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Film and the Arts

Actor Turned Director Diego Luna Celebrates "Cesar Chavez"

Photo by B. Balfour

Born on December 29, 1979 in Mexico City, Diego Luna Alexander lost his mother in a car accident when he was only two. So Luna became immersed in his father's passion for entertainment as Mexico’s most acclaimed living theatre, cinema and opera set designer. From an early age Luna began acting in television, movies and theater. Once he achieved international recognition, he expanded his resume to include writing, producing and directing as well.

This producer-actor-director’s full bio includes such highlights as big budget sci-fi thriller Elysium (2013),  the Oscar-nominated Milk (2008), Tom Hanks starrer The Terminal (2004), and provocative Y Tu Mamá También (2001). But his most recent directorial effort Cesar Chavez not outlines a slice of the famed civil rights leader and labor organizer’s life (powerfully played by Michael Pena) but also chronicles the birth of a modern American labor movement. The film also tells the story of a man torn between family duties as a husband and father and his commitment to the fight for a living wage for farm workers. 

Passionate but soft-spoken, Chavez embraced non-violence as he battled greed and prejudice in this struggle to bring dignity to his community and disenfranchised people in general. Chavez inspired millions of Americans who hadn’t worked on a farm or been to California to fight for social justice. His journey is a remarkable testament to the power of one person’s ability to change the world.

Buttressed by two incredibly strong women — wife Helen (America Ferrara) and Dolores Huerta (Rosario Dawson) — Chavez presciently foresaw the impact the Latino American community would have on this country as he drew attention to this long disenfranchised sector.

chavez posterQ: Once you got this idea, how long did it take you to do this film? 

DL: At the beginning I didn’t know I had to do it; I would’ve quit had I been told this was going take four years and a half of my life. When I started I thought, “Wow, it’s amazing that there’s no film about Cesar Chavez. But this is so powerful and comes in time for many reasons, and  since this community’s growing, everyone’s going to want to do this film.” 

I went out and started shopping as is done with films. You go to studios and sit down with executives and everyone gave us a chance to sit down which sounded like, “Okay it’s happening,” then they said, “Wow, this is great, we love that you’re doing this, we’re not going to join but once you have a film, come and show it to us and probably we’ll be part of it,” and we’re like, “No! We need the money to do it!” 

It’s not like I’m just going out and doing it. I heard things like, “Can you make it more sexy?” and I was like, “How can I make it more sexy? If it was sexier, farm workers would probably be living a different reality today.” 

They said, “What about A-List actors? Can you have Antonio Banderas and Javier Bardem in it?” And I’m thinking, the man existed, there are pictures, there’s murals! You cannot just say, “Well now it’s just going to look like something else…” This is about a Mexican-American, a guy who was born in Arizona. Anyway, we found no support in this country. But by that point, I promised the family that I was going to deliver a film.

I promised that it was happening and then invested a year of my life into it at that point. We were working on the script with Keir Pearson, so I said to my partner Pablo Cruz, “Let’s go to Mexico and finance it the way we do in film.” 

We went to Mexico and in a week and a half we found the money. At least 70% that allows the comeback for the other 30%. Then we came back and found the perfect partners, Participant Media and Pantelion Films, two different kind of film [studios], but they’re both doing films that would be perfect for this market — one that we’re trying to prove exists. That’s how everything started in terms of putting it together. 

We wanted to come to the States and open a company and office here, so we said that we have to do a film that mattered on both sides of the border. It would allow us to work here but still do stories that connect us with where we come from and the community we belong to, to the point that my son who was born here, in the States, so he’s knows he’s a Mexican-American. In fact, he had an American passport before the Mexican one.

In a way, this was an attempt to tell a story that he would be able to use to find out where he comes from and what needed to happen for him to be where he is at the moment. That’s how everything started.

Q: Do you hope this film will change society’s perception of Latinos and the issues that concerns this community?

