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November '25 Digital Week III

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 27 November 2025 16:29; Written by Kevin Filipski

Streaming Releases of the Week

Anniversary

(Lionsgate)

A political film that demands to be treated seriously is a rarity nowadays, but this apocalyptic drama, slickly directed by Jan Komasa from a hamfisted script by Lori Rosene-Gambino, pretends to be a daring cautionary tale when it’s only a pedestrian treatment of how a sea change in American politics (called, blandly, “the change”) takes its toll on an affluent family.

The country is turned upside down along with the Taylors, but despite politically motivated killings and a suicide bombing, little of it rings true or plausible, mainly because it fails at being clinical and probing. Convincing performances by Diane Lane (mom), Kyle Chandler (dad), Zoey Deutsch, McKenna Grace and Madeline Brewer (daughters), Dylan O’Brien (son), and Phoebe Dynevor (son’s wife and main catalyst) can only do so much.

Frankenstein

(Netflix)

Mary Shelley’s classic Gothic thriller remains unnerving and relevant, with movie adaptations as far flung as James Whale’s 1931 talkie that made a star of monster Boris Karloff and Mel Brooks’ explosively funny but faithful parody-cum-homage, 1974’s Young Frankenstein.

Now Guillermo del Toro lumbers into view with a typically overwrought, stuffed-to-the-gills adaptation whose elaborate visuals makes it seem as if we’re watching a video game. Bluntly directed with a sledgehammer, the film evaporates from memory as soon as it’s over, stranding good performers as Jacob Elordi (monster), Oscar Isaac (doctor) and Mia Goth (love interest).

Vindication Swim

(Brilliant Pictures)

The story of Mercedes Gleitze—a young Englishwoman who was the first female to swim the English Channel in 1927, then tried to do it again when her achievement was questioned—is certainly inspiring, and director/writer Elliott Hasler milks it for all its worth in this entertaining if conventional biopic.

As Mercedes, Kirsten Callaghan is highly impressive both in and out of the water, and the era’s anti-woman, pro-white male politics makes for a good antagonist, yet this could have been so much more memorable than it turns out to be.

4K/UHD Releases of the Week

The Conjuring—Last Rites

(Warner Bros)

This latest (and last?) dramatization of the pioneering paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren’s exploits with malevolent hauntings uses the same blueprint as the series’ three earlier entries, but Michael Chaves’ overly fussy direction makes this all too familiar as its 2 hours and 15 minutes drag unnecessarily.

On the plus side, there’s solid acting by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as the Warrens and well-cast support from Mia Tomlinson, Ben Hardy and others as the affected Smurl family. There’s a superior UHD transfer; extras include on-set featurettes and interviews.

Howards End

(Cohen Film Collection)

The peak of the uneven James Ivory-Ismail Merchant-Ruth Prawer Jhabvala team’s career was this absorbing 1992 adaptation of E.M. Forster’ classic novel about the shifting relations and attitudes among the different classes in Edwardian England: it’s old-fashioned filmmaking done so well that it’s transfixing to watch.

Ivory’s directing and Jhabvala’s writing were never equaled by them before or after, while the cast—Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, Helena Bonham Carter and Vanessa Redgrave, for starters—is flawless. The film has a spectacular film-like sheen in 4K; extras include a new audio commentary, vintage Ivory and Merchant interviews, and on-set interviews and featurettes.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Strauss—Intermezzo

(Naxos)

Richard Strauss (1864-1949) wrote 15 operas—among them classics Salome, Der Rosenkavalier, Arabella and Capriccio—but this talky drama based on his personal life has never really caught on, despite lovely music and a wonderful lead role for the soprano playing a famous conductor’s wife, whose complicated relationship with her husband makes her seek out an affair.

Tobias Kratzer’s 2024 Berlin State Opera staging is set in the present day, which neither harms nor helps the storytelling—happily, the orchestra and conductor Donald Runnicles are in fine form, and, as Christine, Swedish soprano Maria Bengtsson gives the towering portrayal the opera needs to succeed. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.

The Island Closest to Heaven

(Cult Epics)

Morimura Katsura’s story about Mari, a Japanese teenager visiting the ravishingly beautiful islands of New Catalonia, becomes, in director Nobuhiko Obayashi’s capable hands, a tender character study that is the opposite of his earlier, often delirious films House and School in the Crosshairs.

Buoyed by an accomplished, understated performance by Tomoyo Harada as Mari, this is a modest, satisfying drama. There’s a good hi-def transfer; extras include an audio commentary and making-of featurette.

CD Releases of the Week

Rachmaninoff/Elgar—The Bells/Falstaff

(Harmonia Mundi)

Two works inspired by two great American and English writers make up this terrific disc, starting with The Bells, a choral symphony by Sergei Rachmaninoff whose texts have been freely adapted from poems of Edgar Allan Poe—the creative fusion of the Russian composer’s rich melodies and American author’s unsettling imagery results in a truly unique work.

