Juliette Binoche (Cannes Best Actress) has a wonderfully expressive face and speaks French, English and Italian equally well, but shows off her art’s primary colors (sneering, crying, laughing, yelling) instead of creating a credible character. The Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray transfer is first-rate; extras include a Kiarostami interview, hour-long making-of documentary and an early Kiarostami feature, 1977’s The Report.

Fiennes effortlessly makes Shakespeare’s words sound conversational even when confrontational; too bad he doesn’t trust his writer more. The gritty imagery is retained on Blu-ray; extras include and on-set featurette and Fiennes’ commentary.

The 1989, 1992 and 1998 sequels are far more annoying than the merely forgettable original. The movies look good enough on Blu-ray; a fifth disc houses retrospective featurettes that include many interviews.

As a disease robs people of their senses, scientist Eva Green meets chef Ewan MacGregor; their brief affair leaves a mark on them and, maybe, the human race. Mackenzie literalizes how the couple’s relationship parallels a crumbling world. Too bad Green and MacGregor, charismatic performers both, are unable to do little more than inject emotional and physical nakedness into a movie starving for it. The Blu-ray image is splendid; lone extra is a two-minute featurette.

Curry’s sympathy is obvious as he documents the kids trying to grow up normally while facing a lot of—often self-inflicted—pressure to become winners and, maybe, famous drivers. This PBS doc looks superb on Blu-ray; extras are deleted scenes, kids update, director Q&A and behind-the-scenes featurette.

Arrietty is a wondrous entrance into another world by another talented protégé of Hayao Miyazaki. Extras are an English-language version (stick with the original!), original storyboards and music videos.

Along with the 18-song performance, seven songs from the band’s 2010 concert—all unplayed seven years earlier—are included. The Blu-ray image is flawless; the surround sound is wonderfully enveloping.

Otherwise, despite car chases, fight sequences and other ridiculous sequences, director McG can’t breathe life into a hoary plot: two CIA agents fight for the right to win Reese, with a real criminal in hot pursuit. The movie has a good hi-def transfer; extras include an extended version, deleted scenes, alternate endings, gag reel and McG commentary.

America’s Hangar summarizes flight’s first century beginning with the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, while Concorde: Flying Supersonic chronicles the only passenger jet that flew at the speed of sound, including a wrenching account of the horrible 2001 crash that also killed off the airline. Lastly, History in HD: America in Space and Space Shuttle: Final Countdown glimpse the checkered history of our country’s space program.

Dori Berinstein’s affectionate portrait of the ultimate—and unique—Broadway baby is 83 minutes of pure bliss. Included are 15 additional scenes, including Carol’s reminiscence about singing at Joan Crawford’s wedding and Barbara Walters speaking touchingly about Carol’s friendship with Barbara’s older, sickly sister.

Instead, we’re left to mourn the fall from grace of Vivica A. Fox, a graceful actress stuck in a stock role of an FBI agent in a movie whose literally explosive ending is a last-gasp desperation move. The lone extra is a jokey “interview” between producer Deanna Shapiro and the movie’s canine star.

A remarkably controlled study of aberrant and abhorrent behavior, Michael nevertheless omits important details—we never learn why, among any number of questions, he does what he does. And the final shot is morally questionable at best.

The cleverness on display can’t cover up the premise’s hokiness, and despite top-notch production values and a game cast, the show (now cancelled) is hampered by its overreliance on the tired trope of found footage. Extras include audio commentaries, deleted scenes and a making-of featurette.

Using original songs, excerpts from diaries, letters and performances, Thomas, his talented singers and musicians have made a love letter to a once-thriving art form. Extras include a Thomas interview and full-length versions of some of the music.

The Requiem’s wide emotional arc makes sweeping generalities useless. I had just listened to the original recording with Dietrich Fischer-Diskeau after hearing of his death; although not up to that defining performance, this new version comes near enough.

Even with Daniel Barenboim sympathetically leading the superb Berlin Staatskapelle, I felt every second of the work’s 67 minutes, which kept me at arm’s length from its occasional tragic beauty.

Just off Fifth Avenue on East 70th Street is the Frick Collection. Housed in Henry Clay Frick’s former home, the imposing mansion houses the city’s best small art museum—if by “small,” you mean three Vermeers, several Goyas and Rembrandts, and works by Titian, Bellini, El Greco,and so on.

The building itself is worth entering just to see how the .01 percent once lived, and in addition to its own collection, the Frick also features pointed exhibitions, like the just-closed Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting, which brought together nine of the French Impressionist’s largest canvases, like the Frick’s own La Promenade,  Chicago’s Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando and Washington D.C.’s The Dancer. Seeing these oversized Renoirs in a single gallery was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Pride of place remains Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emmanuel Leutze, whose monumental patriotic canvas—which takes up an entire wall in Gallery 760, flanked by the two paintings hung near it at an 1864 exhibition, Frederic Edwin Church’s Heart of the Andes and Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains — has been cleaned so it looks sparklingly beautiful, and sits within the glittering gilded frame reconstructed from vintage photographs of the painting.

One of the best Met exhibitions in recent memory, The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde (through June 3) recounts how writer Gertrude, brothers Leo and Michael and Michael’s wife Sarah created one of the most impressive collections of then-modern art in the first half of the 20th century.

When they first came to Paris in the early 1900s, they were able to purchase dozens of Picassos, Matisses, Bonnards, and other cheap-to-buy painters before their name recognition and value skyrocketed. Picasso’s famous portrait of Gertrude, already a cornerstone of the Met’s collection, is complemented by his portraits of Leo and his son Allan.

Many of the exhibit’s paintings are familiar, but seeing them in a new context simply awes us by the family’s discerning taste. Letters, photographs and other ephemera help to form a portrait of an American family in Paris that collected art as they rubbed shoulders with the artists who created the works they bought.

Perhaps the reviewers thought that giving wife Linda credit for co-writing half the songs was going too far...who knows?

The glorious five-minute soundscape—and Paul's first post-Beatles Number One—“Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” is another example of Paul’s genius for elaborate symphonic mini-suites, as are the phenomenal “Long-Haired Lady” (which opens with Paul’s “well, well, well, well, well” lovingly aping Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band primal scream) and the joyous closer, “The Back Seat of My Car.” There’s also delightful English absurdity in “3 Legs” and “Monkberry Moon Delight,” while “Smile Away” and “Eat at Home” are among Paul’s most infectious rockers.

A second disc, comprising singles and outtakes, includes the instantly hummable hit “Another Day,” the rocking B-sides “Oh Woman Oh Why” and “Little Woman Love,” and the galvanizingly epic “Rode All Night.” Ram “special editions” include a DVD with a 10-minute Paul reminiscence of the album’s creation, as well as vintage video clips for “Heart of the Country,” “3 Legs,” and “Eat at Home” in concert.