DL: There’s something that’s happened here before which is that all us Latinos, we have to learn from these guys that if we organize, if we’re united, we have the strength to change the world. That’s definitely a reality, because I don’t think we’ve been so well organized since then. Yes, there’s a lot of complaints that we have to this country, as a community, but I would start looking at ourselves in the mirror and [ask] why we haven’t done [anything]? 

We have a chance to send that message on the opening week, March 28th, which is, “We want these films to be out. We want our stories to be represented. We want our heroes to celebrated in film.” 

There’s two things that matter here. As Cesar said and showed us, one is that our strength is in our numbers, and they’re growing. So I don’t know why we, as a community, haven’t experienced that feeling of power [that] we actually have in hand. The other is that the film confronts you, not just us Latinos, but everyone in this country, with a reality that’s very uncomfortable, that today in the fields, the conditions still aren’t great. 

The struggle continues and consumers have also not been aware of what they’re part of when they buy a product since then. The amazing thing they did as a community, is that they connected with consumers, the rest of America, a community they didn’t think they had a connection with. They found a way to say, “Our story matters to you.” 

When you buy a grape, you’re supporting child labor. Moms listened to that, when a mother was in a store in Chicago, she found a farm worker saying, “When you’re buying that product, you have to remember that behind that product is the work of my six year-old. ” 

Mothers stopped buying grapes. So it’s about connecting, finding out what connects us, not what separates us. I think that’s a beautiful message about the film, and that applies not just for America, but for the world. It’s a nonviolent movement that said it’s about the responsibility of knowing we’re not here alone. The work of many has to happen so we can experience the life we have. It’s just being aware of that — that’s what matters. 

Q: Was it tough for actor Michael Peña to have this on his shoulders?

DL: I was walking coming with Rosario from having lunch, and she told me, ”It’s unbelievable how much Michael changed for this role. He’s just nothing close to what he portrayed here.” 

I always told him, “Michael, we have to be aware. We cannot do the Hollywood way, you know? We cannot say suddenly that Cesar was a great speaker, and the Martin Luther King kind of leader.” 

But he wasn’t. He was very humble and timid. As a result of the amount of urge he had for change to happen, he had to become the leader. If he would’ve had a chance to stand back and stay behind, he would have done it. He was a great listener. 

That’s why he could organize these people, because he came and took the time to listen to everyone’s story. This is a community that has been ignored for so long, that suddenly someone arrived that cared about their story and said, “Your story matters.” 

In fact, Mark Grossman, who traveled a lot through rallies and was Cesar’s PR person — he wrote the speeches for him — was very close to him and we worked a lot with him. He told me [that] the rallies were painful because he would stay until nine, 10 pm, and people left, and he was still talking to a woman in the back. He had time, he nothing else to do but this, and everyone realized he was giving his life. We have to remember, this is a man that got out of living in the city. He changed his life, he was wearing a suit, he had a job. But he said, “No, we have to go back to the fields, we have to change things from the inside. It’s not going to come from the outside.” 

He went back and sacrificed not just his reality but the reality of his family. I love when Fernando asks, “Who plays in Delano? You’re not taking me to a place that doesn’t have a major league baseball team, right?” And [Cesar] goes, “Yeah, we’re all going to sacrifice here, and we’re all going to go back to where we come from.” 

Q: You showed how he sacrificed his relationship with his older son. You spent more than four years working on this movie. How much did it affect your relationship with your own children?

DL: It does, it does. I’ve never had to go so far as he did. I was in Chicago on Friday, took the red eye, spent Saturday and Sunday with my kids, and I’m here on Monday. I would never give away the weekend, and stay for another interview. I think that’s what makes him heroic. I don’t know if I would be able to go that far. 

Q: How old are your kids now?

DL: Five and three. I don’t know if I would be able to go that far. These guys left for months. Besides everything we’ve talked about, the film is about a father and a son. To me, the reflection I’m making here is [that] there’s a sacrifice we fathers do. I did not understand until I had a baby. It changed the way I looked to my father. When I had a baby, I went back and said, “Damn, dad. You’ve done all of this?” 

