This week’s home entertainment offerings include one of the best boxing movies in years, Oscar contenders, The Danish Girl and Room, plus the excellent Cold War drama The Americans, the underrated crime drama Legend, as well as the long-awaited Blu-ray debut of the Death Note anime and the return of the long out-of-print Zeta Gundam series.

Theatrical Movies

It makes sense that some films with major Oscar nominations are coming out just after the big awards show, but one film that didn’t get nearly the nominations that it deserved is also hitting the streets.  Creed (Warner Bros., “PG-13” 133 min., $29.98, BD $35.99) is a sort of second generation “Rocky” movie with Sylvester Stallone training the son of Apollo Creed, who is played (in an award-worthy performance) by Michael B. Jordan.  The “Boxing Movie” genre is arguably the most fascinating of all the sports movie genres, and Creed, which earned a stellar 94% positive rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, is a worthy entry in a category of films that has spawned more than its share of cinema classics like Body and Soul, The Harder They Fall, and Raging Bull.

Higher profile Oscar films include The Danish Girl (Universal, “R,” 120 min., $29.98, BD $34.98), which stars Eddie Remayne and Alicia Vikander, who won “Best Supporting Actress” for her role as artist Gerda Wegener, whose marriage to fellow artist Einar Wegener (Remayne) evolved as he became a transgender pioneer, and Room (Lionsgate, “R,” 118 min., $19.98, BD $24.98), a powerful film about a woman and her five-year-old son who have been imprisoned for years in a windowless, 11’ x 11’ room, that delivered the “Best Actress” award for Brie Larson.

For those who love crime films there is Legend (Universal, “R,” 132 min., $26.98, BD $29.98), the true story of the Kray bothers, the kings of the UK underworld.  Tom Hardy plays both of the identical twins in this excellent film directed by Academy Award winner Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential).

Typically holiday-themed comedies are held back and released in the fourth quarter, but the R-rated The Night Before (Sony, “R,” 101 min., $26.99, BD $34.99) has a problematic relationship with Christmas anyway, so Sony probably figured that the best way to cut its losses (the movie cost $25 million to make an earned just $52 million worldwide, which means that given marketing costs, Sony is going to come up a little short on this one), was to get it out on disk as fast as possible.  There are some real laughs in this stoner “bromance” that covers familiar comedic ground that involves aging “man-boys” catching that first inkling of what maturity might be like.

In spite of its title, Youth (Fox, “R,” 124 min., BD $39.99), which stars Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, targets an older audience.  Directed by Paolo Sorrentino, Youth tells a bittersweet, adult story about two aging friends, one a composer and the other a filmmaker, who have to learn how to deal with the “winding down” of their careers.

TV on DVD

This week’s top offerings include The Americans: The Complete 3rd Season (Fox, 550 min., $39.98), which collects the latest season of the FX Cold War drama about two KGB officers hiding in deep cover in suburbia in the early 1980s, plus the 6-hour SyFy Channel adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction classic Childhood’s End (Universal, 247 min., $29.98, BD $34.98), plus Drunk History: Season 3 (Paramount, $26.99) the Comedy Central series based on the Funny or Die Web series created by Derek Waters, the action-packed “war on terror” series Strike Back: Season 4: Final Season (HBO, $29.98, BD $34.98), as well as the zombie-fighting, horror/comedy post-apocalyptic series Z Nation: Season 2 (Universal, 644 min., $39.98), which airs on SyFy and was renewed for a third season that is due in 2016. 

Animated TV offerings include Lego Star Wars: Droid Tales (Disney, 110 min., $19.99), My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic—Friends Across Equestria (Shout Factory, 110 min., $14.98), and Alvin and the Chipmunks—Alvin vs. Brittany (Bagdasarian, 77 min., $14.99, BD $24.99).

Vintage TV series due on Tuesday include the medical drama The Bold Ones: The New Doctors-The Complete Series (Shout Factory, 1980 min., $59.99), which aired from 1969-1973, the proto-RoboCop 1977 series Future Cop: The Complete Series (Mill Creek, 470 min., $14.98), and the 2000 Biblical miniseries In the Beginning (Mill Creek, 168 min., $9.98), which starred Martin Landau and Jacqueline Bisset.

This week’s top release from across the pond is The Fall: Series 2 (Acorn Media, 403 min., $39.99, BD $39.99), which features Gillian Anderson (The X-Files) as a police detective on the hunt for a slippery serial killer played by Jamie Dornan (Fifty Shades of Grey) in what is in all respects, a superior serial drama.

Anime

This week’s top release is not new to these shores— the 37-episode 2006 adaptation of the Death Note manga by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata is now available in high def in a new Blu-ray edition.  For fans of the series the Death Note Complete Collection (Viz Media, 925 min., BD $54.97, The Omega Edition $69.99) is highly desirable since the previous DVD editions of the series mastered in 480pi just don’t look that good on today’s large HD screens.  The Omega Edition comes in a special slipcase along with a volume of the Death Note manga.

Another older anime due out this week that should find considerable success in the market is Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, Part 1 (Right Stuf, 625 min., $59.99, BD $74.99), which contains the first 25 episodes of the 1985 Zeta Gundam series, the second series in groundbreaking Gundam mecha series.  This series, an essential part of the Gundam saga, was issued by Bandai Entertainment starting back in 2004, but has long been out of print.

This week’s lone new release is the Wizard Barristers: Complete Collection (Sentai Filmworks, 300 min., $59.98, BD $69.98), which collects the 12-episode 2014 supernatural series produced by Arms (and simulcast here by CrunchyRoll) about a society in which wizards and ordinary folks live together, but wizards are judged in special Magic Courts, where they are defended by wizard barristers.