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July '26 Digital Week I

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 02 July 2026 18:41; Written by Kevin Filipski

In-Theater/Streaming Release of the Week

Obsession

(Universal)

The biggest surprise at this year’s box office so far has been this low-budget horror black comedy, written and directed by comedian/YouTuber Curry Barker, who turns a decent premise for a Twilight Zone episode into an interminable feature that is far less clever than it thinks. When music-store employee Bear makes a wish that his attractive coworker Nikki will fall for him, it leads to crudely shocking but entirely predictable consequences.

There are a couple of cheap jump scares, including one telegraphed so blatantly I’m surprised anybody fell for it, while the haphazard plotting and nonexistent characterizations don’t help. Michael Johnston makes a one-note Bear, while Inde Navarrette’s shrill Nikki scores mainly because her opposite number is so invisible. Here’s hoping we don’t get a run on even worse low-budget horror comedies as producers attempt to chase box-office glory.

In-Theater Releases of the Week

Couture

(Vertical Releasing)

French director Anna Winocour’s new film brings together intimate stories of three women during Paris Fashion Week: Maxine, an American director making a video; Ada, an African model who’s left home to make her mark; and Angèle, a local makeup artist. As she jumps around this trio’s personal stories, there are moments of insight, but when Maxine gets a cancer diagnosis, the film gets knocked severely out of whack, and the travails of Ada and Angèle come off as relatively trivial.

Still, it’s beautifully shot and acted, especially by Angelina Jolie, whose Maxine has a cancer scare that recalls her own decision to have a double mastectomy. It’s almost exploitative, but in Winocour and Jolie’s hands, it’s emotional without becoming melodramatic.

For the Love of a Woman

(Panorama Films)

In this heavyhanded if earnest drama set in the 1970s, Esther travels to Israel after her mother dies to learn about a closely held family secret, which involves a free-spirited woman named Yehudit, a settler in a rural village in 1930s who affects the live of three local men.

Director Guido Chiesa awkwardly handles the film’s flashback structure, and his and Nicoletta Micheli’s script injects sentimentality into what should have been a straightforwardly incisive study of hidden truths. Still, the performances of Mili Avital as Esther and Ana Elaru as the tough-as-nails Yehudit make this watchable throughout.

4K/UHD Release of the Week

Maurice

(Cohen Film Collection)

Following their international breakthrough, 1986’s A Room with a View, the next year director James Ivory and producer Ismael Merchant daringly tackled another Forster novel (with a script by Ivory and Kit Hesketh-Harvey), this one about the intimate relationship between Maurice and Clive, two young men in the stiflingly repressive culture of Edwardian England. The leisurely 140-minute film drags at times but the atmosphere and details are unerringly right. So is the acting from James Wilby (Maurice) and Hugh Grant (Clive) as well as Rupert Graves, Denholm Elliott, Simon Callow and Billie Whitelaw, among others in a superb supporting cast.

The film looks ravishing in 4K; extras include a commentary on the 4K disc and, on the accompanying Blu-rays, the film, alternate takes/deleted scenes with Ivory commentary, interview/Q&A with Ivory and cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, making-of featurette and a conversation between Ivory and director Tom McCarthy.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Don’t Play With Fire

(Cult Epics)

Hong Kong master Tsui Hark’s bleak 1980 drama follows three nihilistic teens who are blackmailed by a cunning young woman into committing further acts of violence after she witnesses them set off a bomb in a movie theater. And that’s just the beginning: be warned that there are scenes here that might make some viewers close their eyes, from the opening images of a mouse to a cat being thrown off a balcony—but Hark’s fast-paced immersion in this sordid world is ultimately impossible to look away from.

Alongside the uncensored international version, this set includes the banned Chinese version and English dubbed version, a commentary, and interviews with Hark, two actors, an assistant director and Hark’s cowriter.

A Game for Six Lovers

(Icarus Films)

Jacques Doniol-Valcroze’s 1960 roundelay, which follows three mostly mismatched couples at an imposing French chateau, proves that not all French New Wave directors were masters of their craft: the director-writer crafted a dull-edged, often tone-deaf film that wavers between comedy and tragedy and wastes a game cast (especially Bernadette Lafont, Alexandra Stewart, and Francoise Brion, who was also Doniol-Valcroze’s wife), Roger Fellous’ lovely B&W cinematography and Serge Gainsbourg’s attractive score.

The film looks great in hi-def; lone extra is a 1965 short also starring Lafont, The Botanical Avatar of Mademoiselle Flora, directed by Jeanne Barbillon.

CD Release of the Week

Nadia Boulanger—La ville morte

(Pentatone)

Although French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger was an important teacher to countless prominent European and American composers, she was also a composer (as was her talented sister, Lili, whose death at age 24 in 1918 is one of the great tragedies in music history). Nadia—who died at age 92 in 1979—wrote this opera between 1909 and 1913 with fellow French composer Raoul Pugno (who may also have been her lover), based on the text of a play by Gabriele D’Annunzio.

