Author: Peter J Patrick

Sweeney Todd AKA Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is the most performed Stephen Sondheim musical after West Side Story for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein’s music. The 2007 DreamWorks film of Sweeny Todd, originally released by Warner Bros., has been newly upgraded to 4KUHD by Paramount, its current owner.…

Albert Brooks’ 1996 film, Mother, now on 4K UHD and standard Blu-ray from Criterion is, if not a masterpiece, the closest thing to one the comedian-actor-writer-director has yet to come up with. Born Albert Einstein in 1947, he changed his name for obvious reasons. His father, who collapsed and died at a Friar’s Roast for…

Every four years in the U.S. we have a presidential election. This is one of those years, which makes it the perfect time to look back at the history of American presidents on film. For our purposes, we will only go as far back as the beginning of the sound era. The first film of…

Of all the film restorations that happen every year, VCI’s Bu-ray release of 1930’s The Bat Whispers is this year’s most impressive find. Based on The Circular Staircase, the first novel of Mary Roberts Rinehart, known as the American Agatha Christie, first published in 1908, the work was a whopping success as a book, play,…

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences was established in 1927 but didn’t start handing out its annual awards until 1929 when its first awards were supposed to be for films released in Los Angeles between August 1, 1927 and July 31, 1928. I’ll explain what I mean by “supposed to be” but first,…

What will win this year’s Oscars? At this point no one knows. There is no early favorite as there was at this time last year with Killers of the Flower Moon, which had already been seen at Cannes, and Oppenheimer which opened in wide release the third week in July on the same day as…

A24 has released The Zone of Interest on 4K UHD and standard Blu-ray, each sold separately, and available only from their website. The 2023 Oscar winner for Best International Feature and Best Sound was also nominated for Best Picture, Directing, and Adapted Screenplay, the latter two going to writer-director Jonathan Glazer. The film had looked…

Kino Lorber has released 4K UHD upgrades of two iconic films, one from almost twenty years ago, and one from almost seventy years ago: Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain from 2005, and Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956. Brokeback Mountain was so successful that it made back its cost in its first week…

Warner Home Video has released a 4K UHD upgrade of Jan de Bont’s 1996 disaster film, Twister. The film opens in 1969 during a devastating tornado that destroys a small Oklahoma town culminating in the death of the father of a young girl as he is sucked out of the family’s storm cellar. The girl…

Kino Lorber has released Lewis Milestone’s The North Star on Blu-ray from the film’s 2022 restoration of the 1943 film along with Armored Attack, the heavily re-edited 1957 re-release of the film from its 2013 restoration. The North Star, produced by Samuel Goldwyn, was one of three 1943 films, along with Warner Bros.’ Mission to…

Arrow Video has released a 4K UHD remastered edition of Paul Schrader’s 1980 film, American Gigolo, the third film directed by the writer of Taxi Driver. Schrader’s previous two films, 1978’s Blue Collar and 1979’s Hardcore were well received by the critics but not by the public. Like Taxi Driver, which Schrader wrote for Martin…

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…

I usually know what to expect from a film before I see it. I’m rarely surprised to see one that is so much better than I expected, but such was the case with Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One which won the 2023 Oscar for Best Visual Effects. The visual effects are impressive but the film,…

Kino Lorber has released three films on Blu-ray originally released theatrically between 1947 and 1974 that seemingly have nothing in common other than that they all deal with death. Raoul Walsh’s 1947 film, Pursued was the first noir western. Based on a novel by Niven Busch (Duel in the Sun, The Furies), the film is…

Kino Lorber has released a three-film Blu-ray of Paramount’s historically significant Philo Vance Collection, the first of the three being the first murder mystery of the talkie era. There were twelve Philo Vance detective novels written by author William Huntington Wright under the pseudonym of S.S. Van Dine published between 1926 and 1939 when the…