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Reviews
September '26 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 24 September 2026 14:22
- Written by Kevin Filipski
In-Theater Releases of the Week
The Weight
(Vertical Releasing)
In early 1930s Oregon, Murphy (Ethan Hawke), who made a wrong move against undercover policemen, finds himself on a brutal work gang and separated from his beloved young daughter—but the warden, Clancy (Russell Crowe), takes a shine to him and says he can get him an early release if he takes on a dangerous mission to smuggle gold through forbidding wilderness. This no-nonsense drama has its share of suspenseful moments, but the potentially intriguing relationship between a desperate Murphy and the shady Clancy never becomes momentous, despite both actors at their grim best.
Director Padraic McKinley and writers Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines don’t make any of the characters (including Anna, an Indigenous woman played strikingly by Julia Jones) authentic enough to root for, so the story’s power somewhat dissipates.
(Brainstorm Media)
Angelina Jolie certainly began her directorial career auspiciously with the intense historical dramas In the Land of Milk and Honey and Unbroken, but since then she’s floundered—this exploration of the closeness of grief, memory and vengeance was made in 2024 but sat on the shelf until now.
It’s not hard to see why: this 85-minute film barely has enough time to sketch out its protagonists and their horrific histories, and even with committed performances by Salma Hayek and Demián Bichir, Jolie is unable to provide anything more than earnest, clichéd and (yes) bloodless platitudes.
You Had to Be There
(Greenwich Entertainment)
In 1972, a Toronto production of the musical Godspell was populated by several future comedy legends: Gilda Radner, Paul Shaffer, Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Dave Thomas, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, etc., and director Nick Davis brings many of them back for an often hilarious (and equally touching) reminiscence.
Also on hand are Godspell composer Steven Schwartz and fans like Mike Myers and Lin-Manuel Miranda, who expound on the singular talents of these performers, many of whom would go onto fame on SCTV and SNL. This terrific trip down memory lane climaxes when the surviving group gets together in a NYC apartment and sings songs from the show like “Day by Day.”
(Kino Lorber)
Director Charles Burnett’s sophomore feature was this compassionate 1980 drama that centers around Pierce, who lives in a South Central L.A. neighborhood that remains a close-knit community despite the often miserable reality of everyday existence.
This authentic slice-of-life culminates when Pierce must decide whether to attend the wedding of his brother Wendell or the funeral of his good friend Soldier. Although the film has its share of amateurish performances, Burnett’s script and direction have a clarity that makes this a still meaningful glimpse into ordinary Black lives.
4K Releases of the Week
Interview with the Vampire—The Vampire Chronicles
(Warner Bros)
Anne Rice’s 1976 novel was an anomaly in its time: an intelligent gothic romance about New Orleans vampires that paved the way (or is that can be blamed) for the later undead craze. In Neil Jordan’s atmospheric 1994 adaptation, the master Phillipe Rousselot’s glistening photography and Dante Ferretti’s gorgeous set design are the real stars, even with memorable performances by Brad Pitt, Stephen Rea and a young Kirsten Dunst.
Too bad the film is saddled with Tom Cruise’s unmenacing Lestat along with an unrelieved seriousness that doesn’t seem aware of the campiness of the material. The film looks exquisite in 4K; extras include a Jordan commentary as well as new and vintage featurettes with interviews with the cast, Rousselot, Ferretti, Jordan and Rice.
(Warner Bros)
In the latest superhero reboot, Kara Zor-el—female cousin of Superman from the planet Krypton—gets her own origin story as she travels across the galaxy to make sure the villain who hurt her dog Krypto gets his comeuppance.
Unfortunately, director Craig Gillespie’s adventure is as simple and pedestrian as it sounds, as Supergirl meets an assortment of bizarre characters that seem to have emerged from a Mad Max sequel. Milly Alcock is a winning performer, but she ends up battling a mediocre script and pedestrian direction to differentiate this from other comic-book flicks. Unfortunately, she fails. It all looks great on UHD; extras are several featurettes and deleted scenes.
