Nominated for 2 Oscars for Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident is now streaming on HBO Max.

The 2025 Cannes Film Festival winner starts out intriguingly with a well-dressed man and his pregnant wife driving home in the Iranian countryside at night with their young daughter when they hit an unseen dog. A short distance later, the car breaks down. The man is able to drive the car to a nearby garage where he can get help. While waiting for his car to be repaired, an unseen worker at the garage thinks he recognizes the man’s voice and disguises his own voice, so that the man won’t recognize him, but why?

Through a series of bizarre activities by the man in the garage, we are drawn into an is he or isn’t he mystery as to whether or not the well-dressed man is a former prison warden who tortured the man from the garage and his friends.

Several others are drawn into the situation which seemingly can have no good outcome.

What might have been a hard-hitting exploration of the atrocities in the country’s prisons turns comedic to the point that buffoonery begins to overwhelm the seriousness of the subject. It’s as if Panahi who had been imprisoned for his earlier films was willing to go just so far in his depiction of his country’s hardline rulers with the film ending in a whimper.

It’s a film that should be seen, but I give it an A for effort, and a B at best for its accomplishments.

KPop Demon Hunters, the world-wide phenomenon that won Oscars for Best Animated Feature and Best Song (“Golden”) has been streaming on Netflix since last July but I only attempted to watch it just before the Oscars. I’m afraid that I couldn’t get beyond the first ten minutes without suffering from a sever case of vertigo watching the heads of all those girls bobbing up and down in the film’s opening scenes.

Not only was I unable to watch the film, but I’m also still unable to understand a single word the girls are singing in that catchy song even after looking up the lyrics on the internet. A big bah-humbug from me on this one.

The only Netflix theatrical releases from last year that I thoroughly enjoyed are the previously discussed Frankenstein, Train Dreams, and Wake Up Dead Man.

MGM has released Phil Karlson’s 1961 film, The Young Doctors on Blu-ray.

No, MGM films from 1961 have not reverted to MGM. The Young Doctors was a United Artists release that is now owned by MGM, whereas MGM’s own films of the era are still now owned by Warner Bros.

The film, which was listed as one the year’s ten best films by the National Board of Review, was released in August 1961, a month before the long-running TV series, Dr. Kildare made its debut.

Whereas Dr. Kildare, based on the late 1937 MGM film series starring Lew Ayres and Lionel Barrymore, like similar TV medical shows of the 1950s and 60s featured a young doctor and his mentor (Richard Chamberlain and Raymond Massey), the main characters in The Young Doctors were adversaries.

The film starred Fredric March, fresh from Inherit the Wind and just as set in his backward thinking ways here as he was in that. His young adversary is Ben Gazzara, a young pathologist up on all the latest trends and methods that old fogey head pathologist March dismisses until it’s almost too late in one case.

Also in the cast are Ina Balin as a young nurse who is hiding a serious medical condition, Dick Clark as a young surgeon with a pregnant wife who has already lost one newborn baby, Eddie Albert as a dedicated obstetrician, and Aline MacMahon as a seasoned female surgeon. They are all excellent, including Clark who was better known as TV host on American Bandstand.

Criterion has released 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon on 4K UHD and 1983’s Testament on Blu-ray. I reviewed both films previously when they were released in those formats by other distributors as imports.

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is a film that deserves more than one viewing, despite initial impressions. It is the kind of film that reveals impressive depth you may have missed the first or even second time you have seen it. Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance, which seemed odd at first, takes on a much deeper aspect as do the Oscar nominated performances of Lily Gladstone and Robert De Niro. We are lucky to have it on home video because like everything else that was available just on Apple TV, you never know when it will be taken off their schedule and disappear altogether.

Lynne Littman’s Testament was a rare narrative film from the Oscar winning documentary filmmaker, easily one of the ten best films of its year. Jane Alexander received her fourth and last to date Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a suburban mom who must prepare her children and herself for death following a nuclear attack. William Devane plays her husband who is one of the early victims of the attack and Rossie Harris, Roxanna Zal, and Lukas Haas play her children. The outstanding supporting cast includes Philip Anglim, Lilia Skala, Leon Ames, Lurene Tuttle, Rebecca De Mornay, Kevin Costner, and Mako.

Happy viewing.