• courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment

It's Fourth of July in the seaside tourist town of Claridge, Md., on the Chesapeake Bay. All is well. The parade is forming up on Main Street. The kids are tubing out in the harbor. The annual crab eating contest is in full swing.

Then the bad things start to happen. A million dead fish wash into the marina. Blackbirds fall from the sky. Some Claridge residents begin to break out in terrible, painful lesions. Others start hemorrhaging. And the less said about that crab-eating contest, the better.

That's the set-up for the found-footage horror film The Bay, new to DVD and digital this week from director Barry Levinson. That's right, Barry Levinson—director of Diner, Rain Man and The Natural.

The Bay opened in a handful of theaters last November and quickly sank from view, which is too bad. It's an effective horror picture that avoids much of the gimmickry usually associated with the found-footage thing. It's also a movie with something to say. The Bay is thoroughly steeped in ecological anxieties about pollution, pandemics, infections and runaway superbugs finding interesting disease vectors into your body.

Levinson frames his movie with the on-camera testimony of one Donna Thompson (Kether Donohue), eyewitness to the terrible events of 07-04-09, who is cooperating with a Wikileaks-style group to expose a government coverup. At the time of the incident, Donna was a intern with the local news station, filming the Independence Day celebrations.

As Donna recounts the horror, Levinson splices in sounds and images from a dozen sources: surveillance cameras, police car dash cams, 911 calls, smart phones, surgical exploratory cams and of course that one relentless dad who won't put down the camera on vacation. We follow a handful of characters and their stories on that day, including Donna and her cameraman, a pair of oceanographers and the town mayor.

I don't want to give too much away, but it's safe to say that the citizens of Claridge don't fare well. It seems that the coastal waters have been poisoned over the years with nuclear materials and steroid-laced runoff from the local chicken processing plant. We hear alarming details about fungal bacteria, crustaceous isopods and something ominously referred to as "a new form evolve." Rumors fly: Is it biological warfare? Terrorism? Cults? Aliens? Whatever it is, the government wants it kept quiet at all costs.

• courtesy of the Criterion Collection

Director Elia Kazan's classic 1954 drama On The Waterfront tells the story of dockworker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), a once-promising boxer whose life is derailed when he gets mixed up with mobbed-up labor union honchos on the NYC waterfront. As you may have heard, Terry coulda been a contender. On The Waterfront is generally regarded as one of the greatest American films ever made and won eight Academy Awards in 1955, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Brando.

New to DVD and Blu-ray this week, the Criterion Collection reissue of On The Waterfront features a new digital restoration and alternate presentations in the full-screen (1.33:1) and wide-screen (1.85:1) aspect ratios. Also included in the package are various interviews and commentary tracks reprised from previous DVD iterations, plus additional critical essays, a new making-of documentary and recent interviews with Martin Scorsese and Brando's co-star Eva Marie Saint.

Among the joys of digging into a reissue like this is gleaning insights from the bonus materials as to what makes a great movie work. To wit: The film's script, we learn, was based on a series of investigative reports published in the New York Sun in 1949. In the postwar years, violent crime and corruption were running rampant among the docks and shipyards of New York City. Journalist Malcolm Johnson exposed the organized crime operation in a 24-part series called "Crime on the Waterfront," and he remained obsessed with the situation for years.

• courtesy of Paramount Pictures

After nearly a decade of experimentation with motion-capture animation, director Robert Zemeckis returned to live action filmmaking last fall with Flight, starring Denzel Washington. The film tells the story of commercial airline pilot Whip Whitaker, who must confront his demons after crash landing a airliner while drunk on vodka and high on cocaine. (You can read Neil Morris' full review here.)

Flight is a fascinating piece of filmmaking and a kind of stealthy movie business maneuver. The marketing and advance trailers for Flight highlighted the film's boffo action sequence — the plane crash — and the almost gimmicky angle of the airline pilot that shows up for work drunk. This is a news story we seem to see about once a month these days.

But as anyone who has seen the film knows, Flight is a much more complicated machine. The spectacular plane crash proves to be a kind of narrative feint concealing a harrowing addiction drama and character study. It's one of the strangest and best screenplays to come along in a long, long while. (It a nominee for this year's Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.)

Anyone interested in looking under the hood of this remarkable film will want to check out the superior bonus materials included on the home video release of Flight, new to DVD and Blu-ray this week.

