Universal has released a 4K UHD upgrade of 2020’s Promising Young Woman.

Nominated for five Oscars and winner of one for Emerald Fennell’s screenplay, this release comes as Fennell’s second directorial film, Saltburn, and star Carey Mulligan’s latest, Maestro, are making their film festival debuts to strong reviews.

Fennell, previously best known for her acting roles in the TV series Call the Midwife and The Crown, received three of the film’s Oscar nominations, having also received one for Best Directing and one for Best Picture, which she shared with three others. The other two nominations were for Best Film Editing and Best Actress for Mulligan’s superb portrayal of the title character, a woman with a secret double life.

Wickedly funny and terribly sad at the same time, Mulligan is superb as the plain by day, stunning by night, woman bent on revenge for a terrible wrong.

Superb as she is, Mulligan is not a one woman show. There are fine supporting performances by the likes of Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Clancy Brown, Jennifer Coolidge, Connie Britton, Max Greenfield, Christopher Lowell, and others.

If you want to see Fennell in action, check out Call the Midwife, all twelve seasons to date of which are presently streaming on Netflix.

Fennell appears in seasons 2-6, which originally ran from 2013-2017, in which she played Nurse Patsy Mount, the always cheerful, closeted lesbian in a house of Anglican nuns and nurses serving the poor residents of London’s East End beginning in 1957 with each season advancing the story by a year. Fennell’s participation runs from 1958-1962. Her co-stars include Jenny Agutter, Judy Parfitt, Pam Ferris, Charlotte Ritchie, Jack Ashton, Helen George, and Linda Bassett, with narration by Vanessa Redgrave.

You can also find her on Netflix where her Emmy-nominated portrayal of Camilla Parker-Bowles in The Crown is also streaming. She’s in Season 3 opposite Josh O’Connor as Prince Charles.

Fennell is currently on the big screen as the pregnant Barbie doll, Midge, in the smash hit, Barbie.

With Warner Archive’s Blu-ray upgrade of William Dieterle’s 1937 Oscar winner, The Life of Emile Zola, all but three Oscar Best Picture-winning films have been released on Blu-ray. Still missing are 1936’s The Great Ziegfeld and 1956’s Around the World in 80 Days, both of which are owned by Warner Bros., and 2021’s CODA, which is owned by Apple TV.

The Life of Emile Zola was nominated for ten Oscars and won three for Best Picture, Supporting Actor (Joseph Schildkraut), and Screenplay. Paul Muni was nominated for Best Actor for his towering portrayal of Zola, but lost to Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous

Long considered one of the screen’s best courtroom dramas, Muni has one of his best roles as the French author, champion of the oppressed, who relentlessly pursued a campaign to free the wrongly convicted Captain Dreyfuss (Schildkraut) falsely accused of treason and sent to Devil’s Island where he has already languished for years.

Although he had won the New York Film Critics award for his portrayal Zola, Muni, who won the previous year’s Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of the pioneering French microbiologist in The Story of Louis Pasteur, was not expected to win two years in a row. Ironically, Luise Rainer, his co-star in 1937’s The Good Earth, the previous year’s Best Actress winner for The Great Ziegfeld shockingly became the first back-to-back Oscar winner for The Good Earth over the more acclaimed performances of Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth, Greta Garbo in Camille, Janet Gaynor in A Star Is Born, and Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas.

Spencer Tracy became the first back-to-back Best Actor winner the following year for Boys Town.

Along with Muni and Schildkraut, critics warmly applauded the performance of Gale Sondergaard as Schildkraut’s crusading wife in The Life of Emile Zola. Others in the cast include Gloria Holden, Donald Crisp, Erin O’Brien Moore, Henry O’Neil, Morris Carnovsky, Louis Calhern, Ralph Morgan, and Harry Davenport.

Also new from Warner Archive are Blu-ray upgrades of George Cukor’s 1933 version of Little Women and Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 film, Father’s Little Dividend, the sequel to his 1950 film, Father of the Bride.

For many, Cukor’s efficient version of Louise May Alcott’s Little Women is still the definitive one.

Nominated for three Oscars for Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay, it lost all three, but film historians still insist that this is the film for which Katherine Hepburn should have won her first Oscar, not the same year’s Morning Glory directed by Lowell Sherman.

Others may have come close, but Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Frances Dee, and Jean Parker as the sisters are hard to surpass. The same could be said of Paul Lukas as Professor Bhaer, Douglass Montgomery as Laurie, Spring Byington as Marmee, and certainly of Edna May Oliver as Aunt March. Indeed, Hepburn, offered the role of Aunt March in Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version, turned it down because no one in her estimation could fill Oliver’s shoes.

The extremely popular Father of the Bride had been nominated for three Oscars for Best Picture, Actor (Spencer Tracy), and Screenplay. Father’s Little Dividend was just as successful at the box-office but doesn’t quite achieve the earlier film’s magic despite the recasting of the earlier film’s splendid cast. They are Joan Bennett as Tracy’s wife, Elizabeth Taylor as their daughter, Russ Tamblyn as their son, Don Taylor as the groom, and Billie Burke and Moroni Olson as the groom’s parents.

Happy viewing.