Edward Elgar and William Shakespeare are a less surprising combo, and Elgar’s symphonic study about the Bard’s wondrous comic creation Sir John Falstaff is rollicking and contemplative by turns. Vasily Petrenko leads the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in an outstanding Falstaff, and the Philharmonia Chorus and three fine soloists contribute to a superb version of The Bells.

Grace Williams—Works for Orchestra

(Lyrita)

Welsh composer Grace Williams (1906-77)—barely known on this side of the Atlantic, at least—wrote attractive music in various genres, and this disc is a worthwhile primer to anyone (like me) heretofore unfamiliar with her music.

Williams’ shimmering violin concerto has a persuasive soloist in Geneva Lewis; her supple Sinfonia concertante for piano and orchestra sounds exquisite in soloist Clare Hammond’s hands. On the concerti and brooding Elegy for string orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales sounds remarkably cohesive, considering there’s a different conductor for each work.

Off-Broadway Musical Review—“The Seat of Our Pants” at the Public Theater

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 20 November 2025 21:01; Written by Kevin Filipski

The Seat of Our Pants

Adaptation, music, and lyrics by Ethan Lipton; based on the play The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder

Choreography by Sunny Min-Sook Hitt; directed by Leigh Silverman

Performances through December 7, 2025

Public Theater, New York, NY

publictheater.org

Shuler Hensley and Micaela Diamond in The Seat of Our Pants (photo: Joan Marcus)

Making Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth literally sing is not an original concept: the last time it was done here, Off-Broadway in 2017, director Arin Arbus interpolated songs by César Alvarez into the high-concept structure of Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning creation, which takes a tongue-in-cheek but also deadly serious look at the Antrobus family from New Jersey (Antrobus means, not surprisingly, “human being” in Greek), whose 5,000-year existence includes a new ice age, a Biblical flood and an end-times world war in each of its three acts. (Wilder wrote it in 1942 during World War II, for context.)

The Skin of Our Teeth is a structural monstrosity—actors address the audience out of character, stagehands join in on the action, and a dinosaur and a mammoth have speaking parts, to name just a few—so adding songs would seem just another formal conceit that mirrors Wilder’s. The playwright heavily borrowed from James Joyce’s last novel, the punning classic Finnegans Wake—another formal experiment that has challenged readers and scholars for decades—to create the indestructible family that lives through both natural and man-made disasters.

Ethan Lipton—who adapted the play and wrote the music and lyrics of this latest incarnation, retitled The Seat of Our Pants—has kept most of Wilder’s conceits, so when the Antrobus’ maid, Sabina (who becomes a beauty pageant winner stealing the father away from his family in the second act before reverting back to their maid Sabina in act three) addresses the audience at the beginning, the effect is humorous if bemusing. (Wilder shrewdly put dialogue in Sabina’s mouth that would shut down criticism about what he is trying to do with his play.)

Lipton is better at adapting than writing songs, which, with a couple exceptions, don’t deepen the play’s metaphorical, allegorical or literary conceits but instead regurgitate what Wilder’s alternately pointed and ponderous writing has already covered. The Skin of Our Teeth is a long, exhausting evening of theater—and The Seat of Our Pants, also long, is even more exhausting.

Luckily, the always resourceful director Leigh Silverman stages these seemingly random scenes of a family adrift in a world that’s at war with itself with an unerring sense of the theatrical and the metatheatrical. With choreographer Sunny Min-Sook Hitt, Silverman makes movement more telling than Lipton’s songs or even Wilder’s words. On Lee Jellinek’s cleverly pliable unit set—illuminated by Lap Chi Chu’s canny lighting design and Kaye Voyce’s colorful costumes—Silverman creates a world in which the Antrobus clan, on the precipice of extinction, manages to survive the worst of both nature and their fellow humans.

The large cast tackles these brazenly surrealistic characters with aplomb. Shuler Hensley’s Mr. Antrobus is charming in his dumbness, someone who knows men will always lead however unqualified they are. Damon Daunno, as son Henry, is remarkably adept at aping his father’s brainlessness while Amina Faye, as daughter Gladys, effectively embodies a shrewdness her father and brother will never know. Ruthie Anne Miles, as Mrs. Antrobus, sings beautifully (no surprise) and finds an uncomfortably devastating emotional core, especially in a brief scene when she screams in mortal pain over her dead infant son.

Then there’s the Sabina of Micaela Diamond, a stage natural who, through a miraculous blend of charm, singing chops and comedic smarts, holds this unwieldy show together.