In the first featurette, "Origins of Flight," screenwriter John Gatins reveals that the story was conceived in 1999, well before the media trend of drunk pilot stories or the heroics of Captain Sully on the Hudson River. Both director Zemeckis and leading man Washington (also nominated for an Oscar) go out of their way to praise Gatins' script. Zemeckis says that when he first read the screenplay, he realized it was the rarest kind of treasure — a complex R-rated character drama both sturdy enough to break new artistic ground and thrilling enough to punch through into mainstream success. Washington, among the industry's most in-demand players, signed on almost immediately. He considered the script "dangerous" and kept the first draft with him on-set as a kind of talisman.

• courtesy of Cinedigm

In recent years, I've become fascinated with animated foreign films for kids. There's so much good stuff out there — some recent examples include The Secret of Kells (Ireland), Chico & Rita (Spain), A Cat in Paris (France) and Ponyo (Japan). These are movies you're unlikely to see in theaters, so you have to track them down on DVD, Blu-ray or digital download.

While I certainly appreciate the artfulness of these films — each has earned various world cinema awards — I have very practical reasons for keeping them on the shelf. I have two young kids at home and if I have to watch one more goddamn Shrek movie I'm going to kill myself.

Tales of the Night — the enchanting French animated feature new to DVD and Blu-ray this week — is the kind of children's movie you can feel good about putting into rotation. It's the latest project from French animation artist Michel Ocelot and it will provide you and the kids with some images you've never seen before.

Ocelet has worked in a variety of media, but he's most known for his "shadow play" style of silhouettes set against intricate and impossibly colorful backgrounds. The six stories in Tales of the Night have been compiled from previous television specials, anthologized in 2011 for European cinema presentation.

• courtesy of Universal Pictures

End of Watch — the intense police drama new to DVD, Blu-ray and digital this week — truly is a different kind of cop movie.

I know, I know. They all say that. But director David Ayer (writer of Training Day) executes an interesting game plan here and gets big results by going small. He narrows the focus radically by following two L.A. cops and their day-to-day experiences in a notorious South Central neighborhood.

Jake Gyllenhaal headlines as Brian Taylor, a young patrolman for whom the term "gung-ho" was apparently invented. As stated in the film's opening voiceover, Taylor fully believes in the concept of the thin blue line: That a brotherhood of good guys with badges is the only thing standing between a safe society and a murderous criminal class of bad guys.

Taylor's on-the-job experience seems to support this theory. Along with partner Miguel Zavala (Micheal Pena, Tower Heist), Taylor encounters scene after harrowing scene of violence and despair on the streets of South Central. When the partners break down one too many doors, they're targeted for bloody elimination by a terrifying Mexican drug cartel.

The film's narrative twist is that Taylor carries a hand-held digital camera with him on duty, as part of a community college project. Director Ayer uses the digital camera — plus lapel cameras and squad car dash cams — to deliver much of the film in dizzying first-person close-up. In fact, as the extras reveal, the original plan was to film the entire movie in the "found footage" style so fashionable of late.

Ayer eventually chose to integrate traditional cinematography as well. Good call. The found footage gimmick is too conspicuous and too implausible — why would the gangbangers have cameras? End of Watch is a good movie, but it could have been even better film if Ayer had discarded the shaky cam entirely. You don't need a reason to use weird, tight camera angles. Spike Lee does it all the time.

• courtesy of Docudrama Films

Family lore holds that my mom and dad met as teenagers during Detroit's heyday in the 1950s, when the Motor City was an enviable American metropolis. Mom worked at a diner downtown. Dad raced hot rods up Telegraph Road. She calmed his ass down and we settled in the suburbs, six blocks from Detroit's famous 8 Mile Road.

My dad worked as a truck driver in the city for the next 40 years, often shuttling parts between auto plants. A dedicated union man, he clocked overtime pretty much every day and made enough money so that my mom didn't have to work and us kids all had the chance to go to college.

I didn't realize it at the time, of course, but my family was among the last beneficiaries of Detroit's Golden Age.

Detropia — the darkly fascinating documentary new this week to DVD, digital and cable VOD — poses the simple, awful question: What happened? Over the last several decades, Detroit's economic collapse has been so severe it's practically science fiction. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Detroit now has half the median income and three times the poverty rate of the nation as a whole. The average home price? $9,562. In the national and international consciousness, the city of Detroit is an object of pity — too sad to even be a punchline anymore.

Detropia profiles an assortment of Detroit natives and newcomers and finds episodes both despairing and cautiously hopeful. But that shell-shocked central question — what happened? — is always pulsing underneath.