My mother died when I was two, so my father had to play both roles and work and it’s that very unfair part of life where you know you have to do it. I do film because of my kids, I think about them every moment of my life. Every decision I make, they’re involved. Probably, they won’t know this until they have their own. 

That’s the gap that sometimes... Hopefully in life you have the time to bring it back together, but not many times it happens. For these characters, it took a long a long time. They had eight kids. Dolores Huerta had 11 kids. Imagine that and they managed to do all this as well. 

Q: Was it a conscious choice that you avoided his childhood? 

DL: The first script I got, [went] from the day he was born until the day he died. You can do that in a fictional film, it doesn’t matter, but with the life of someone I think that’s very unfair. It’s impossible in an hour and 45 minutes to tell of someone’s 64-year journey. I thought, “I’m going to concentrate in one achievement.” 

That’s the boycott was to me. I said, “If I can explain how the boycott happened, and why the boycott happened, and what [it brought] to the community, I’ll be sending the right message.” 

I didn’t want to do a film just about this community. I wanted to do a film about how this community managed to connect with the rest of the country. Because to me, the powerful message here is that if change ever comes, it’s because we get involved and we people connect with others. 

We find those who are out there and what connects us with them. So to me, that was the thing I wanted to focus on -- the personal struggle of a father. It’s the first film done about Cesar and the movement, so it’s unfair to ask one film to fill the gap of so many years where there was no film talking about it. Because if I was here, and there were another three films, I could focus in on a specific thing that none of the other films [did], but you cannot ask a film to tell everything that hasn’t been told. Hopefully this will [stimulate] curiosity and awareness so that people will go and investigate a little more about who they are and what’s behind them. 

Q: Why was the movie shot in Mexico instead of where the events happened? Did that have to do with where you found the money? Being a movie about a syndicated movement, with the actors’ unions very strong here, don’t know how it is in Mexico, but how much of the actors and the crew were unionized?

DL: We shot in Mexico because of two reasons. One, the film was financed in Mexico, so a lot of the financing came as support. We first went to California, but even if we would have shot in the States, we would not have shot in California, because the actual places have changed dramatically since the ’60s. So you cannot shoot there, you’d have to recreate the [conditions]. 

We found in Sonora that the fields there have that immensity. Sonora is the state that produces 80% of the table grape of Mexico. Mexico is a huge country, so the feeling when you’re there, it’s the same feeling you have in the valley in California. You really are a dot in the middle of nowhere. There’s this immensity, the feeling that those fields are feeding a world, 

In terms of the union, there’s no way to do a film this big non-union in Mexico. Every actor was paid through SAG; we also have a union in Mexico of actors and technicians. It would be very stupid to do a film about a union without the support of unions [laughs]. But you know what happened…? There was a whole debate on the extras. 

The extras are farm workers. That doesn’t mean they didn’t get paid. The point is, I wanted to work with real farm workers. You know those faces? There’s no way to put makeup on a face and make it look like they’ve been under the sun for so many years, under that condition of dust and wind. Those faces tell you the story. Just by looking at the face, you get many things that can’t be said in dialogue. 

Q: Were these farm workers from the area where you shot?

DL: Many farm workers joined. By the third day they realized that film isn’t glamorous and that the experience was as miserable as working in the fields [laughs]. Because we were in the fields, we put every penny we had in front of the camera, so the conditions we were shooting under were rough compared to the cliché of how Hollywood filmmaking is. 

Q: Did the workers themselves teach you anything, something that you never knew?

DL: The only thing is that they reminded me every day of why the film needed to be done. It just still makes no sense to me that those who are feeding this country can barely feed their families. And by listening to their stories, I got the necessary energy to keep going. No matter what our issues were, they don’t matter. I am lucky to be able to choose where I work, who I’m around, what I do, what stories I tell, I can’t complain. It was a great reminder on why this needs to be out. 

Q: The film deals with social issues. Is that also part of the marketing?

