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June '26 Digital Week I

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 04 June 2026 15:10; Written by Kevin Filipski

Film Series of the Week

Louis Malle: Portraits of America

(Metrograph, NYC)

French director Louis Malle (1932-95) was best known for intelligent and provocative films like his incest comedy Murmur of the Heart and two Nazi Occupation dramas, Lacombe, Lucien and Au Revoir, Les Enfants, but he was also a heartfelt chronicler of an America that could only be seen by an outsider. This series includes several such films, including his 1978 “success de scandale” Pretty Baby, with a 12-year-old Brooke Shields as a child prostitute, and his witty Atlantic City, with an excellent Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon, from a scabrously funny John Guare script.

Also included are Malle’s sympathetic documentary portraits of his adopted country during the Reagan presidency that show those left behind: 1985’s God’s Country (farmers) and 1986’s And the Pursuit of Happiness … (immigrants). There’s also a new doc, Louis Malle, Le Révolté (Louis Malle, The Rebel) by Claire Duguet, which—though too short (75 minutes)—effectively hits on the major themes of Malle’s life and career. This essential series was curated by Malle’s daughters Chloé and Justine. (metrograph.com)

In-Theater Releases of the Week

Carolina Caroline

(Magnolia Pictures)

If it wasn’t for the winning presence of Samara Weaving—an actress who always seems to elevate the lame movies she’s usually stuck in—as Caroline, a young woman who falls for the charming but dangerous Oliver and follows him on a deadly Bonnie and Clyde-like excursion across Texas, then Adam Carter Rehmeier’s derivative drama (the obvious script is by William Thomas Dean IV) would be even less palatable.

Routine and predictable for much of its length—even Kyle Gallner’s charismatically villainous Oliver is unoriginal—this is yet another film that wastes poor Weaving.

The Currents

(Kino Lorber)

After successful designer Lina impulsively leaps from a bridge into icy Swiss waters, upon her return home to Buenos Aires she finds it difficult to return to normal life in Argentine-Swiss writer-director Milagros Mumenthaler’s sometimes opaque but mostly trenchant character study.

Although a few moments of fantasy and surreal touches aren’t always successful, the director’s intimate glimpse into this fragile woman’s psyche is greatly assisted by Isabel Aimé González Sola, a bracingly natural actress who makes Lina an elegantly empathetic protagonist.

Forastera

(Grasshopper Film)

Teenager Cata’s beloved grandmother Catalina dies, and Cata herself discovers her body—this leads to her trying to deal with her grief in ever more confusing ways in Lucía Aleñar Iglesias’ achingly intimate chamber drama.

Anchored by Zoe Stein’s magnificent and moving performance, Iglesias’ film shows how those we loved and lost are still among us in different ways, whether in our memories or otherwise, as her infinitely suggestive final shot underlines.

Streaming Release of the Week

Blum: Masters of Their Own Destiny

(Icarus Films)

The fascinating true story of Emerik Blum, a Bosnian-Jewish businessman whose Yugoslav company Energoinvest was successfully run as a socialist collective of sorts (women workers were paid the same as men), is recounted in Jasmila Žbanić’s concise but often illuminating documentary.

The film is structured from valuable archival footage and interviews with many of those involved, including Blum and several colleagues, but it would have been even more interesting if Žbanić had given more time to delving into Blum’s personal history—his family was murdered during the Holocaust, which is mentioned but not gone into in any depth.

CD Release of the Week

Thomas de Hartmann—Esther

(Pentatone)

Thomas de Hartmann (1884-1956) was a Ukrainian composer who composed this neglected opera—based on the Biblical story of Esther, who saved the Jewish people from annihilation—in Paris during World War II, which also threatened the very existence of the Jewish people.

This world-premiere recording displays the de Hartmann opera’s strengths, notably the lyrical vocal writing, although it also brings its static nature to the fore. Still, it’s a treat to be able to hear this valuable work in its entirety, and it’s performed superbly by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under conductor Kirill Karabits and sung beautifully by a top cast led by American soprano Corinne Winters as Esther.

New York Philharmonic Performs "Swaddling Silk and Gossamer Rain" and "Cinderella"

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 04 June 2026 13:40; Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Brandon Patoc

At Lincoln Center’s wonderful David Geffen Hall, on the night of Thursday, May 28th, I had the privilege to attend an excellent concert presented by the New York Philharmonic, under the distinguished direction of Elim Chan.

The event started very promisingly with the brilliant realization of one of the New York premiere performances of Noriko Koide’s unusual but remarkable Swaddling Silk and Gossamer Rain, from 2022. In a Gramophone podcast interview she stated that:

Western music is not my mother tongue, right? I'm a Japanese composer. So, it's like I have two different OS installed inside me — Javanese music and Western music, and sometimes pop music.

There, according to annotator Kathryn Bacasmot, who is described as “an independent writer about music,” the composer “explained that after reading” Mariko Asabuki’s novel Timeless, “she wanted to express its unique atmosphere.” About her musical influences, she told her publisher that “Western music language and gamelan music language often have the exact opposite direction.” Bacasmot adds that “Koide describes her compositional style as comprising ‘delicate timbre and subtle resonance.’”