November '25 Digital Week II

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 19 November 2025 15:38; Written by Kevin Filipski

Streaming Releases of the Week

Heaven

(Lightyear)

With the untimely death of Diane Keaton, there was discussion about her legendary screen career, from her indelible collaborations with Woody Allen to her powerful performances in Reds and Shoot the Moon, among others.

But Keaton was also an idiosyncratic filmmaker, and her first feature—this weirdly beguiling 1987 documentary—showed off her singular style in ways that were both affecting and head-shaking. This 75-minute exploration rounds up interview snippets with people who discuss their idea of an afterlife alongside dozens of carefully chosen clips from a wide array of movies including Metropolis and A Matter of Life and Death to create something uniquely, lightheartedly Keatonesque.

Sex Diva

(Breaking Glass Pictures)

Writer-director Giulia Louise Steigerwalt smartly chronicles the fascinating career of Italian pornographer Riccardo Schicchi, who broke through in the ‘90s, helping to create celebrities of some of his female adult-film performers, including his wife Éva Henger and international superstars like Moana Pozzi, who died tragically of cancer at age 33.

Steigerwalt’s film is amusing and dramatic, tongue-in-cheek and tragic, and has superb acting throughout, led by Pietro Castellito (Riccardo), Tesa Litvan (Éva) and Denise Capezza (Moana), with—as the calming influence of the Schicchi empire, Debora Attanasio—the magnificent Barbara Ronchi the emotional anchor of the story.

4K/UHD Releases of the Week

Def Leppard—Diamond Star Heroes: Live From Sheffield

(Mercury)

For a triumphant return to its hometown of Sheffield in northern England in 2023, Def Leppard played the local soccer stadium for a 90-minute concert before tens of thousands of loyal fans that mixed the group’s biggest hits with a few deeper cuts; highlights are the early tracks “Bringing on the Heartbreak” and “Switch 625.” Singer Joe Elliott can still hit most of the high notes, impressive at his age (63 in ’23), and the band is tight and focused.

A bonus concert, at a Sheffield club a few nights earlier, is a 65-minute trek through some of the same hits and a couple different true-fan faves like “Let It Go” and “Wasted.” The UHD video and surround sound are first-rate.

Him

(Universal)

In this crudely if occasionally effective horror flick, college football player Cameron Cade—after being attacked by an unknown assailant after a game—goes to train privately before the pro combine with veteran NFL QB Isaiah White, whose unconventional methods result in sex, murder and a ridiculously risible final blood-letting.

Tyriq Withers is a persuasive, even sympathetic Cam, while Marlon Wayans brings gravitas to the young quarterback’s mentor. For 95 minutes, co-writer/director Justin Tipping hammers everything home so literally that it turns what could have been an enjoyably guilty pleasure into a visually striking mess. It does look terrific on UHD; extras include an alternate ending, deleted scene, and featurettes.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Burden of Dreams

(Criterion)

Les Blank and Maureen Gosling’s perceptive 1982 documentary about the stupendous (and often stupid) lengths that director Werner Herzog went to making his rain forest epic Fitzcarraldo is far more focused than Herzog’s feature, another of the German filmmaker’s adventurous but stillborn studies of madness. A precursor to the making-of featurettes that populate so many home media releases, Blank and Lassiter’s chronicle catches many interesting filmmaking moments—and Herzog, always a charming figure, has himself made far more memorable documentaries than features.

The film looks striking on Blu; extras comprise Blank’s, Gosling’s and Herzog’s insightful commentary, Blank’s amusing short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), deleted scenes and an archival Herzog interview.

Pavarotti—The Lost Concert

(Mercury/Universal)

In 1995, the great Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti gave a concert in Llangollen, a small town in Wales, 40 years after he won a vocal competition there, to keep a promise he made to return one day: the entire 75-minute concert, where he sang his greatest classical hits in front of tens of thousands, was recorded for posterity.

His delight is evident from the start, and he’s in fine form throughout. The video looks decent and the sound is good; lone extra is a 52-minute documentary that follows Pavarotti on his journey to the concert, although some of it repeats performances we see in the actual show.

Rick and Morty—Complete 8th Season

(Warner Bros)

The latest bonkers season begins with Morty and his sister Summer escaping the matrix into which their mad-scientist granddad Rick sent them after they took his phone charger—and that’s just the beginning of a series of dementedly witty episodes that features clones of the main characters that go off on further adventures.

The superb voice cast and the offhandedly clever animation provide special comic (and cosmic) dimension to these eight episodes; lone extra is an inside the season featurette with creator Dan Harmon and others.

