Disney has released a 4K UHD upgrade of 1989’s Dead Poets Society.

Nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture, Actor (Robin Williams), Director (Peter Weir), and Original Screenplay by Tom Schulman, which it won, the film was a showcase for Williams in a surprisingly restrained performance.

Films about beloved schoolteachers have been a screen staple forever with 1939’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips, for which Robert Donat won an Oscar, being the gold standard by which all subsequent such films are judged. Dead Poets Society, which is about a maverick teacher at a prestigious New England boys’ boarding school who uses poetry to embolden his pupils to new heights of self-expression, comes close. In addition to Williams, there are standout performances by Robert Sean Leonard and Ethan Hawke as two of the students he gets through to.

Taking place in 1959, the film’s message of carpe diem (seize the day) has become a favorite of high schoolers ever since. Williams’ performance, though fondly remembered, was not a front-runner for the Oscar which was considered a three-way race between Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July, Morgan Freeman in Driving Miss Daisy, and Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, who won. Williams and Kenneth Branagh in Henry V were surprise nominees over Jack Lemmon in Dad and Al Pacino in Sea of Love. The next actor to be nominated for playing a schoolteacher was Ryan Gosling for 2006’s Half Nelson.

The Disney release also includes a Blu-ray of the film complete with numerous special features.

Warner Bros. has released a 4K UHD upgrade of 1994’s Interview with the Vampire

Directed by Neil Jordan, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for The Crying Game, and BAFTAs for his screenplays for The Crying Game and The End of the Affair, both of which he also directed, Jordan did not write the screenplay for Interview with a Vampire. He left that to the novel’s author, Anne Rice.

Although highly successful at the box-office, the film was not as successful at the Oscars where it was nominated for two awards, for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration and Best Score. It lost the former to The Madness of King George and the latter to The Lion King.

The film starred Tom Cruise as seductive vampire Lestat, Brad Pitt as his 200-year-old protégé whose life story is being told to a reporter, Christian Slater as the reporter, Antonio Banderas and Stephen Rea as rival vampires, and Kirsten Dunst as a child vampire. Although critics swooned over Cruise and Pitt, it was Dunst who received the best reviews leading to a surprise omission for an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She had won the Boston Society of Film Critics award for both Interview with a Vampire and the same year’s Little Women, and had been a runner-up for other awards.

The Warner Bros. release does not include an accompanying Blu-ray. It is from Warner Bros. Pictures, not the Warner Archive.

Warner Archive’s second batch of September releases has finally arrived. They include 1933’s Skyscraper Souls, 1937’s Marked Woman, 1960’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, and 1981’s Pennies from Heaven.

Edgar Selwyn’s Skyscraper Wives is a pre-code classic from the director of the prior year’s The Sin of Madelon Claudet for which Helen Hayes won a Oscar.

While the film is quite risqué, it is mildly so as it follows the love-life of scoundrel Warren William, the owner of an insurance company that occupies the top floor of a 100-story NYC skyscraper, second only to the 104-story Empire State Building.

William manipulates stocks in his attempt to buy the building outright while juggling a wife (Hedda Hopper), a mistress (Verree Teasdale), and a sweet young thing (Maureen O’Sullivan) he hopes to steal from her hardworking boyfriend (Norman Foster). Anita Page is also on board as a social climbing prostitute with Gregory Ratoff and Jean Hersholt in major supporting roles.

William, O’Sullivan, Teasdale, and Page come off best.

Lloyd Bacon’s Marked Woman is credited with giving Bette Davis her first great Warner Bros. role as a clip joint hostess persuaded by a crusading district attorney to testify against her mobster boss after her innocent sister is accidentally murdered during one of his unsavory parties.

Humphrey Bogart had his first starring role in a Warner Bros. film as the district attorney, with Eduardo Ciannelli as the gangster, Jane Bryan as the innocent sister, and Lola Lane, Mayo Methot, Isabel Jewell, and Rosalind Marquis as Davis’ fellow hostesses, all turning in memorable performances.

Charles Walters’ Please Don’t Eat the Daisies was a big hit for Doris Day following the success of the prior year’s Pillow Talk but it is nothing at all like the sophisticated comedy for which she received her only Oscar nomination.

Based on Jean Kerr’s best-selling novel, Day plays the wife of a Broadway critic (David Niven) whose feud with Janis Paige, the star of a Broadway musical he panned, leads to the couple’s move to the country with their four boys. The complications they run into are on the same level as those facing Cary Grant and Myrna Loy in Mr. Bandings Builds His Dream House a decade earlier.

Spring Byington, in her last screen role, is Day’s mother, and Patsy Kelly, in an underwritten role, is her maid.

Herbert Ross’ Pennies from Heaven is a matter of taste.

Set during the Great Depression, Steve Martin plays a sheet-music salesman having an affair with innocent Bernadette Peters before returning to his wife, leaving Peters pregnant. The score comprised of 1930s classics is great, the depressing story not so much.

Happy Viewing.