the sky over the battlefields.

The rest of the film, co-starring Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Richard Arlen (both virtual unknowns at the time) as buddies and fellow pilots, is sturdy studio filmmaking with romance, bonding under fire and rousing “war is hell” action. There’s none of the seriousness or dramatic grace of King Vidor’s earlier “The Big Parade,” but director William Wellman, who was a World War I fighter pilot himself, invests us in the camaraderie of men in battle and especially the thrilling flight of the warriors. The magnificent dogfights, the sky swarming with planes, the downed ships spiraling down through the clouds with a tail of black smoke and yellow flame (color added like hand-tints of the time) were all staged and shot for real and the budget soared to $2 million, making it one of the most expensive films of its era. Wellman makes sure it’s all there on the screen. It’s a romanticized look at war, but it’s also what Hollywood does best.

Paramount releases the film on DVD and Blu-ray (adding one more silent offering to the Blu-ray format) in a beautifully restored and newly remastered edition that preserves the texture of the photography, and offers a choice of two scores.

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For more releases, see Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs, Blu-rays and streaming video for January 24

By sheer numbers, the 84th Annual Academy Award Nominations seems to belong to Hugo, with 11 nominations. But given those are largely in the technical / craft categories, the success story this year is The Artist, a modern silent movie, shot in black and white, with two French stars practically unknown in the United States. With ten nominations, it should be the surprise off the season, except for the fact that this is simply the last lap in its run as the unlikeliest picture to win the hearts of awards season voters.

'The Artist' - 10 nominations for a silent film in black-and-white with two French stars

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences moved the nominations announcements to January a couple of years ago, effectively shortening the “awards season,” but the unintended consequences have been to push the rest of the pretenders to Oscar glory into a free for all, everyone trying to predict or influence or simply contrast eventual Academy Award nominees. As a result, there are few real surprises by the time the Oscars are announced. It’s the final party in an absurdly overcrowded season of awards proms and I’m about partied out.

Plus there’s that new Academy sliding scale of Best Picture nominees. Bumped up from five to ten spots last year (not out of altruism but because indie pictures kept knocking the big audience-pleasing Hollywood movies out of contention), the number is now determined by the number of “You like me, you really, really like me!” number one votes a film received on the Academy ballots. This year, it resulted in nine nominations: an odd number for an odd year.

And yet… it’s the Oscars. They still matter. A nomination is indeed an honor (certainly more of an honor than the Golden Globes) and a snub is still something to get worked up over. And so here is out annual scorecard on Oscar’s slights and oversights: they shoulda been a contender.

Picture

There are nine nominees this year, but is more really better when Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Hollywood’s inevitable and inadequate 9/11 drama) and The Help (this year’s answer to The Blind Side?) and War Horse (Spielberg sentiment run amok) fill out those extra slots? This year swings so far in the other direction of Big Films with Important Messages Hammered Home with Insistent Direction that the indie films that spurred the expansion are all but ignored.

Take Shelter

Two of the most glaring slights: Meek’s Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt’s lost-in-the-desert frontier drama (did it play too early in 2011 for voters to remember its understated virtues?), and Take Shelter, a psychological drama about mental illness and end-of-the-world fears wrapped up in contemporary anxieties of economic survival.

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Distill The Champ and Rocky, add a dash of The Rumble in the Jungle, shake well and serve in larger-than-life rock ‘em sock ‘em robots. That’s basically what you get with Real Steel‘ and somehow all those second-hand pieces come together in a rousing (if awfully inevitable) underdog story.

Ostensibly based on the same short story that spawned the original Twilight Zone episode “Steel,” it takes no more than the basic premise (a future where human boxing has been replaced with robots, a down-at-heels former boxer trying to get by with failing equipment) and spins a story of father/son bonding and a real jerk of a would-be dad getting a shot at redemption.

