New on DVD and Blu-ray

The Help

(Disney, $30)

Kathryn Stockett’s engaging novel about a white writer and the two black maids she chooses to profile turned out to be “an equally affecting movie,” said USA Today. Emma Stone plays the writer; Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer’s long-suffering maids “add vast reserves of depth and dignity.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Laurel & Hardy: The Essential Collection

(RHI Entertainment/Vivendi, $100)

This 10-disc set “covers a golden age” in Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s long run as a comedy duo, said the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. These 17 remastered features and 41 shorts show why the meek Englishman and the “big, blustery” Georgian “complemented each other perfectly.”

Histoire(s) du cinéma

(Olive Films, $50)

Director Jean-Luc Godard’s eight-episode history of cinema is “one of the French New Waver’s greatest achievements,” said Time Out Chicago. First released in 1998, it’s both “a heady cluster of allusions—to movies, literature, 21st-century politics”—and “an epic poem.”