DL: Definitely, and we’re focusing a lot in kids. Before the proper promotion started, we did two weeks of going to high schools and universities. We went to Harvard, Berkeley, Irvine, UCLA, then we did a screening in the RFK High School. It was like a system. We did a screening where they taped it and then that’s going to be shown to kids around California. 

We’re pushing to do tons of little videos in social media and everything to raise awareness about Cesar Chavez and what the movement [stood] for. That’s where Participant comes in. They have an amazing reach in terms of a call-to-action. 

As part of our film, we are also making a petition to President Obama about making a Cesar Chavez National Day of Service. As the campaign goes, if you guys participate, it’d be great. There’s a page called takepart.com/cesarchavez and you can sign. If you sign the petition, we need a hundred thousand signatures to go to Obama. 

Film should be the beginning of something bigger. This film should trigger, hopefully, the curiosity of people to find out exactly what this movement was about. It’s difficult to inform in an hour and 45 minutes about everything they did and still entertain but it is pertinent to talk about this because the issues today in the field are even more complicated [than ever]. 

We thought also about a day of celebration... A few states today celebrate Cesar Chavez day, but we thought that a national day of service would be the way he would like to be remembered, a day where you work and give something back to your community, which is what they did from beginning to end. 

There [are] so many things happening at the same time, and there are so many things happening in Latin America. Because if few people know here the story of Cesar Chavez, you’ll go to Latin America and everyone thinks he’s a boxer. No one knows, and it’s something that hopefully the film, and everything happening around the film, might be able to change. Also, the foundation is working really close. 

Dolores Huerta has been promoting the film with us, and every time she grabs the microphone, she talks about it and the 10 other things that matter to her. If film can work for that to happen, if film can bring attention to the work of those that are still in the struggle, still out there, I’ll be very proud. But it’s definitely about kids.

You know an amazing thing that has been happening is that today there’s many Latinos in key positions and many have the chance to actually choose what they want to do in life. They have businesses and so many of these people are buying out theaters and giving them away to schools. 

For the first weekend, someone said, “I would like to share this film with every high school kid of the community I come from” which is an amazing thing. The distribution company Pantelion is getting these calls and managing to actually make it happen, where you basically buy out a theater and fill it with kids that normally wouldn’t go watch it, or will probably watch it two years later on their phone while doing another 20 things, which is how kids now watch films... so that’s also happening. People like Henry Moreno — he was the first one. 

Q: Is he one of the producers?

DL: No, no, no! He’s just a guy that cares about this. I was at an event in Washington, and Moreno talked about this, he was doing a show and he told me, “I’m buying out theaters to share with the kids, and this is happening, people are starting to react.” 

That’s fantastic. I did this film because I think I have some distance to the story. Generationally, I wasn’t around when this happened, so also that gives me some objectivity, I guess. But the angle which I’m telling this, it’s the perfect angle for people who don’t know the story, to listen [to] it for the first time.

Q: What did it teach you about yourself as a father, as a director, as an actor? 

DL: You know, I found a connection. It was through telling personal stories that they managed to bring the attention to something bigger. It was about a mother going out, as I said, a mother going out of a grocery store and telling another mother, “Behind that grape, there’s the work of my kid. Are you sure you want to be part of that?” 

Then that mother got hit so badly and so profoundly, that she’s gonna turn into an advocate for the movement. But it’s by telling personal stories that you can trigger that, and I think film has that power. Today, if I was sitting in a board meeting of this movement, I would say, “Let’s do short documentaries about each other’s experiences and get them out, because that’s the way to get people’s attention.” 

We do the same thing, in a way. At least film is capable of doing what these guys did. That was a connection that I found on the way. When I was out and everyone was like, “Oh, you’re doing the film about Cesar Chavez! I gotta tell you something. My grandfather, one day, he grew up and blah blah blah…” 

If I do a documentary where I tell you, “More than a 100,000 have been killed in the last eight years in my country because of the war on drugs that our president started, our former president started…” You’re going to go, “Oh, that’s a big number.” 

