In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week 

French director Francois Ozon, who turns out films fast like a Gallic Woody Allen, is back with a tongue-in-cheek drama about Madeleine, a struggling actress who uses her trial for killing an elderly letcher (she’s acquitted, thanks to Pauline, her close friend, roommate and lawyer) as a springboard toward fame and fortune onstage and onscreen.

 

 

Ozon’s direction wavers between excessively campy and wittily on-target, and the large cast has a blast: Nadia Tereszkiewicz as Madeleine, Rebecca Marder as Pauline, Isabelle Huppert as a possible rival killer, Fabrice Luchini as an investigator and Andre Dussolier as Madeleine’s fiancee’s rich and unhappy father.

 

 

 

A Disturbance in the Force 

1978’s Star Wars Holiday Special was a singular event in television history—singularly awful but destined to remain legendary since it’s never been seen again (at least not officially) thanks to George Lucas infamously hating it and keeping it under wraps.

 

 

Steve Kozak and Jeremy Coon’s engaging and informative documentary not only shows clips from the special (I vaguely remember seeing it as a teenager back in the day) but speaks with several people—those who worked on the show, like writer Bruce Vilanch, and those who are fans, like Kevin Smith, Patton Oswalt and Weird Al—giving their often amusing takes on why it turned out like it did and its legacy as part of Star Wars history.

 

 

 

Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars 

Before he died in 2002 at age 91, master French director Jean-Luc Godard finished what he titled a trailer for a film he would never get to make; Phony Wars is the usual dense Godardian collage, perfected in his films of the ’80s as well as his masterly series Histoire(s) du Cinema: at 20 minutes, it’s provocative and humorous enough to hint at what might have been if he made a full-length feature. 

 

Kino Lorber has paired the director’s final work with Godard Cinema, an acerbic and illuminating valentine by director Cyril Leuthy to Godard’s singular career as the enfant terrible of French cinema—Leuthy interviews colleagues and performers who worked with Godard (including Marina Vlady, Julie Delpy and the great Nathalie Baye), painting an impressionistic portrait of a cantankerous but important artist. 

 

 

 

 

 

4K/UHD Releases of the Week 

Director David Gordon Green desperately wants to link the latest Exorcist sequel to William Friedkin’s classic original, so he begins with a shot of two dogs fighting, like the original; Mike Oldfield’s haunting “Tubular Bells” is heard in variations throughout, and the end titles are in the original’s same font.

 

 

Otherwise, there’s little that’s similar in this crass horror flick that has the temerity to bring back Ellen Burstyn and, briefly, Linda Blair as the original’s Chris and Regan McNeil—only to dispatch Burstyn in a sequence so crass it’s headshakingly awful to contemplate. There’s an excellent 4K transfer; extras include on-set featurettes and interviews.

 

 

 

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio 

Do we need a stop-motion animation Pinocchio set during the Fascist era? Apparently, Guillermo del Toro thinks so, codirecting with Mark Gustafson a crudely melodramatic if visually impeccable adaptation that runs a full two hours—when at least 20 to 30 minutes could have been trimmed to make a tighter, more cohesive tale.

 

 

Still, there’s much of interest on display, and it’s easy to see why it took several years to make, but as with many Del Toro films, he piles on the schmaltz, to the detriment of his own drama. The UHD transfer looks immaculate; extras include interviews with the directors and other creatives as well as a making-of documentary, Handcarved Cinema.

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

This eerie thriller is set in a Seoul subway station, where the dark tracks and cervices are the perfect spot for unearthly shenanigans, as a young reporter desperately looking for a good story burrows into a series of supposed suicides in that strange station.

 

 

Director Jeong Yong-ki keeps the action and the twists moving swiftly, along with a couple of exciting underground sequences that compensate for an overreliance on jump scares and the “ick” factor of closeups of spirits in hideous makeup. There’s a fine hi-def transfer.

 

 

 

Menotti—Amahl and the Night Visitors 

Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007) created the first opera written exclusively for television in 1951, a touching one-acter about a crippled young boy who is visited by the magi on their way to a more famous nativity scene.

 

 

Less than an hour in length, it was perfect for the then burgeoning TV medium; nearly 70 years later, Stefan Herheim’s 2022 Vienna production, updated to an antiseptic modern hospital where Amahl has terminal cancer, retains the lovely music (chorus and orchestra are led by Magnus Loddgard) but loses much of the sentiment with its forced hard edge. It has first-rate hi-def video and audio.

 

 

 

OSS 117—Cairo, Nest of Spies/Lost in Rio 

Before he swept the Oscars for his cute but overrated 2011 parody The Artist, French director Michel Hazarincarius made a pair of goofy spy thrillers modeled on James Bond: OSS 117 is the code name for the handsome if accidentally successful French secret agent (the always debonair Jean Dujardin).

 

 

2006’s Cairo, Nest of Spies and 2009’s Lost in Rio provide the director and his hero the chance to parade around decent spy jokes and jokey action sequences in far-flung locations; Cairo is more watchable since it costars the director’s wife, the elegant and winning Berenice Bejo, who didn’t return for the inferior sequel. There are very good hi-def transfers; extras include commentaries, deleted scenes and featurettes.

 

 

 

The Wandering Earth II 

For this big-budget Chinese sci-fi epic—and a prequel to The Wandering Earth—the visual effects are so eye-poppingly impressive that whenever the plot gets bogged down in minutiae or the less than scintillating interaction between many characters takes center stage it doesn’t really matter.

 

 

Director Frant Gwo’s dramatic buildup over nearly three hours is often thrilling, even though this is basically a Twilight Zone episode stretched to monumental length. The film, which includes subtitled and English dubbed versions, looks absolutely breathtaking in hi-def.

 

 

 

CD Releases of the Week 

Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006) might be known for his otherworldly music, so brilliantly used by Stanley Kubrick in three of Kubrick’s most unsettling films—2001, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut—but the genius of Ligeti is his unclassifiable oeuvre comprising a singular musical vision that looked forward while nodding to the past.

 

 

The works on this disc (superbly played by the Verona Quartet) bare this out. The first string quartet, Métamorphoses nocturnes (1953-54), has a sound world similar to Ligeti’s compatriot Béla Bartók, with variations of invention and vitality. The second string quartet (1968) goes even further, again hinting at the earlier composer while moving forward, full speed ahead, into modernity. Rounding out this exceptional disc is an early work, 1950’s Andante and Allegretto, pleasant yet nowhere near as revolutionary as what was to come.

 

 

 

Felix Mendelssohn—Symphony No. 4, “Italian” 

When Felix Mendelssohn died at age 38 in 1847, several of his works had not been published, including probably his greatest—or at least most famous—symphony, the “Italian.” He had written it in 1833 and made revisions the next year, although the original version, opening with that instantly memorable and joyful melody, is still the preferred one.

 

 

This CD includes both versions, played by the ensemble Le Concert des Nations under the firm guidance of Jordi Savall. To the uninitiated, they sound remarkably similar; in fact, there are a few differences in the final three movements, but the excellence of Mendelssohn’s orchestral writing and his gift for wondrous melodies make this a pleasure to hear in either version.