The opera follows an archeologist, his wife, his sister and a colleague amid Greek ruins—with more than a little thematic (and musical) resemblance to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Since the orchestration did not survive, it’s been reconstructed, and this world-premiere recording by the Talea Ensemble led by Neal Goren gives a good sense of its intimacy and restraint. The impassioned vocal performances by the quartet of soloists—soprano Melissa Harvey, mezzo Laurie Rubin, tenor Joshua Dennis and baritone Jarell Williams—are unimpeachable.

"Onegin" with the American Ballet Theater

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 30 June 2026 14:23; Written by Jack Angstreich

Devon Teuscher and Aran Bell in Onegin. Photo: Steven Pisano.

At Lincoln Center’s wonderful Metropolitan Opera House, on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 24th, I had the privilege to attend a marvelous performance of American Ballet Theater’s fine production of John Cranko’s undervalued Onegin, from 1965,setto a score by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky arranged by Kurt-Heinz Stolze, here admirably conducted by veteran David LaMarche. (It is notable that the music is not drawn from the composer's magnificent opera, Eugene Onegin—adapted from the canonical verse novel by Alexander Pushkin—but from various others of his works. This literary source might have provided the interesting basis for a film by Max Ophuls or Luchino Visconti.) This performance was a worthy sequel to the previous week’s presentation of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake with Skylar Brandt and Herman Cornejo.

Cranko is known to me for his delightful, also misappreciated staging of Sergei Prokofiev's Cinderella which was a superb vehicle for the extraordinary David Hallberg as the Prince; lamentably, that production has been replaced although, fortunately, with an even more beautiful production choreographed by the legendary Frederick Ashton. The ABT production of Onegin was staged by Jane Bourne, supervised by Reid Anderson and Tamas Detrich. The attractive sets and costumes were designed by the celebrated Santo Loquasto, and the effective lighting by James F. Ingalls.

The primary cast at this performance was exceptional, with the abundantly talented Aran Bell in the title role, partnered by the fabulous Devon Teuscher as Tatiana. (I have seen these roles danced by the unforgettable Hallberg and Hee Seo but Bell and Teuscher were not very far behind in their achievement here.) The secondary cast was also fine, including Calvin Royal III as the poet Lensky, Onegin’s friend and even more remarkable was the brilliant Catherine Hurlin as Olga. Prince Gremin, the friend of the Larina family, was danced by Joseph Markey, with Claire Davison as the widow Madame Larina and Isadora Loyola as the nurse of her daughters. The terrific corps de ballet was, of course, characteristically indelible.

The artists deservedly received an enthusiastic, standing ovation.

Off-Broadway Musical Review—“Girl, Interrupted” at the Public Theater

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 29 June 2026 02:21; Written by Kevin Filipski

Girl, Interrupted

Music and lyrics by Aimee Mann

Book by Martyna Majok, based on the book by Susanna Kaysen

Choreography by Sonya Tayeh; directed by Jo Bonney

Performances through July 12, 2026

Public Theater, New York, NY

publictheater.org

Juliana Canfield and the cast of Girl, Interrupted (photo: Joan Marcus)

Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir Girl, Interrupted—an unflinchingly honest account of her time in a Massachusetts psychiatric hospital in the 1960s—was first turned into a 1999 film, directed by James Mangold, notable for its two central performances: Wynona Ryder as Susanna and Angelina Jolie, who won an Oscar for the showy role of Lisa, one of Susanna’s fellow patients.

The new stage adaptation, a world-premiere production at the Public Theater—which has introduced new musicals for decades, from Hair, A Chorus Line and Hamilton to the more recent Suffs and Hell’s Kitchen, all of which went to Broadway—has an equally impressive pedigree.

The book is by playwright Martyna Majok, whose incisive drama Queens was done off-Broadway earlier this season; the show is staged by Jo Bonney, one of our most inventive directors; and the music and lyrics are by Aimee Mann, a master of intimately ironic songs about miscommunication and broken relationships, from her 1985 debut with ‘Til Tuesday through her decades-long solo career.

But Mann’s songs—which made their debut on her stunning 2021 album, Queens of the Summer Hotel—are almost too confessional for the stage, even a small off-Broadway one. What sounds so achingly poignant on Mann’s album loses that poignance when sung by different characters, despite nearly identically restrained and small-scale accompaniment by acoustic guitar, bass, violin and piano.

When Susanna (a restrained but powerful Juliana Canfield) sings “At the Frick Museum,” a deceptively intricate song that manages to encompass Vermeer—one of whose paintings at the Frick gives the memoir and the show their title—and male predation, her vocal is harrowingly understated, but lost is Mann’s world-wearily forthright voice.

The same goes for most of the other songs, especially when they’re performed by more than one character. Another problem is that Mann does not write showstoppers; this works on Queens of the Summer Hotel, where the accumulation of her soulful, incident-filled songs grabs the heart. Yet onstage, though beautifully crafted and orchestrated by Todd Almond, the piling up of these same songs is far less memorable.

Majok’s lively book captures sympathetic snapshots of these misunderstood (and misdiagnosed) women, while Bonney’s precise direction helps smooth over the unavoidably episodic nature of the material. She also effectively uses the conceit of performers playing instruments onstage.