Hugh Jackman really plays up the “jerk” part of his character in the opening scenes, ducking creditors, welching on bad bets and in general letting his arrogance get in the way of his shots at success. That is, until he’s force to be a father to the son he gave up long ago (Dakota Goyo), a kid whose justified anger at all his surviving parental figures makes him a force to be reckoned. And when the kid rescues an old model ‘bot that has just as much pluck as the humans, Dad slowly takes is place in his son’s corner as advisor, inspiration and even robot trainer.

Somehow director Shawn Levy, leaving the familiar waters of high-concept comedy for family drama set against a vaguely futuristic backdrop of robot action from the dregs of fleapits to the main event of a championship bout, makes it all work as a satisfying experience. For all the dazzle of the mechanical dance, Levy commits himself to the human drama and delivers an old-fashioned piece of storytelling.

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For more releases, see Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs, Blu-rays and streaming video for January 24

On Monday, January 23, Turner Classic Movies is showing all four films made by Max Ophuls, the great German director, during his brief tenure in America (when he dropped the “h” and signed his films “Max Opuls”).

The evening of “Max Ophuls in Hollywood” is followed by two of his greatest French films, La Ronde (1950) and The Earrings of Madame de… (1954), but while they are well represented in superb DVD editions stateside, the four American films showing Monday night—Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948), The Reckless Moment (1949), Caught (1949) and the rarity The Exile (1947), his Hollywood debut—have still not been released on DVD in the U.S.

The films of Ophuls haunt the space between the idealism of unconditional love and the reality of social barriers and fickle lovers. Yet his greatest films are anything but cynical; ironic certainly, but also melancholy, sad and wistful, and always respectful of the dignity of those who love well if not too wisely. His fluid, elegantly choreographed camerawork and intimate yet observant directorial presence have resulted in some of the most delicate and beautiful films made on either side of the Atlantic, but his American films have never been as celebrated as his more overtly stylized and seductively romantic French films (Ophuls left Germany in the early 1930s for the same reason so many fellow artists did).

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There wasn’t another actress like Bette Davis in the golden age of Hollywood, and I doubt there ever will be. In a film culture that prized beauty over talent, she became a leading lady and a dominant movie star by the sheer force of her talent and screen presence and dedication. She drove her career, going to war with the studios to demand better roles and more control over her career, and remained a force to be reckoned with through the 1960s. Only Kate Hepburn and (at least so far) Meryl Streep can boast of careers with comparable virtues of longevity and seriousness (poor Joan Crawford slipped into self-parody after her career-reviving “Baby Jane” while Davis maintained her dignity even through substandard roles).

The Warner Archive recently released a collection of Bette Davis films from the 1930s and they offer a snapshot of the rise of her career, from the snappy, street smart dame of Warner Bros. pre-code movies to the leading lady of serious dramas and lavish historical pictures. While they may not all be among her best films of the era (most of those have already been released to DVD), they show that Davis is never less that committed to her work and is constantly striving to be at her best.

In Housewife (1934), she’s second billed but really only a supporting player, the “other woman” who seduces — or at least makes a valiant attempt to — advertising professional George Brent from his devoted wife Ann Dvorak. It’s not hard to see the attraction; Davis’ big city advertising copywriter is all confidence and sophistication next to Brent’s meek company man and she essentially grooms him for better things. He returns the favor by trading up, at least until Dvorak follows suit by considering a suitor of her own. It’s a fairly unremarkable piece of pre-code filmmaking, but Davis — not yet a major star but certainly a leading lady working her way up the studio hierarchy — shows the rest of the cast (including the reliable Warner girl Friday Ruth Donnelly) how it’s done.

The Sisters (1938) is, by contrast, a standout role for Davis, playing opposite Errol Flynn (for the first time) as the quiet and sensible of three sisters who proves to be a passionate woman under her guarded restraint.

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Cornel Wilde’s grim, fatalistic end-of-the-world thriller No Blade of Grass is a forgotten dystopian classic of its time. Gritty and brutal, built on fears of ecological devastation through pollution and overcrowding (with hints of genetic manipulation gone bad), this 1970 eco-apocalypse thriller seems to have gotten lost in the overcrowded apocalypse now science fiction cinema of the era.

