The year’s biggest box-office success thus far has been Dune: Part Two which has been released on Blu-ray and 4K Ultra UHD by Warner Home Video.

The film, a sequel to Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 film, Dune, is basically the second half of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel.

This is at least the third iteration of the novel, first filmed in 1984 by David Lynch with Kyle MacLachlan as the hero of the science-fiction epic set in 10,191. There was a 2000 TV miniseries with William Hurt that, like Villeneuve’s films, broke the novel into two episodes, followed by a third based on Herbert’s 1969 novel, Dune: Messiah, which was written as a sequel to the original. Lynch had planned to film Dune: Messiah as a sequel to his 1984 film but due to the poor critical and audience reception to the original, did not. Villeneuve plans to make it the third part of his much more successful trilogy.

The first film was nominated for ten Oscars and won six for Film Editing, Cinematography, Production Design, Visual Effects, Sound, and Score. It was also nominated for Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Makeup and Hairstyling, and Costume Design. Will the sequel do as well? Only time will tell.

This one opens with the first-billed stars of the original, Timothée Chalamet and Rebecca Ferguson, as son and mother making their way to safety, but as the story progresses, Zendaya moves up in prominence to the story which also gives prominent roles to Florence Pugh, Christopher Walken, and Austin Butler. Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgard, and Charlotte Rampling are also in the cast, having survived the slaughter at the end of the first film.

If you liked the first film, you’ll like this one.

Warner Archive, the niche section of Warner Home Video, has released Blu-ray upgrades of two of the most requested titles in their repertoire.

William Wyler’s 1956 film, Friendly Persuasion, based on Jessamyn West’s acclaimed 1945 novel about a Quaker family during the Civil War, was nominated for six Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Anthony Perkins), Adapted Screenplay, Song (“Friendly Persuasion (Thee I Love)”), and Sound Recording.

Gary Cooper was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor-Drama for his portrayal of the head of the Birdwell family and Dorothy McGuire won the National Board of Review award for Best Actress for her portrayal of his wife and mother of their three children, Perkins, Phyllis Love, and Richard Eyer. Marjorie Main does her usual scene stealing as the mother of three daughters looking for husbands, while Samantha the Goose is billed for playing herself.

The first part of the film follows the bucolic life of the family whereas the second part focuses on the terrifying aspects of the war.

Cooper reportedly didn’t think much of his performance, but critics and audiences found it to be one of his best. McGuire, inexplicably billed below the title, is very much his equal in the first of a series of great middle-age performances that also included Old Yeller, A Summer Place, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and Swiss Family Robinson.

Anthony Perkins would go on to star in three 1957 films, Fear Strikes Out, The Lonely Man, and The Tin Star, as well as several more films before achieving screen immortality with 1960’s Psycho.

Fred Zinnemann’s 1959 film, The Nun’s Story, based on Kathryn Hulme’s groundbreaking 1956 novel about a nun who leaves the convent, was nominated for eight Oscars including Best Picture, Director, Actress (Audrey Hepburn), Screenplay, Film Editing, Cinematography, Sound, and Score.

Surprisingly, the film was not nominated for any of its great supporting actresses, although Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft were nominated elsewhere. Even more surprising is that Hepburn, who had won the New York Film Critics award, did not win Best Actress for playing a role based on that of a real-life former nun. Evans won the National Board of Review award for Best Supporting Actress.

The film takes Hepburn from a starry-eyed postulant to a novice nun assigned to a harrowing mental institution and finally to the Congo where she excelled at saving lives as a nursing nun. Returned to the mother house in Belgium, she finds herself unable to forgive the German invaders of her country who have murdered her physician father and leaves the convent.

The remarkable supporting cast includes Peter Finch as the doctor in the Congo, Dean Jagger as Hepburn’s father, Mildred Dunnock, Beatrice Straight, Patricia Collinge, Barbara O’Neil, Ruth White, and Rosalie Crutchley as various memorable nuns, and Colleen Dewhurst as a violent mental patient.

Also newly released on Blu-ray by Warner Archive is Francis Ford Coppola’s bizarre 1966 comedy, You’re a Big Boy Now, starring Peter Kastner as a young man looking for love in all the wrong places in the New York City of the day. The supporting cast includes Elizabeth Hartman as a cold-hearted beauty, Gerladine Page as Kastner’s daffy mother, and Julie Harris as his landlady, Miss Thing. Page received an Oscar nomination for playing against type.

The Criterion Collection has released a Blu-ray and 4K UHD upgrade of Michael Powell’s 1960 film, Peeping Tom.

The film about a sympathetic serial killer played by Carl Boehm was savaged by London critics and pulled from theatres after a shortened run. It was slowly released in other countries, including the U.S. where it was shown in an aborted version in 1962. It achieved new respectability when it was presented in a restored version at the 1979 New York Film Festival, having been rediscovered by Martin Scorsese.
Long considered the British Psycho, which had been made two years earlier, it is better compared to Hitchcock’s later 1972 film, Frenzy, which features Anna Massey, who stars opposite Boehm in Peeping Tom, as one of the serial killer’s victims in that one.

The Criterion release includes archival interviews with Scorsese and Boehm (Fox and His Friends) who died in 2014 at 86.

Happy viewing.