Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the third entry in the franchise, is now streaming on Netflix.

Unlike the first two in the franchise, 2019’s Knives Out and 2022’s Glass Onion, neither of which I liked, Wake Up Dead Man is an absorbing murder mystery with comic undertones. More serious than silly, with some well-earned laugh out loud moments to relieve the tension, I found this one a joy to sit through.

The story revolves around the murder of a Catholic priest, a monsignor in charge of a small parish in a remote section of upstate New York played by Josh Brolin. It is narrated by his newly assigned assistant and chief suspect in his murder, Josh O’Connor, who is brilliant throughout who is pleasingly in almost every frame of the film.

Daniel Craig gets top billing as Benoit Blanc, the private investigator assisting the local police as he did in the previous instalments, but his role is subordinate to O’Connor’s. His character has been described as an American Hercule Poirot, but this is the first of the three films in which that is clear, helped in part by several Agatha Christie books on the parish’s book club reading list which figure into the narrative.

The murder takes place in a locked room on Good Friday prompting expectations in the minds of some of Brolin’s demented parishioners of an Easter morning resurrection.

O’Conner is terrific in the lead but so are all the other A-list players who support him.

Brolin makes a worthy opponent as the renegade priest whose murder becomes the center piece of the story.

Glenn Close has her best role in years as the church’s housekeeper and the parish’s bookkeeper.

Also memorable are Mila Kulis as the local sheriff, Jeremy Renner as the local doctor and parishioner, Daryl McCormack, Cailee Spaeny, Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington, and Daryl McCormack as other parishioners, Thomas Haden Church as the church’s groundskeeper, and briefly, Jeffrey Wright as the bishop in Albany.

Possible Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, and Casting.

Now available on Video on Demand (VOD) is Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon with a screenplay by Robert Kaplow (Me and Orson Welles) inspired by the letters of Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland.

Hart was of course the lyricist who worked primarily with composer Richard Rodgers on some of the greatest songs and scores of Broadway musicals from 1919 and occasional films from 1930 until his death in 1943.

The film takes place in the evening of March 31, 1943, the day that Oklahoma!, Rodgers’ first musical with his new partner, Oscar Hammerstein, opened.

Filmed in a bar in Dublin, Ireland representing the bar downstairs from the after-show party taking place upstairs, the one-set film centers on Hart played by Ethan Hawke as he trades quips with bartender Bobby Cannavale and later meets with college student Weiland played by Margaret Qualley in the cloak room.

Hawke gets to interact with various partygoers on their way to and from the party including Andrew Scott as Rodgers, Simon Delaney as Hammerstein, Cillian Sullivan as “little” Stevie Sondheim, David Rawle as future director George Roy Hill and more.

Hart worked again with Rodgers on additional songs for the revival of A Connecticut Yankee before dying of alcoholism eight months later at 48.

Hawke’s intense performance has already won him awards with an Oscar nomination possible to come.

Universal has released four Claudette Colbert films on Blu-ray for the first time.

Teamed with Fred MacMurray for the third of seven times, 1937’s Maid of Salem is the only non-comedy they made together. Based on the Salem, Massachusetts witch hunts and trials of 1692 in which 19 women and 12 men were executed for witchcraft, the film is a mix of real and fictitious characters. Colbert plays one of the women that false accusations are brought against by young girls and some of their elders. MacMurray plays a fugitive from justice, a rebel against the British Crown who is pardoned just in time to save Colbert from hanging.

The film was released February 12, 1937, five days after the 1936 Oscar nominations, the first to honor supporting performances, were announced. Three of the film’s standout performances are provided by three of the Oscar nominees for that award, Beulah Bondi, Bonita Granville, and Gale Sondergaard.

Bondi was nominated for playing Andrew Jackson’s pipe-smoking wife in The Gorgeous Hussy, Granville for playing the brat who makes a false accusation against Miriam Hopkins in These Three, and Sondergaard, who would go on to win, for playing Claude Rains’ evil mistress in Anthony Adverse. All three were evil in Maid of Salem with Granville again the brat who makes the initial accusation, Bondi as her mother, and Sondergaard as the sister of Colbert’s friend played by Harvey Stephens.

Frank Lloyd (Mutiny on the Bounty) directed.

The other three newly released Colbert Blu-rays are all comedies.

1937’s I Met Him in Paris, directed by Wesley Ruggles (Cimarron) is a piece of fluff with some amusing dialogue in which Colbert has to chose between writers Melvyn Douglas and Robert Young, The only surprising thing about the film is that it was names as one of the year’s ten best films by the New York Times.

1938’s Zaza, directed by George Cukor (Camille) is the third film version of an 1899 Broadway play in which she plays a French musical star who discovers her lover (Herbert Marshall) is a married man. It’s amusing but far from the best work of either star or director.

1941’s Skylark, directed by Mark Sandrich (Top Hat) has Colbert having to chose between stuffed shirt husband Ray Milland and her divorce lawyer, Brian Aherne. Nominated for an Oscar for Best Sound, it’s diverting but hardly original.

Happy viewing.