Girlfriends (Blu-ray)

When her best friend and roommate abruptly moves out to get married, Susan (Thirtysomething’s Melanie Mayron), trying to become a gallery artist while making ends meet as a bar mitzvah photographer on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, finds herself adrift in both life and love. Could a new job be the answer? What about a fling with a married, older rabbi (The Magnificent Seven’s Eli Wallach)?

A wonder of American independent filmmaking whose remarkably authentic vision of female relationships has become a touchstone for makers of an entire subgenre of films and television shows about young women trying to make it in the big city, this 1970s New York time capsule from Claudia Weill (It’s My Turn) captures the complexities and contradictions of women’s lives and relationships with wry humor and refreshing frankness.

• New, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by director Claudia Weill and director of photography Fred Murphy, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• New interview with Weill
• New interview with Weill and actors Melanie Mayron, Christopher Guest, and Bob Balaban
• New interview with screenwriter Vicki Polon
• New interview with Weill and writer and director Joey Soloway
• Joyce at 34, a 1972 short film by Weill and Joyce Chopra
• Commuters, a 1973 short film by Weill
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: Essays by critic Molly Haskell and scholar Carol Gilligan