Jojo Rabbit is the seventh of the nine films nominated for Best Picture at the 2019 Academy Awards to be released for home viewing.

The Irishman and Marriage Story are available for screening through Netflix. Ford v Ferrari, Joker, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, and the winner, Parasite, have previously been released on Blu-ray and standard DVD. 1917 will be released on March 24, and Little Women on April 7.

Christine Leunen’s 2008 novel Caging Skies was the source material for Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit.

Star Roman Griffin Davis is the 11-year-old son of cinematographer Ben Davis (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) and writer-director Camille Griffin (second clapper loader on Sliding Doors). He plays Jojo, a ten-year-old boy in the throes of World War II who has just begun his training to become a Hitler Youth. An accident sidelines him at home where he discovers that his mother (Scarlet Johannsson) has been hiding a young Jewish girl (Thomasin McKenzie) from the Nazis. Jojo has an invisible friend that only he and the audience can see. This invisible friend is Adolf Hitler, played by writer-director Waititi, a character not in the source material.

Critics and audiences have been split on whether the Nazis are a proper subject for comedy, but this is an argument that goes as far back as 1940’s The Great Dictator and 1942’s To Be or Not to Be.

In The Great Dictator, Charlies Chaplin played the dual role of a timid Jewish barber and a dictator who looked suspiciously like Hitler. The film was an enormous hit, nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture, Actor, and Screenplay. In To Be or Not to Be, Jack Benny got to play an actor who impersonated Hitler. The film, best remembered for being released less than two months after the death of Carole Lombard, was nominated for one Oscar for its scoring. It wasn’t until Mel Brooks’ 1967 film The Producers that a comedy featuring Nazis was widely accepted. Nominated for two Oscars, it won for its screenplay. Brooks would remake To Be or Not to Be in 1983 and that’s been about it for comedies dealing with the Nazis.

If the comedic moments of Jojo Rabbit recall those films, the harrowing war scenes rival those of Fritz Lang’s 1943 film Hangmen Also Die! while the children at war aspects vividly recall Roberto Rosselini’s 1948 film Germany Year Zero.

Nominated for six Oscars, it won Waititi the award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Marielle Heller’s follow-up to last year’s awards magnet Can You Ever Forgive Me?, was her highly anticipated film of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, an adaptation of a 1998 Esquire article by Tom Junod.

Critics and audiences generally loved the film, but it was not what most were expecting. Instead of focusing on Fred Rogers, the beloved children’s TV host known as Mister Rogers, the film focuses on his interviewer, the fictitious Lloyd Vogel, patterned after Mr. Junod.

The film uses the Mister Rogers Pittsburgh set instead of the real Pittsburgh to show cars driving through the neighborhood which can be a bit off-putting. It does, however, use the set more appropriately for much of the film’s narrative. Other locations in Pennsylvania were used including one in Mount Lebanon where sound mixer Jim Emswiller fell to his death.

For Tom Hanks, who received his sixth Oscar nomination for playing Fred Rogers, this was the ninth film in which he played a real-life person. His was approached by Heller at a party to play the role after having told his agents not to send him anymore scripts about real people. They were introduced by his son Colin Hanks, a longtime friend of Heller’s.

Rogers was the third real-life person Hanks has played who it turns out was a distant cousin. The others were Walt Disney in Saving Mr. Banks and Ben Bradlee in The Post.

Although Hanks dominates the screen in every scene in which he appears, it’s Matthew Rhys as his interviewer who is the film’s central character. It’s basically about Rhys’ inability to forgive his father (Chris Cooper) for abandoning his mother on her deathbed that drives the film’s narrative. Others of note in the cast include Susan Kelechi Watson as Rhys’ wife and Maryann Plunkett as Hanks’ wife, the legendary Joanne Rogers.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Edward Norton wrote, directed, and starred in Motherless Brooklyn based on Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel. Although the novel was set in 1997, Norton moved the action back to 1957 because he always wanted to make a film noir, and that seemed to be the ideal time to place it. It was also a time when city planner Robert Moses, on whom the film’s central villain is based, was most active. Alec Baldwin as the Moses character, Willem Dafoe as his brother, Bruce Willis as Norton’s mentor, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as the film’s heroine with “he’s my uncle, he’s my father” issues, are all terrific. Best, though, is Norton himself as the film’s hero, a lonely private detective afflicted with Tourette’s Syndrome. Raised in a Catholic orphanage in Brooklyn, he’s nicknamed Brooklyn by Willis’ character and called “poor, motherless Brooklyn” by Mbatha-Raw’s.

The film is to Brooklyn and Manhattan in the 1950s what Chinatown was to Los Angeles in the 1930s. The film’s score is often reminiscent of Chinatown‘s. Although the film received a Golden Globe nomination for Daniel Pemberton’s score and an AARP for Grownups Awards nomination for Best Time Capsule, its biggest awards recognition was at the Satellite Awards where Norton won the Auteur Award and the film was nominated for Norton’s screenplay, cinematography, and art direction/production design.

This was Norton’s second film as director. His first was Keeping the Faith, made twenty years ago.

Motherless Brooklyn is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

This week’s new releases include Knives Out and Frozen II.