September '26 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 17 September 2026 02:51
- Written by Kevin Filipski
In-Theater Releases of the Week
Kwaidan
(Janus Films/Film Forum)
Japanese director Mitsuo Kobayashi’s 1964 classic is unlike other ghost stories, since he is not concerned at all with actual scares or things that go bump in the night (predating Kubrick’s The Shining), and deliberately has made one-dimensional characters who are lacking in motivation throughout these four weird tales. Instead, Kobayashi concentrates on stylized atmosphere above all else: each story’s setting is brilliantly evoked, beautiful and haunting trappings for these eerie meanderings.
Stylishness has never been so spectacular, and Kobayashi’s cinematographer Yoshio Miyajima, editor Hisashi Sagara, art director Shigemasa Toda, costume designer Masahiro Katô and composer Toru Takemitsu are up to the formidable task.
(Assembly Releasing)
For Sam Green, the premise was simple but daunting—track down and interview the world’s oldest person. But since that person inevitably keeps changing, Green has to keep moving, traveling from Brooklyn to Europe and back to the U.S. to talk with centenarians who hold the Guinness age record, however briefly.
But that premise is just the beginning of this beguiling documentary, for Green also discovers that mortality is a large part of a 50-year-old filmmaker’s life as well, when he is diagnosed with multiple myeloma (which has been kept under control so far). But Green never loses his sense of humor: while making the film, he and his partner welcome a baby boy, whom Green slyly calls “the youngest person in the world”—if only for a brief moment, until the next baby is born somewhere else.
On a String
(Joke Zero)
Isabel Hagen, a Juilliard-trained violist turned comedian and filmmaker, has mined her own experiences for the core of this often amusingly grating glimpse at Isabel, a freelance New York City musician who still lives with her overbearing parents and brother while navigating the cutthroat world of musicmaking, where even a friend will betray you, like a fellow quartet member also going to a New York Philharmonic audition and getting a callback instead of her.
Hagen writes, directs and also stars as Isabel—she comes off as a less enervating Greta Gerwig, which works well for her jaundiced semi-autobiographical self-portrait. There are also solid turns by New York acting veterans like Dylan Baker, Eric Bogosian and Fred Weller.
(KimStim)
Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa remakes his own sinister 1998 thriller, about child exploitation and organ trafficking, in France, and it’s another compelling exploration of grief checkered by revenge and ultimately betrayal. Heroes and villains are a slippery concept in Kurosawa’s hands, and he is masterly at transforming ordinary situations that devolve into chaotic cruelty.
It might go on a bit too long, especially in a finale as conventional as it is implausible but, led by an excellent group of French and Japanese actors like Damien Bonnard, Ko Shibasaki, Mathieu Amalric and Grégoire Colin, this is a rough but riveting watch.
Streaming Release of the Week
Mutiny
(Lionsgate)
If there’s a Jason Statham vehicle blueprint, it’s this tautly executed, single-minded action flick in which our hero, who plays Cole Reed, a former commando whose life is in danger after he’s accused of murdering his rich boss and stows away on a ship involved in human trafficking. Director Jean-François Richet and writers Lindsay Michel and J. P. Davis waste no time on niceties like characterization or believable dialogue, but they give Statham—and costar Annabelle Wallis as his unlikely but effective sidekick—the chance to continually overwhelm the dastardly bad guys.
Special credit goes to Adrian Lester, whose U.S. military ship captain becomes more entertainingly bemused as he gets a fuller picture of what’s happening aboard the rogue boat.
Colors of Time
(Distrib Films)
In French director Cédric Klapisch’s latest drama, four cousins meeting for the first time explore their celebrated ancestor Adèle’s home—we meet Adèle herself (a fine Suzanne Lindon) as she leaves the sticks for Paris at the zenith of the 1890s Belle Époque and befriends artists like Claude Monet, who ends up having more to do with the cousins’ extended family than expected.