But if I tell you the story of a kid who lost his father and now has to work and had to get out of school to support his mother, and how the life these four people changed dramatically, not just his but his brother and his sister... The next day you’re going to care about the war we’re living there. So by telling personal stories you can trigger that attention and that’s something they were doing that was way ahead of us. 

 

"The Girls in the Band" Honors Music's Unsung Heroines

How many female jazz musicians can you name? Judy Chaikin's new documentary The Girls in the Band can help. By the time the credits roll, you will have met three generations of distaff players, composers, arrangers and GreatDayinHarlemconductors reaching back to the 1920s. Names like saxophonists Roz Cron and Peggy Gilbert, trumpeters Clora Bryant and Billie Rogers and drummer Viola Smith will roll off the tongue as readily as those of Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie.

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September '25 Digital Week IV

In-Theater Release of the Week 
One Battle After Another 
(Warner Bros)
Each Paul Thomas Anderson film is treated as an Event, but his latest magnum opus cobbles together themes and characters he’s worked on for decades—this loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland is a flashy, convoluted, crude and cartoonish take on an America comprising left-wing terrorists and right-wing authoritarians. There’s some good material here, but Anderson throws everything against the wall to see what will stick, resulting in a tonally unbalanced and unwieldy 160 minutes.
 
 
The acting is all over the map—Leonardo DiCaprio’s wild-eyed terrorist hero stops just short of caricature, while Teyana Taylor and Chase Infiniti are solid if unspectacular as his wife and daughter, both of whom however (especially Taylor) are shortchanged by the script. Then there’s Sean Penn’s villainous Colonel Lockjaw—a failed attempt to channel Dr. Strangelove’s Jack D. Ripper and General Turgidson—which is wincingly embarrassing, likely the worst performance of a storied career. Anderson’s bombast reaches its nadir when he kills off Lockjaw three times in a couple of dragged-out, pedestrian sequences that add nothing to an already overstuffed vehicle. Finally, the less said about Jonny Greenwood’s typically excessive score—whose rhythmic drive is more repetitious than tense—the better.
 
 
 
Streaming Release of the Week
Infinite Summer 
(Indiepix)
Miguel Llansó’s often imaginative sci-fi hybrid follows a trio of bored young women in the Estonian capital of Talinn one summer whose meeting with a man named Dr. Mindfulness who introduces them to the wonders of a new app that promises a meditative experience but ends up being much more than they bargained for.
 
 
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4K/UHD Release of the Week 
Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride 
(Warner Bros)
This enjoyable 2005 follow-up to Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, codirected by Burton with Mike Johnson, is another dazzling stop-motion animated feature cleverly visualizing the director’s darkly tongue-in-cheek themes, here following a young man about to be married who’s whisked away by the title character.
 
 
There’s ample mordant humor, decent thrills and a marvelously dreadful visual sense along with a terrific voice cast led by Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson and Albert Finney. The film looks spectacular in 4K; there are several vintage featurettes and two new making-of featurettes. 
 
 
 
Blu-ray Releases of the Week
The Beat That My Heart Skipped 
(Criterion)
In Jacques Audiard’s bracing remake of James Toback’s messy 1978 drama Fingers, small-time Parisian hood Thomas (a magnetic Roman Duris) tries resurrecting a lost musical career as a classical pianist. Unlike Toback, whose film never felt organic, just willfully contrived, Audiard makes the disparate parts—the scuzzy characters and their motivations alongside beautiful music making—snap together as perfectly as a Bach or Chopin piano piece.
 
 
The film looks grittily authentic on Blu; extras include a new Audiard interview, vintage interviews with cowriter Tonino Benacquista and composer Alexandre Desplat, 2005 Berlin Film Festival press conference, rehearsal footage and deleted scenes with Audiard’s commentary.
 
