Wes Anderson is a filmmaker with a unique perspective whose films people seem to either love or hate. Although his films have more lovers than haters, some people love some of his films and hate some of his others.

An 8-time Oscar nominee and winner for his 2023 short film, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, his latest, The Phoenician Scheme has been released on 4K UHD with all the bells and whistles one would expect and is also streaming on Peacock.

With a Metascore of 70, The Phoenician Scheme is the lowest rated film of Anderson’s career since his 1995 debut film, Bottle Rocket.

In full disclosure, I tried to watch the film with an open mind but found it so difficult to like that when the film froze on my streamer, I gave up trying and after the TV rebooted, turned it off and went to bed.

The Phoenician Scheme stars Benicio Del Toro as a greedy oligarch in 1950s Lebanon with many children and many enemies. Like all of Anderson’s films, it is beautiful to look at, with plenty of dry wit. Mia Threapleton as his daughter, a nun, and Michael Cera as his tutor, have the largest roles aside from Del Toro. Popping up throughout the film are such stars as Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlet Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Friend, Hope Davis, Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham, and Bill Murray as God.

If you spend time with it, hopefully you will enjoy it more than I did, but probably not as much as The Grand Budapest Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom, Isle of Dogs, The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore or whatever your favorite Anderson film might be.

Turning to other films that have been newly released on 4K UHD, two from Criterion stand out.

Neither Carnal Knowledge nor You Can Count on Me were previously released on Blu-ray in the U.S.

1971’s Carnal Knowledge was Mike Nichols’ fourth film and his return to critical favor after the flop of 1970’s Catch-22 brought him down from the heights of his first two, 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for which he was nominated for a Best director Oscar, and 1967’s The Graduate for which he won.

Spanning time from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, the film explores the relationship between two men, one completely toxic, and the other mildly so, as they desire and mistreat several women.

Jack Nicholson, himself coming off of consecutive Oscar nominations for 1969’s Easy Rider and 1970’s Five Easy Pieces, plays an aggressive fast-talking schemer while bay-faced Art Garfunkel of Simon and Garfunkel plays his somewhat less obnoxious buddy who tries to keep up with him. The principal women in their lives are played by Candice Bergen as Garfunkel’s girlfriend who is seduced Nicolson, and Ann-Margret in an Oscar nominated performance as Nicholson’s sexpot first wife. Oscar winner Rita Moreno (West Side Story) appears as a sex worker in the film’s devastating last scene.

Extras include a 2001 interview of Nichols by writer-director Jason Reitman.

2000’s You Can Count on Me was the directing debut of writer-director Kenneth Lonergan based on his 1996 one-act play.

Lonergan, who later won an Oscar for his screenplay for 2016’s Manchester by the Sea, received his first nomination for his screenplay for You Can Count on Me as did lead actress Laura Linney.

Linney and Mark Ruffalo play siblings who were orphaned as children when their parents were killed in a car crash. Linney, who is now a lending officer at her local bank, is a divorcée with an eight-year-old son played by Rory Culkin in his film debut. She hasn’t heard from her brother for some time when he returns to the home they own together to hang out for a while. The siblings reconnect and the errant brother bonds with his young nephew before going his own way once again.

The portrayals of the quirky family members are beautifully rendered by all three actors.

The supporting cast is headed by Matthew Broderick, a childhood friend and classmate of Lonergan, as Linney’s boss at the bank. Jon Tennery as Linney’s off-and-on boyfriend and Lonergan himself as a local minister also have major supporting roles.

Extras include new on-screen interviews with Lonergan, Linney, Ruffalo, and Broderick.

After the disappointing Phoenician Scheme, the brilliant but depressing Carnal Knowledge, and the marvelous but very sad You Can Count on Me, I needed something uplifting and I found it in the 4K UHD upgrade of Ron Howard’s 1995 film, Apollo 13 which is being re-released on IMAX screens in honor of its 30th anniversary.

The film is about the April 1970 ill-fated attempt to land another three astronauts on the moon less than a year after the successful August 1969 landing.

Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon are the three astronauts whose trip is cancelled after an explosion renders continuing the trip unwise and they turn to NASA headquarters in Houston to find a way to bring them home.

Howard films it in three sections, alternating between the astronauts, the Houston team that worked to bring them home, and the families of the astronauts eagerly awaiting their return.

The Houston team includes Gary Sinise as the astronaut who was forced out of the trip by doctors who is the one who finds the perfect solution to their dilemma and Oscar nominee Ed Harris as the head of the team.
Oscar nominee Kathleen Quinlan as Hanks’ wife leads the cast of those who wait at home.

Nominated for 9 Oscars overall including Best Picture, it won for Best Film Editing and Best Sound.

Happy viewing.