Adapted from the novel The Death of Grass by John Christopher, it has vague resemblances to the nuclear holocaust thriller Panic in Year Zero in its basic premise of a man hardening to deal with the brutal new world order to save his family. But in place of nuclear war (the favored device of most apocalyptic films of the era) is ecological collapse: a virus poisons the world’s grass and cereal crops and causes a dire food shortage. As panic spreads across the globe, John Custance (Nigel Davenport), a former military officer and an affluent husband and father in London, makes plans to take his family north to his brother’s fortified compound, prepared for just such an emergency. But he puts off leaving until it is almost too late: mobs start looting, riots break out and London is put under martial law with roadblocks posted to prevent a flight from the city. To save his family, John becomes as hard and as ruthless as the looters, the rogue militias and the roving gangs preying upon the citizens fleeing the cities.

Cornel Wilde is not the most subtle of directors. Here he’s a provocateur, favoring primal images to make his points. A montage of scenes of nuclear tests, overcrowding, and pollution poured into the waters, pumped into the skies and spread over crops in the form of pesticide opens the film as Wilde’s narration sets the stage of environmental devastation. Early in the film, as John meets with his brother in a city pub, images of famine and starvation and long lines for food rations play on TV news while customers gorge on the lavish buffet spread out in the bar. Wilde hammers the point home in blunt terms until the irony and social commentary shifts from a statement decadence to the willful ignorance of a population that still believes it can hold out. Flashforwards hint at the horrors to come while flashbacks recall a time before such threats were even imaginable. It’s a rather clumsy and unwieldy tactic as executed by Wilde, and it tends to confuse the narrative until the audience gets used to his style, but it’s all part of his rabbit-punch assault on our sensibilities.

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Videodrone’s take on the biggest, best, coolest and culty-ist releases of the week

Steven Soderberg tackles the drug trade with startling clarity in Traffic (Criterion), quilting a complex checkerboard screenplay into a unified piece.

Taking the viewer from Tijuana to Washington, with side trips to middle America and border crossings, Soderberg explores the instability and corruption that makes the drug war so futile. Michael Douglas stars as the well meaning drug Czar and Catherine Zeta-Jones is a pregnant socialite turned lioness, but the heart belongs to Benicio Del Toro, a Tijuana cop ambiguous to the final scene, playing the opportunist while hiding his passion and disgust under a mask of indifference. Del Toro earned one of the film’s four Oscars; the others went to director Steven Soderberg, editor Stephen Mirrione, and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan (who adapted, condensed, and transplanted the original British mini-series “Traffik”). Soderberg never lets his anger overflow into the film, but his emotional restraint makes this critical portrait of a doomed struggle even more cutting.

The film is also available on Blu-ray from Universal, in an edition with a short featurette and deleted scenes. The “Director Approved” Criterion edition, by contrast, is packed with supplements, including three separate commentary tracks: a sharp and articulate track by director Steven Soderbergh and writer Stephen Gaghan; one by producers Laura Bickford, Edward Zwick, and Marshall Herskovitz and consultants Tim Golden and Craig Chretien, which brings a completely different set of insights and background information to the film; and one with composer Cliff Martinez (with two music cues not included in the film).

There are also deleted scenes with optional commentary by Soderbergh and Gaghan and 30 minutes of additional footage from the scenes of the El Paso Intelligence Center and the Washington D.C. cocktail party, but the disc’s most compelling features are demonstrations of the three key production elements. There is a step by step look into the film processing technique used to achieve the sun-blasted look of the Mexican scenes; a demonstration of the editing choices and process of three scenes narrated by editor Stephen Mirrione (watching each scene become subtly sharpened and focused through each successive cut is a real education in the art of editing); and an instructional look at the art and technique of sound editing, hosted by sound editor Larry Blake. While a little on the technical side (Mirrione’s talk of “layering” isn’t always clear), each of these demonstrations is attacked with the kind of professional insight rarely seen in such DVD productions. Also features a gallery of U.S. Customs trading cards of the K-9 squad (!), TV spots, and trailers.

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