 
 
Gilbert & Sullivan—The Gondoliers 
(Opus Arte)
This terrifically mounted 2021 staging of one of the legendary musical duo’s characteristic works by the Scottish Opera works well thanks to Stuart Maunder persuasive direction, the colorful and witty costumes and sets, the superlative acting and singing by a large and distinguished cast, and the excellent music making by the Orchestra of the Scottish Opera and the Chorus of the Gondoliers under conductor Derek Clark’s baton.
 
 
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Mieczysław Weinberg—The Idiot 
(Unitel)
Russian-Polish-Jewish composer Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-96) died before his musical renaissance began with his emotionally shattering Holocaust opera The Passenger, several productions of which were soon followed by dozens of recordings of his varied orchestral and chamber music. Although not as affecting as The Passenger, his operatic adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s disturbing The Idiot is a major accomplishment, as this 2024 Salzburg staging by director Krzysztof Warlikowski—imaginatively done in a modern setting—demonstrates.
 
 
For more than three hours, Weinberg’s powerful reimagining of a great writer’s painfully intimate study holds us in thrall, and the remarkable vocal performances of Bogdan Volkov, Ausrine Stundyte and Vladislav Sulimsky—heading a flawless cast—along with the Vienna Philharmonic (led by Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla) and Vienna State Opera Chorus (led by Pawel Marcowicz) provide more musical and dramatic dividends. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio but unfortunately no contextualizing extras.

September '25 Digital Week III

4K/UHD Releases of the Week 
Superman 
(Warner Bros)
James Gunn has rebooted the man of steel for a new generation, but it’s pretty much the same old, with many CGI sequences that become enervating of Superman fighting various foes (even a prehistoric monster of sorts) while trying to regain his rep—he’s considered a traitor to America since he’s (of course) an illegal alien—thanks to a devious Lex Luthor (an hilariously hammy Nicholas Hoult).
 
 
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The Last of Us—Complete 2nd Season 
(Warner Bros)
The first HBO series that’s based on a video game, this often morbid dystopian thriller is filled with too-familiar visuals of a post-pandemic civilization destroyed by a too-familiar infection that begat hordes of too-familiar zombie-like victims.
 
 
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M3GAN 2.0 
(Universal)
Did we need a sequel to M3GAN, the forgettable evil AI doll flick from a few years ago? Writer-director Gerard Johnstone thinks so—just turn her from a program that went rogue to an ally of sorts of creator Gemma (a game Alison Williams) and teenage niece Katie (an enjoyable Violet McGraw), as reprogramming sets her up to take down a new, far more malevolent program called AMELIA.
 
 
It’s pretty ridiculous and unnecessarily convoluted—its two hours could be shorn of 20 minutes—but it is kind of fun watching M3GAN become good, kind of. It all looks great on UHD; extras comprise making-of featurettes and interviews.
 
 
 
In-Theater Releases of the Week
Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round 
(Ruby Pictures Inc.)
A little-known but transformative protest at the dawn of the civil rights movement is chronicled in Ilana Trachtman’s documentary, triggered by five Black students from Howard University who decide to ride the carousel at a segregated Maryland amusement park, Glen Echo, in 1960.
 
 
Trachtman (who uses a 1942 Langston Hughes poem for her evocative title) insightfully explores how local and college-student Blacks along with a group of progressive Jews from a nearby neighborhood made common cause to pressure authorities into desegregating the park. Along with illuminating interviews with those who took part and much archival footage, Trachtman also uses voiceovers from Mandy Patinkin, Bob Balaban and Jeffrey Wright on the soundtrack. 
 
 
 
Andrea Bocelli—Because I Believe 
(Trafalgar Releasing)
This endearing 105-minute portrait by director is not exactly a hagiography, even though it shows beloved Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli as someone just short of an angel on earth—of course, with a heavenly singing voice. It’s also a thoughtful look at a man who followed his dream and his talent assiduously after a horrible accident robbed him of his sight at age 12.
 
 
There are intimate glimpses of Bocelli at home, backstage and onstage with his wife, young daughter (who also sings), family and horses as well as wonderful musical interludes even nonfans might welcome.
 