CD Releases of the Week

Leoš Janáček—The Makropulos Affair/The Diary of the One Who Disappeared

(Somm)

Australian conductor Charles Mackerras (1925-2010) was an authority on the music of the Czech master Leoš Janáček (1854-1928), recording all of his major operas, especially in an unparalleled cycle for Decca Records back in the 1970s. One of Janáček’s towering masterpieces, The Makropulos Affair (better known as The Makropulos Case in America) had its London premiere in 1964 at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, under Mackerras’ meticulous direction, with Marie Collier an unforgettable-sounding heroine.

Also on this two-disc set is a fine performance (from the BBC Studios in 1956) of the composer’s yearning song cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared, sung in an English translation by tenor Richard Lewis and contralto Maureen Forrester, with Ernest Lush on piano.

Kurt Weill/Alan Jay Lerner—Love Life

(Capriccio)

This delectable 1948 time-traveling musical was the only collaboration of two musical geniuses: Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner. The amazing thing is that the finished work is so cohesive and flows so entertainingly, considering the outsized talents (and, no doubt, egos) of both men.

This excellent recording of a recent production of Opera North—located in Leeds, England—features wonderful singing, especially by the leads, Quirijin de Long and Stephanie Carley, along with the large supporting cast and chorus; while the orchestra, under conductor James Holmes, sounds wonderful throughout. Too bad this is an audio recording—a video of this staging would be unbeatable.

Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra Perform at Carnegie Hall

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 14 November 2025 14:54; Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Fadi Kheir

At the excellent Stern Auditorium, on the night of Monday, October 27th, I had the privilege to attend a fabulous concert—presented by Carnegie Hall—featuring the superior Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, admirably led by its Music Director and Conductor, Jaap van Zweden.

The event started brilliantly with the US premiere of Inferno by Jung Jae-il, who is known for his score for Bong Joon Ho’s extraordinary 2019 film, Parasite. The composer has commented on the work as follows:

This is the very last section of Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities. Marco Polo says this to Kublai Khan:

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

This piece began with that passage.

As I reflect on the countless deaths, suffering, and farewells caused by wars, plagues, and natural disasters occurring around the world, I realize that their scale is far beyond what I could ever fathom.

In the face of darkness and flames, where not even an inch ahead is visible, I tried to think about how we are to go on living.

Though I am a composer without formal classical training, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Maestro Jaap, who encouraged me from our very first meeting and gave me the courage to take on the challenge of composition.

Inferno opens forcefully and dissonantly but soon acquires a more meditative and elegiac cast; this section is succeeded by more exciting music, with a driving rhythm, and then a dulcet, more affirmative interlude arrested by dramatic measures. The composition concludes quietly but beautifully with another solemn episode. Jung was present to receive the audience’s acclaim.

An amazing soloist, Bomsori Kim—she wore a gorgeous, bright yellow gown—then entered the stage for a terrific performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s marvelous, Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64, which underwent its final revision in 1845–in the period after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and before Samuel Barber and the modernists, Mendelssohn’s concerto’s only peers may be those of Ludwig Van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Jean Sibelius. The initial, Allegro molto appassionato movement begins lyrically and emotionally with some urgency but there are exquisite, reflective moments amidst the bewitching virtuosity; the music builds to a thrilling climax. The ensuing Andante is introspective but song-like too, an uninterrupted flow of irresistible melodies; it becomes more serious in inflection, ending softly. In the finale, a brief, pensive, Allegretto non troppo introduction is followed by an Allegro molto vivace main body that is propulsive and joyous; it closes exhilaratingly. Enthusiastic applause elicited an enjoyable encore from the soloist: Fritz Kreisler’s “Schön Rosmarin” from his Old Viennese Dances.

The second half of the evening was maybe even more memorable: a sumptuous account of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s magnificent Symphony No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 27, completed in 1907. The composition starts somewhat lugubriously with an extended Largo introduction; the movement’s Allegro moderato main body is livelier, although an undercurrent of sadness is discernible throughout—there are moments that recall the Sibelius of his Second and Fifth symphonies. Towards the end of the movement, the music accelerates, but it finishes abruptly. The succeeding Allegro molto is even more spirited—it has some playful qualities but it also expresses the longing that is a hallmark of Rachmaninoff’s creative personality. A central episode has an unusual intensity and turbulence; after another agitated section, it concludes quietly.

The Adagio is the most sheerly lovely of the movements, an outpouring of pure Romanticism; the music is much sunnier and more serene towards the close, ending pacifically. The finale, marked Allegro vivace, is largely exuberant, with a more consistently positive valence, although it is not entirely free from disquiet; it concludes triumphantly. A deserved, standing ovation was rewarded with another splendid, indeed exultant, encore: Antonín Dvořák’s delightful Presto from the Slavonic Dance in G Minor, Op. 46, No. 8.

Reviews

November '25 Digital Week III

Off-Broadway Musical Review—“The Seat of Our Pants” at the Public Theater

November '25 Digital Week II

Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra Perform at Carnegie Hall

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