Paramount Presents has released a stunningly beautiful 4K UHD restoration of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, the enduring 1974 masterpiece that is one of the screen’s great murder mysteries. Nominated for 11 Oscars, it won just one for Robert Towne’s brilliant screenplay.

Jack Nicolson stars in perhaps his greatest performance as the private detective who is convinced that the widow of a Los Angeles County executive, played by Faye Dunaway in perhaps her greatest performance as well, is the killer. He couldn’t be more wrong.

The sizzling performances of Nicholson and Dunaway are supported by a cast of actors including John Hillerman, Perry Lopez, Burt Young, and actor-director John Huston, all working at the top of their craft. John A. Alonzo’s (Star Trek: Generations) Oscar-nominated cinematography is the best of his career.

The film was supposed to be the first in a trilogy of films about Nicholson’s character, spread out over a thirty-year period, but after the failure of 1990’s The Two Jakes, which was directed by Nicholson, the third film was never made.

Extras include a new documentary on the era that produced the film as well as a ton of previously released material and a previously recorded commentary by David Fincher and Robert Towne. A Blu-ray of The Two Jakes is included on a separate disc.

Frank Capra’s 1941 classic, Meet John Doe has been released on Blu-ray by Classic Fix. Restored from a British negative, the film, like Capra’s 1946 classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, fell into public domain when Capra’s company failed to renew its copyright, but unlike It’s a Wonderful Life, the film has not had a resurgence in popularity to the extent that it deserves.

Like It’s a Wonderful Life, the film has a dark tone, but its outcome is not quite as rosy. Gary Cooper stars in the title role of a homeless man who decides to commit suicide on New Year’s Eve. That is due to a story that is concocted by newspaper columnist Barbara Stanwyck whose article propels the unknown John Doe to prominence with Cooper the homeless man Stanwyck finds to pretend to be the man she wrote about. It all backfires and Cooper ends up really planning to commit suicide by jumping off the roof of the film’s fictional city’s tallest building at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve.

Cooper and Stanwyck are at their best here, a feat almost duplicated by their comic performances in the same year’s Ball of Fire directed by Howard Hawks. Stanwyck was nominated for an Oscar for the latter, and Cooper won his first Oscar for his third 1941 film, Sergeant York but he is even better here. Stanwyck would also be great in a third 1941 film, Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve opposite Henry Fonda. It was quite a year for the two stars who shine at their very best in Capra’s enduring drama with comic undertones provided by a sterling cast that includes James Gleason, Walter Brennan, Edward Arnold, Spring Byington, and Gene Lockhart.

Devil’s Doorway, newly upgraded to Blu-ray by Warner Archive, is the story of a decorated Civil War hero which was fittingly released the day before Veteran’s Day, 1950 by MGM, but strangely advertised as a romantic film about a white woman and an American Indian, with the woman shown in the foreground and the Indian in the background, which was a horrid example of false advertising.

Robert Taylor, playing against type, is the American Indian who returns to his home in the Wyoming Territory as a Sergeant Major who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery, but is still regarded as an outsider by the growing white community. Tensions mount as sheepherders want to settle on land occupied by Taylor and his family, egged on by a crooked lawyer played by Louis Calhern, and the law. Newcomer Paula Raymond plays a struggling young lawyer who tries to help him stave off the settlers but fails as new anti-Indian laws are enacted.

Taylor, at the time, was long past his romantic idol days in Magnificent Obsession, Camille, and Waterloo Bridge, and not yet the stalwart latter day star of Quo Vadis, Ivanhoe, and Knights of the Round Table that he would soon become. MGM had decided to shelve the film after a disastrous preview months earlier, but after Fox’s release of the similarly themed hit, Broken Arrow, decided to release it anyway, albeit unsuccessfully.

The film has grown in legend as the first western directed by Anthony Mann, who would soon become one of the great directors in the genre with Winchester ‘73, The Naked Spur, and The Man from Laramie among others. It’s good but could have been better.

Cohen Media has released Uberto Pasolini’s Nowhere Special less than a month after the film was first show in theatres.

A festival hit in 2020, the film’s theatrical release was inexplicably delayed for four years but is finally available for all to see.

Based on a true story about a 34-year-old Belfast window cleaner given three months to live after a cancer diagnosis, the film chronicles his search for a family to adopt his three-year-old son so that the boy won’t be brought up in foster homes like he was.

The role is played by James Norton, who catapulted to fame as the first star of the hit British mystery series, Grantchester (2014-2019) and stunned with his complex BAFTA-nominated performance in 2015’s Happy Valley. He is probably best known in film for his portrayal of John Brooke in Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Little Women.

Norton and then-four-year-old Daniel Lamont have amazing chemistry as father and son. For most of the film, the little boy has no understanding of why he and his father, accompanied by a government lady, are going on visits to various families. He slowly comes to understand that his father is going to go away and that he will be given a new home, but which one is not revealed until the very end when the little boy fondly recalls something that occurred on one of the visits and his father suddenly knows which family he belongs with.

It’s a tearjerking ending but one that is well-earned. Norton and Lamont were both nominated for awards by British groups after the film was first shown in festivals. Director Pasolini is best known as producer for the film and TV versions of The Full Monty.

Happy viewing.