Typically flavorful and spirited, lavish but not overstuffed, Klapisch’s film might be schematic in how it crosscuts between the present-day cousins’ endless zoom calls about Adèle’s valuables—including a painting that may have a surprising provenance—and her adventures in the dazzling city of lights, but it’s a delight from start to finish. Too bad there’s no hi-def release, since the visual wonders Klapisch conjures aren’t seen to their fullest effect on DVD.
Off-Broadway Play Review—Revival of Wendy Wasserstein’s “An American Daughter”
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 14 September 2026 16:35
- Written by Kevin Filipski
An American Daughter
Written by Wendy Wasserstein
Directed by Sarna Lapine
Performances through September 20, 2026
Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
lafemmetheatreproductions.org
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| Dakin Matthews, Jean Lichty, and Robert Sean Leonard in An American Daughter (photo by Joan Marcus) |
An American Daughter opened on Broadway in 1997, a few years after President Clinton’s picks for attorney general, Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood, were withdrawn from nomination over the ridiculous Nannygate scandals. The current revival (its first) shows that, in today’s climate—where Trump has destroyed norms that have obtained for decades—it now seems irrelevant and surprisingly one-dimensional.
Wasserstein’s heroine, the accomplished liberal doctor Lyssa Edna Hughes, is in her mid-40s and has been nominated as surgeon general. She’s seen as a safe pick, and she has a solid political pedigree, since her father, Alan Hughes, is a longtime Republican senator who has just married his fourth wife, nicknamed Chubby. Lyssa’s husband Walter is an academic still respected in progressive circles.
Several other characters flit in and out. Lyssa’s college friend Judith is a Black Jewish oncologist from Brooklyn desperate to have a baby. Morrow McCarthy, a gay, anti-abortion columnist, is another friend of the couple. Then there’s Quincy Quince, a Gen X feminist whose mentor was Walter and whose quick rise to fame threatens to derail Alyssa and Walter’s own relationship.
It’s all melodramatically soapy, especially when rising TV journalist Timber Tucker—during an interview with Alyssa—runs with a tidbit he overhears at a brunch attended by all the characters that the supposedly perfect Lyssa ignored a jury summons, which begins a runaway train that destroys Lyssa’s nomination.
Although the inspired and insightful creator of The Heidi Chronicles and The Sisters Rosensweig is still occasionally present, these characters are not differentiated enough—with names like Chubby, Morrow, Timber and Quincy, one suspects Wasserstein knew this too and hoped the monikers would make them stand out—to be worth spending 2-1/2 hours with, and the surfeit of one-liners (this being Wasserstein, there are many of them, some of them hilarious, others not so) tries to hide the lack of motivation and development.
On Broadway 30 years ago, Daniel Sullivan’s slick production and Kate Nelligan’s elegant Lyssa helped smooth over the dramaturgical holes. But the new off-Broadway staging—unevenly directed by Sarna Lapine on Mikiko Suzuki Macadams’ beautifully appointed set of Lyssa and Walter’s Georgetown home—is hampered by slack writing and a mixed bag of acting.
Montego Glover is an adroit Judith, Dakin Matthews has a blast as Alan and Robert Sean Leonard is a capable Walter. On the debit side, Mary Beth Peil (Chubby), Carmen Zilles (Quincy), Ryan Spahn (Morrow) and Chris Gaffhari (Timber) can’t transcend their clever names enough to become individuals, while, most damagingly, Jean Lichty plays Lyssa with an unfortunate somnolence that makes Wasserstein’s heroine disappear into the scenery.
September '26 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 10 September 2026 21:04
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Streaming Releases of the Week
Sherman’s March
(Music Box Films)
Ross McElwee has been making personal chronicles masquerading as documentaries for nearly 50 years, carrying a camera around filming his own life—and those of his loved ones—through several feature films, the most famous of which is this 1986 masterpiece that has been rereleased in a restored version for its 40th anniversary.
