The oddest duo of presenters at this year’s Oscars was, to me, that of Bill Pullman and his son, Lewis Pullman. Not only was the scripted repartee between the two off-putting but I kept thinking, why these two? Bill Pullman has always been a good actor but his last starring role of any note had been in 1995’s While You Were Sleeping opposite Sandra Bullock, Lewis Pullman is an up-and-coming actor whose most prominent role to date has been in last year’s The Testament of Ann Lee which hardly anyone has seen. On the other hand, both have had stand-out roles in TV series and would make a better duo of presenters on the upcoming Emmy awards as both are terrific in new Netflix limited series.

Premiering just in time for Mother’s Day, Olivia Newman’s Remarkably Bright Creatures starring Sally Field and Lewis Pullman features Field in her best role in years, that of a grieving mother, a role she has played to perfection many times before, albeit never in a science-fiction film which this film is in the vein of Guillermo de Toro’s The Shape of Water.

Field, who joins Dolly Parton, Liza Minnelli, and Cher in turning 80 this year, is still remarkably spry as she plays an old lady who has a job as the night cleaner at the local aquarium where she befriends a wise old octopus voiced by Alfred Molina. The octopus doesn’t speak but he conveys his thoughts to the audience via voiceover. Lewis Pullman is a young drifter and sometimes drummer with dreams of becoming a rock star who fills in for Field after she suffers an injury which limits her mobility.

Pullman is in town looking for his birth father after the death of his recently deceased birth mother who abandoned him as a child. Field, whose husband has recently died, lost her only son years before but keeps his bedroom the way he left it in hopes that he might come back some day.

That’s the setup, but there are many twists and turns along the way, some of which you will see coming, some of which you won’t. Both Field and Pullman are terrific with Colm Meaney excellent as well as a kindly grocery store owner.

Jeffrey Addis and Will Matthews’ The Boroughs, which premiered just in time for Memorial Day weekend, is also a science-fiction about old people. This one, by the creators of Strange Things, is very much in the vein of that series with the residents of a retirement community deep in the deserts of New Mexico substituting for the teenagers in the earlier series.

The cast is headed by Alfred Molina, this time in the flesh as a recent widower who, at the insistence of his daughter (Jena Malone), reluctantly moves into the community. Bill Pullman is his next-door neighbor who throws a barbeque for him so he can meet his other neighbors. They include Alfre Woodward who is in what has become a cold marriage with husband Clarke Peters, Denis O’Dea as a widowed gay doctor with stage 4 prostate cancer, and a still vibrant Geena Davis who is on the verge of having an affair with a much younger community security guard (Carlos Miranda).

Molina’s house is haunted by the ghost of its previous owner (Dee Wallace) whose husband (Ed Begley, Jr.) is a dementia patient at the community’s medical center convinced that his wife was killed by creatures who hide in the house’s walls. The creatures, though, are not the greatest villains. Those are the community’s owners, a husband-and-wife team played by Seth Numrich and Alice Kremelberg. Jane Kaczmarek appears in flashbacks as Molina’s late wife.

The 2026 Tony Awards are coming on Sunday, June7 which makes this an ideal time for revisiting the big screen version of Tony award-winning musicals including those from the first five years of the awards, all of which are available on DVD and Blu-ray.

The first Tony awards did not single out a Best Musical winner but did give an acting Tony to David Wayne as Og, the leprechaun who follows Irish immigrant Finian and his daughter Sharon to America in 1947’s Finian’s Rainbow. The film version did not appear until 1968 by which time much of the screenplay seemed quaint and old-fashioned, but that didn’t extend to the songs or the stars who performed them.

Fred Astaire, in his last singing and dancing role, played Finian while Petula Clark played Sharon, and Tommy Steele played Og. The great score includes such timeless tunes as “How Are Things in Glocca Moora ?”, “Look to the Rainbow”, and “When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love (I Love the Girl I’m Near)”, sung in order by Clark, Astaire, and Steele.

1948’s Kiss Me, Kate, Cole Porter’s greatest success, was a combination musical version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and the stage actors who are performing in it. The Broadway performances of Alfred Drake, Patricia Morison, and Lisa Kirk were taken over by Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson, and Ann Miller in the extremely pleasing 1953 film version. The score includes such gems as “So in Love”. “Wunderbar” and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”.

1949’s South Pacific, based on James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific was Rodgers & Hammerstein’s third Broadway collaboration following the equally highly successful Oklahoma! and Carousel. The stage performances of Mary Martin, Ezio Pinza, and William Tabbert were played in the 1958 box-office smash hit by Mitzi Gaynor, Rossano Brazzi, and John Kerr. Juanita Hall reprised her legendary portrayal of Bloody Mary. The legendary score includes “Some Enchanted Evening”, “Younger Than Springtime”, and “There Is Nothing Like a Dame”.

1950’s Guys and Dollsbrought Damon Runyun’s Broadway to life with the resilience of Frank Loesser’s score in which Robert Alda, Isabelle Bigley, Sam Levene, and Vivien Blaine excelled. Their roles were played in the 1955 film version by Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Frank Sinatra, and Blaine herself. The delightful score includes “I’ll Know (When My Love Comes Along)”, “Luck Be a Lady”, and “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat”.

1951’s The King and I was Rodgers & Hammerstein’s fourth Broadway collaboration combining the talents of Gertrude Lawrence as the English governess and Yul Bynner as the King of Siam in a based on fact the historical epic. Deborah Kerr (famously dubbed by Marni Nixon) was Mrs. Anna in the film version opposite Brynner who reprised his Tony Award-winning roll to an Oscar win. The immortal score includes “Hello Young Lovers”, “Getting to Know You”, and “Shall We Dance?” among many others.

You can, of course, find film versions of later Tony winners on DVD and Blu-ray as well, but of you want to recreate anything approaching the bliss of the early winners, watching the film versions of these five in the order in which they won, should go a long way in doing that.

Happy viewing.