 
 
Another End 
(Vertigo Releasing)
Director-cowriter Piero Messina’s dour, self-serious exploration of grief about a company named Aeternum that lets survivors say goodbye to their dead loved ones in a way that keeps their spirits “alive” is expertly done but bafflingly distant.
 
 
Sal, who’s mourning his lover Zoe’s death in a car crash, is resisting attempts by his sister Ebe (who works at Aeternum) to submit to this last interaction with the love of his life. Even such excellent actors as Gael García Bernal (Sal) and the luminous Bérénice Bejo (Ebe) can do little with a soppy script Messina and three others concocted.
 
 
 
My Sunshine 
(Film Movement)
In this gentle character study, mediocre young hockey player Takuya notices figure skaters at the rink and is soon paired with Sakura, a competitive skater, by her sympathetic but competitive coach Arakawa, and their relationship on and off the ice deepens.
 
 
Director-writer Hiroshi Okuyama’s drama has a surfeit of acute observation, subtle humor and sentiment that doesn’t fall into sticky sappiness—even Debussy’s overplayed Clair de Lune hits the right notes—and the two leads, Keitatsu Koshiyama (Takuya) and Kiara Nakanishi (Sakura), give lovely portrayals. 
 
 
 
Queen of Manhattan 
(Level 33 Entertainment)
Surprisingly, ‘70s porn star Vanessa Del Rio hasn’t gotten the biopic treatment until now—maybe because it’s a difficult role for an actress to pull off, as the voluptuous, sassy and seductive New Yorker needs to be believable or it falls apart.
 
 
Luckily for director-writer Thomas Mignone, Vivian Lamolli is sexy, funny, and totally persuasive—but the problem is she must carry an otherwise routine biopic, even with the vibe of the grimy ’70s sex-film industry present and decent support from Drea de Matteo, Taryn Manning and Elizabeth Rodriguez as the women in Del Rio’s life.
 
 
 
Blu-ray Releases of the Week 
Dakota 
(Cult Epics)
The life of a Dutch pilot who flies a small plane filled with contraband in the Caribbean islands is dramatized in this intriguing 1974 film by Dutch director Wim Verstappen.
 
 
There’s a lot of local color alongside humorous and tense moments in an effective if bumpy exploration of a man and his plane, centered by a nicely-shaded performance from Kees Brusse. The film’s gritty look, by cinematographers Jan de Bont and Theo van de Sande, is retained on Blu-ray; extras include a commentary and vintage featurettes.
 
 
 
Prokofiev—The Gambler 
(Opus Arte)
Sergei Prokofiev’s opera, based on Dostoyevsky’s novella, makes for riveting drama—filled as it is with the composer’s blistering orchestral barrage and memorable melodies—and its hard musical and histrionic edge matches the obsessives at the center of its story.
 
 
Too bad that Peter Sellars’ 2024 Salzburg production lacks definition, stranding a formidable cast led by Asmik Grigorian as Polina and Sean Panikkar as Alexey as well as the propulsive musicmaking of the Vienna Philharmonic and Choir under Timur Zangiev’s baton. There’s first-rate  h-def video and audio. 
 
 
 
CD Release of the Week 
Boris Papandopulo—Hrvatska Misa (Croatian Mass) 
(BR Klassik)
Croatian composer Boris Papandopulo (1906-91) wrote this mass, which premiered in 1942, as a sacred work that nodded to the style of historical Croatian music as an a capella piece suitable for amateurs (and was actually composed for the Croatian Choral Society Kolo, which he led twice from the 1920s to the 40s).
 
 
With the chorus and soloists singing a Croatian translation of the Roman Catholic mass, it’s a full-throated vocal work that—especially in this superlative recording by the Bavarian Radio Chorus and a quartet of Croatian soloists, all under the direction of conductor Ivan Repušić and chorus master Tomislav Fačini—is often hair-raisingly thrilling in its simplicity and power.

 

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