Ostensibly an excuse for McElwee to follow General Sherman’s infamous Civil War “march to the sea” as Union forces pillaged and burned everything in their path on their way to destroying the Confederates’ spirit, the film is a fascinatingly offbeat glimpse at the director’s own relationships with various young Southern women, all with the then-still horrifyingly real specter of nuclear war hanging over everyone and everything. (The film’s memorably long subtitle is A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation.)
(Music Box Films)
Russ McElwee’s new film, coming 15 years after his last feature, Photographic Memory, is his most personal, chronicling his grief after his son Adrian died of a fentanyl overdose on Christmas Eve, 2016, at age 27. Another insightful, self-reflective and even self-lacerating McElwee self-portrait, Remake illustrates a difficult relationship with Adrian, who, as he got older, also became interested in filmmaking and began making visual records of events in his own life.
McElwee uses his own voluminous footage along with that shot by Adrian to grab hold of his son’s memory, as he says, to make sure he lived and is now gone. There’s also a parallel plotline as Hollywood comes calling with an absurd request to turn his classic Sherman’s March into a fiction feature. But Remake’s heart is McElwee working out his grief over and pride in his son through footage from his earlier films, where we see his children as youngsters. Touchingly, McElwee gives his mother’s mantra as his own: “Everything begins and ends with family.”
In-Theater Releases of the Week
American Summer
(Blue Harbor Entertainment)
In Michael W. Gray’s comedy-drama, nostalgia becomes sentimentality as young Mikey plays baseball, chases girls, and deals with his absent military dad and harried mom during a tumultuous teenage summer.
There’s good acting by Logan Gray as our protagonist and Mia Talerico as Kelly, the object of his teen desire, but Gray also had the not-so-great idea to show older Mikey, played decently by Steve Guttenberg, who’s our onscreen narrator—and when older Kelly shows up at the end, she’s played amateurishly by Christie Brinkley. It would have been better to focus on the kids—Mikey’s friends are a Benetton ad—whose antics are at least diverting.
(Strand Releasing/Film Forum, NYC)
Barbara Hammer, who died in 2019 at 79 of cancer, was a pioneering lesbian filmmaker who made dozens of personal films, from shorts to features, that brought a discerning eye to her challenging explorations of (often explicit) female sexuality.
Director Brydie O’Connor’s involving and ultimately moving portrait of this singular artist comprises Hammer’s own archival footage alongside sequences from her films, her own intelligent voiceover and the thoughts of her longtime partner, Florrie Burke.
Blu-ray Release of the Week
Trial by Jury/A Matter of Misconduct!
(Opus Arte)
This lively double bill of Gilbert & Sullivan’s first hit operetta, set in a courtroom that pits a jilted bride and her scheming groom, and a new operetta by composer Toby Hession and librettist Emma Jenkins, which takes the pulse of political corruption, mixes frivolousness and seriousness quite entertainingly.
This 2025 Scottish Opera production has terrific singing from both casts and choruses, marvelous musicmaking by the Scottish Opera orchestra under conductor Hession, and colorful stagings by, respectively, directors John Savournin and Laura Attridge. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.
Mark Adamo—Lysistrata
(Pentatone)
American composer Mark Adamo’s 2005 riff on the classic ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes has, in the past 20 years, gained even more relevance in a world riven by ethnic, sexual, gender and identity strife. Although Adamo’s rhyming libretto is quite wordy, it does reach Sondheim-like moments of witty eloquence, especially when married to Adamo’s own melodious music.
In this excellent 2025 recording, Boston’s Odyssey Opera gives an enthusiastic performance that doesn’t overdo either the comedy or the politics—the formidable voice cast is led by the terrific soprano Anya Matanovič in the title role and tenor Dominic Armstrong as Lysistrata’s lover, Nico, who leads the men of Athenian men in trying to change the minds of begging Athenian women withholding sex until men stop waging war. Gil Rose adroitly conducts Adamo’s challenging score.
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