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As she grows older, Michelle Pfeiffer – 51 next Wednesday (April 29) if you want to send a card – says her roles are becoming more interesting. In particular, she keeps getting asked to play the older woman in a love affair, be it with Paul Rudd (11 years younger) in Amy Heckerling's 2007 romantic comedy I Could Never Be Your Woman , Rupert Friend (23 years younger) in Stephen Frears's forthcoming Chéri , or Ashton Kutcher (20 years younger) in this week's DVD offering Personal Effects (2009). “Lucky for me, I don't really mind it,” Pfeiffer said with a smile at this year's Berlin Film Festival. Certainly it makes a change from Hollywood's usual habit of pairing older men with much younger women: Cary Grant with Audrey Hepburn in Charade (25 years difference) or Harrison Ford with, well, Michelle Pfeiffer in What Lies Beneath (16years).

The dynamic is old news for Kutcher, who has been the butt of robbing-the-cradle jokes on late-night TV since he paired off with Demi Moore, older by 15 years, whose ex, Bruce Willis, just married Emma Heming, 23 years his junior. Must be something in the Hollywood water. Amusingly, in the making-of segment on the Personal Effects DVD, Kutcher discusses the similarities between his personal life and his character in the movie – former wrestler, has a twin – but manages not to mention the May-September romance. The interviewer must have been biting his tongue.

Oh, right, the movie. Adapted from a short story by Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm , Personal Effects is a low-key drama with suffering stacked wide and high. It opens with a young man in prison, then flashes back to a support group for victims of horrible crimes, attended by the young man's mother (Pfeiffer), whose husband was shot dead. The daughter of her friend (Kathy Bates) was raped and murdered, and the daughter's distraught twin brother (Kutcher) gave up a promising wrestling career and now wears a chicken costume and hands out flyers on a street corner. So, not a musical comedy.

David Hollander, who adapted and directed the film, draws excellent performances from all the actors, including Spencer Hudson, a deaf first-time actor playing Pfeiffer's deaf son. The inability of Kutcher's and Hudson's characters to understand each other, even as Kutcher acts as the lad's mentor, sets up the film's climax.

But if you wonder why you didn't notice this film in the theatres, the answer is that it went straight to video. Pfeiffer had the same experience with I Could Never Be Your Woman , which suffered distribution headaches and arrived only on DVD. Even the witty and clever 2007 fantasy-adventure she made with Claire Danes and Robert De Niro, Stardust (based on a Neil Gaiman novel), had a terrible time at the North American box office and recovered only with a good showing overseas. An advertised Blu-ray release of the film has yet to be scheduled. Pfeiffer had better box-office luck in the musical Hairspray , in which, as in Stardust , she played the villain.

Speaking of ages, director Peter Bogdanovich wanted to shoot his 1976 movie Nickelodeon with a younger cast – John Ritter, Jeff Bridges as leads – but was told by the studio to go with older and bigger names, Ryan O'Neal and Burt Reynolds (Ritter wound up with a supporting part). He also wanted to make the comedy-drama in black and white, since it dealt with the early days of silent films from 1910 to the watershed release of Birth of a Nation in 1915. The studio told him to use colour.

Well, compensation comes to those who wait. This week's DVD release of Nickelodeon includes two versions: the 122-minute theatrical film in colour and a 125-minute director's cut reconfigured in black and white, which, as Bogdanovich says in a commentary, makes the fact-inspired story of a war between patent holders and independent filmmakers somehow seem more real. The slapstick is at times strained, the plot occasionally drags, and Brian Keith (as a producer, in a part written for Orson Welles) hams it up, but the ambition of Bogdanovich's sweeping homage to early filmmaking is impressive.

Also in the two-disc package is Bogdanovich's breakthrough film, The Last Picture Show (1971, black and white), about two young men (Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms) coming of age in a small Texas town in the 1950s with the help of Cloris Leachman (who won an Oscar for this), Ben Johnson (ditto), Ellen Burstyn and Cybill Shepherd.

The world's environment may be going to hell, but it won't be for want of DVDs paying attention. Among the latest crop is Schoolhouse Rock! Earth , which preaches to kids with such animated songs as You Oughta Be Savin' Water and Don't Be a Carbon Sasquatch . A clip appeared this week on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as “your moment of Zen.” Blue Gold: World Water Wars , narrated by Malcolm McDowell and based on the book by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, raises the alarm about fresh drinking water. And The Nature of Things with David Suzuki, Volume 1: Visions of the Future offers five episodes from the long-running Canadian show. Viewers who haven't been scared away by all those commercials showing Suzuki materializing unbidden in people's homes to criticize their energy use will find him examining greener cars, greener housing and more self-sufficient cities.

Also out: Frost/Nixon (2008), a gripping reconstruction of the tug of war between interviewer David Frost (Michael Sheen) and former U.S. president Richard Nixon (Frank Langella); and Notorious (2009), not the Hitchcock classic but a biopic of rapper Biggie Smalls, the Notorious B.I.G.

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The Wrestler (2008) is out on DVD, with Mickey Rourke's comeback triumph as Randy (The Ram) Robinson opposite Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood. Unlike the Blu-ray version, which offers a making-of bonus, the DVD has only a music video of the closing song, Bruce Springsteen's The Wrestler . Springsteen, sporting a soul patch, stands in a wrestling ring and sings lyrics that capture the past-his-prime fighter Rourke plays. “If you've ever seen a one-trick pony, you've seen me.”

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After years of fuzzy reproduction on video – the curse of films whose rights have expired – 17 early Superman cartoons are out in best-ever condition on Max Fleischer's Superman 1941-42 . Paramount Studios hired Max and Dave Fleischer (famous for their Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons) to bring the popular superhero to animated life, and they created 10-minute Technicolor shorts whose visual flair set the template for later Superman outings, as today's animators note in the Warner Bros. set's bonus features. The writing is at times corny, the images still show wear and tear, and the final eight cartoons were made without the Fleischers' involvement (which may be why four 1943 cartoons included here aren't reflected in the set's title), but this is still a treat for fans of animation.