Alongside the always authentic Canfield is a captivating cast, although such a forceful singer as Emily Skinner is unfortunately relegated to a small role as one of the hospital’s doctors.

MET Orchestra Close Out Two Nights of Shows at Carnegie Hall

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 25 June 2026 13:57; Written by Jack Angstreich

The Met Orchestra with Yannick Nezet Seguin and Joyce DiDonato. Photo by Jennifer Taylor.

At the wonderful Stern Auditorium, on the night of Thursday, June 18th, I had the immense pleasure of attending a magnificent concert—the second of two a week apart—presented by Carnegie Hall, featuring the marvelous MET Orchestra under the outstanding direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

The event started very strongly with a sterling account of the late Kaija Saariaho’s powerful Lumière et pesanteur, from 2009. In a note on the piece, the composer has commented thus:

Lumière et pesanteur is a gift for Esa-Pekka Salonen, inspired by his performance of my La Passion de Simone in Los Angeles, January 2009. This piece is an arrangement based on the eighth station of the Passion, which I know that he especially likes.

About La Passion de Simone, annotator Noémie Chemali says that:

this multimedia oratorio, created in collaboration with Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf and stage director Peter Sellars, premiered in 2006 at the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna. Written in the passion play tradition, it makes a loose allusion to Baroque oratorio, which historically depicts the suffering of Jesus. This work, instead, explores the life and spiritual journey of the iconic French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (1909-43). Scored for orchestra, solo soprano, and electronics, it was subsequently performed by fellow Finn, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who inspired the orchestral arrangement known as Lumière et pesanteur.

In another program note, Nicholas Swett reported that “Saariaho came upon Weil's writings as a teenager.” The composer described how

the Finnish translation of her book Gravity and Grace was one of the few things I packed into my suitcase when I travelled to Germany in 1981 to continue my studies in composition. … The combination of Weil's severe asceticism and her passionate quest for truth has appealed to me ever since I first read her thoughts.

About Weil, in a 2021 interview Saariaho said:

I never totally understood what she is saying, but I am still trying. And I don't agree with her thoughts, but they force me to create my own opinions and they are very contemporary.

In Weil’s 1947 book, La pesanteur et la grâce, she wrote: “Two powers hold sway over the universe: light and gravity.”

The fabulous mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato then entered the stage for a superb—if maybe slightly underpowered—performance of Gustav Mahler’s extraordinary, five Rückert-Lieder, completed in 1902. About the now underrated poet, Friedrich Rückert, whose work provides the basis for them as well as the composer’s Kindertotenlieder and which was famously set by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, the composer told Anton Webern:

This is lyric poetry from the source. All else is lyric poetry of a derivative sort.

Annotator Harry Haskell explains that, “Unlike the Kindertotenlieder, the Rückert-Lieder were not conceived as an organic cycle.”

The second half of the evening’s program was at least equally memorable, consisting of an engrossing reading of Mahler’s incredibleSymphony No. 4 in G Major, which attained its final form in 1910. According to Haskell, “Mahler considered his new work ‘basically different’ from its three predecessors.” The composer wrote to his fiancée, Alma Schindler:

My Fourth will be very strange to you. It is all humorous, ‘naïve,’ etc.; it represents the part of my life that is still the hardest for you to accept and which in the future only extremely few will comprehend.

Haskell adds that Mahler “confided to a friend” that the symphony “depicted a cosmic gaiety emanating ‘from another sphere, and hence terrifying for humans: Only a child can understand and explain it, and a child does explain it in the end: a child who, if only at the chrysalis stage, already belongs to this superior world.’” The composer later commented “that humor of this type (as distinct from wit or good humor) is frequently not recognized even by the best of audiences.”

The initial movement opens charmingly—if maybe deceptively—and for much of it remains so, but it is punctuated by moments of almost aching lyricism and the music exhibits greater turbulence as it unfolds, although this eventually subsides before an abrupt, emphatic finish. The second movement is more playful with uncanny, almost sinister aspects and has an especially unconventional structure and considerable forward momentum for much of its length—it too ends suddenly, if relatively softly.

The ensuing, predominantly tranquil, slow movement—marked Poco adagio—has some of the celestial qualities of the celebrated Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony—which was famously employed by Luchino Visconti in his Death in Venice—but there are some dramatic, even portentous measures before it becomes quite cheerful and then recovers its serenity; it closes very quietly. (The composer stated that the movement signifies that “no harm was meant after all.”)

Mahler originally intended the last movement—a song set to the poem “Das himmlische Leben” from the influential 19th-century anthology, Des Knaben Wunderhorn—as the finale to his Third Symphony, and instructed that it “be sung with childlike, cheerful expression; entirely without parody.” It is buoyant, enchanting, often jubilant, with dynamic interludes, concluding irenically. (It was gloriously interpreted here by DiDonato.)

An enthusiastic ovation elicited an incredible encore from the mezzo-soprano and the ensemble: the "Urlicht" movement from Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, the "Resurrection."

Reviews

July '26 Digital Week I

"Onegin" with the American Ballet Theater

Off-Broadway Musical Review—“Girl, Interrupted” at the Public Theater

MET Orchestra Close Out Two Nights of Shows at Carnegie Hall

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