New releases: Documentary reveals talent and problems of ill-fated star Amy Winehouse

Amy

Lionsgate, $19.98; Blu-ray, $24.99

It’s been a great decade for music documentaries, and director Asif Kapadia’s is one of the best of the bunch: an at times disturbingly intimate look at the life and death of pop-soul diva Amy Winehouse. Taking advantage of modern culture’s tendency to document everything — and the tabloids’ habit of hounding celebrities — Kapadia is able to string together footage from Winehouse’s working-class girlhood to her descent into drug addiction and squalor. What emerges is a portrait of an uncommon talent with crippling emotional problems whose rise to stardom was the start of her downfall. The music in “Amy” is wonderful; the movie is harrowing. The DVD and Blu-ray is a must for fans, supplementing the film with unseen performances and bonus interviews.

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Mississippi Grind

Lionsgate, $19.98; Blu-ray, $24.99

Available now on VOD

A sort of modern update of Robert Altman’s classic gambling dramedy “California Split,” Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s “Mississippi Grind” stars Ben Mendelsohn as a broke, degenerate gambler who strikes up a friendship with a devil-may-care grifter (played by Ryan Reynolds) and takes a road trip up and down the Delta. Similar to Boden and Fleck’s excellent “Half Nelson” and “Sugar,” “Mississippi Grind” has a fantastic sense of place, capturing the glitz and grubbiness of small-time Southern casinos. But the main reason to see it is to watch Mendelsohn and Reynolds together, illustrating how some dudes have a habit of bringing out the worst in each other, even when they’re trying to be supportive. The DVD and Blu-ray add a single slim featurette.

Mistress America

20th Century Fox Blu-ray, $39.99

Available now on VOD

Writer-director Noah Baumbach follows up his overly sour comedy “While We’re Young” with the far more likable “Mistress America,” a loopy farce co-written by and starring Greta Gerwig. Though not as good as the earlier Baumbach-Gerwig collaboration “Frances Ha” (one of the best films of the 2010s), the new movie is vibrant and hopeful, telling the story of a college freshman who feels overwhelmed by her first semester in New York until she’s taken under the wing of a cool, kooky go-getter. Lola Kirke plays the student and Gerwig’s the crackpot mentor in a film that starts out like a Woody Allen-esque urban vignette then takes a surprising, screwball turn. Throughout, Baumbach and his muse find something meaningful to say about loving people for their faults rather than sneering at them — something “While We’re Young” did too much. The “Mistress America” DVD and Blu-ray include a few brief featurettes.

Fear the Walking Dead: The Complete First Season

Starz/Anchor Bay, $39.98; Blu-ray, $49.99

The Walking Dead: The Complete Fifth Season

Starz/Anchor Bay, $69.98; Blu-ray, $69.98/$79.99

Not only did AMC’s hit “The Walking Dead” have its best season last year — moving its cast of human survivors from the clutches of a cannibal cult to a deceptively safe-looking gated community, with lots of snarling zombies in between — but the show’s producers also successfully expanded the brand with the spin-off series “Fear the Walking Dead,” which follows a different group of folks at the start of the apocalypse. Both the abbreviated six-episode first season of “Fear” and the full 16 episodes of the fifth “Walking Dead” season are arriving on DVD and Blu-ray simultaneously, with the latter available in collector’s edition packaging. Both tack on a variety of featurettes; “The Walking Dead” set also has commentary tracks. Together they continue to build out creator Robert Kirkman’s incredibly popular, deeply bleak vision of a broken world.

And…

Cooties

Lionsgate, $19.98; Blu-ray, $19.99

Available now on VOD

Downhill Racer

Criterion Blu-ray, $39.95

Goodnight Mommy

Starz/Anchor Bay, $22.98; Blu-ray, $26.99

The Hunting Ground

Starz/Anchor Bay, $22.98; Blu-ray, $26.99

Tokyo Tribe

Millennium, $14.99; Blu-ray, $20.99

Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War of the Underworld

E1 Blu-ray, $29.98

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