Philharmonic principal Carter Brey then entered the stage as soloist for a very accomplished rendition of Camille Saint-Saëns’s memorable Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 33, from 1872. The initial Allegro non troppo begins forcefully, indeed dramatically, with a sense of urgency generally sustained throughout the movement, but at times the music has a more affirmative character as well as a lyricism that eventually comes to the fore. The ensuing Allegretto con moto is more intense and turbulent but also has song-like passages, while the concluding movement, marked Tempo primo, builds to a rousing climax, closing triumphantly. Enthusiastic applause elicited a welcome encore from the cellist (who is retiring from the ensemble at the end of this season): his own arrangement of the classic song, “Strange Fruit,” which was made famous by Billie Holiday, and served here as a memorial to George Floyd.

The second half of the evening was even stronger, consisting in an admirable account of selections from Sergei Prokofiev’s marvelous score for the ballet, Cinderella, which was composed from 1940 to 1944. According to James M. Keller, “former New York Philharmonic Program Annotator and the author of Chamber Music: A Listener's Guide”:

In 1946 the composer assembled music from the ballet into three separate orchestral suites. The music performed in this concert contains three selections from the Cinderella Suite No. 1, the most popular of the three, with the rest from the original complete ballet score.

“In an extended preface to the score,”Prokofiev wrote:

What I wished to express above all in the music of Cinderella was the poetic love of Cinderella and the Prince, the birth and flowering of that love, the obstacles in its path, and finally the dream fulfilled.

The fairy story offered a number of fascinating problems for the composer — the atmosphere of magic surrounding the fairy godmother, [etc.]. … The producers of the ballet, however, wanted the fairy tale to serve merely as a setting for the portrayal of flesh-and-blood human beings with human passions and failings. …

Apart from the dramatic structure I was anxious to make the ballet as “danceable” as possible, with a variety of dances that would weave themselves into the pattern of the story, and give the dancers ample opportunity to display their art. I wrote Cinderella in the traditions of the old classical ballet: it has pas de deux, adagios, gavottes, several waltzes, a pavane, passepied, bourrée, mazurka, and galop. Each character has his or her variation.

The artists deservedly received a standing ovation.

Film Series: Open Roads—New Italian Cinema 2026

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 29 May 2026 19:45; Written by Kevin Filipski

Open Roads—New Italian Cinema 2026

Through June 4, 2026

Film at Lincoln Center

165 West 65 Street, New York, NY

filmlinc.org

Benedetta Porcaroli and Lucrezia Guglielmino in The Kidnapping of Arabella

This year’s Open Roads—the 25th edition of the series that imports new films from Italy—opened with The Kidnapping of Arabella, the second feature by Carolina Cavalli. It stars the winning and gifted actress Benedetta Porcaroli as Holly, a bored 28-year-old who meets the eponymous 8-year-old and is convinced that this precocious youngster is her as a child. Although Porcaroli and Lucrezia Guglielmino (Arabella) have a believable older-younger sister vibe, Cavalli wastes a lot of screen time with their meandering and their meeting a collection of faux-Fellini stereotypes. It’s too bad that Chris Pine, who gives a committed performance—complete with serviceable Italian—as Arabella’s put-upon father, seems adrift in this context.

Barbara Ronchi in Elise

Some of Italy’s best actresses populate several of this year’s Open Roads entries, starting with Elise, in which the fiery Barbara Ronchi—who was so unforgettable as the tragically sorrowful mother in Marco Bellocchio’s masterly 2023 Kidnapped—ratchets up her intensity level as a woman who is imprisoned for killing her sister without any motive, and who agrees to be subjected to a visiting criminologist’s study. Director Leonardo Di Costanzo intelligently explores thorny questions of morality and memory, and Ronchi’s emotionally bare acting provides the necessary grounding.

Jasmine Trinca in The Eyes of Others

In The Eyes of Others, Andrea De Sica’s at times perceptive but often jumbled satire about the corruption of power among the ultra-rich, Jasmine Trinca is magnificent as an enigmatic woman whose arrival on a private island turns heads as well as leads to duplicity and ultimately murder. The film looks gorgeous, and there are some truly shocking moments, but De Sica is unfortunately more interested in stylishness than depth.

Jasmine Trinca in La Gioia

Valeria Golino impressively transforms into the dowdy, repressed high school teacher Gioia, who lives with her elderly parents and falls into an unlikely relationship with a mysteriously slippery student Alessio in Nicolangelo Gelormini’s leaky but watchable La Gioia. Although little of it is plausible—at least as presented by Gelormini—the actors are enough of a reason to watch: alongside Golino, Saul Nanni makes a charismatic Alessio and Jasmine Trinca (again!) does wonders in a largely thankless role as Alessio’s needy mother Carla.

Tecla Insolia in Primavera

Ludovica Rampoldi’s script for Primavera—first-time director Damiano Michieletto’s tantalizing fictional biopic about Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi’s stormy relationship with a young orphan musician named Cecilia—smartly places maestro and student at the center of what is after all a Baroque melodrama. It looks and sounds sumptuous, of course, and Tecla Insolia gives a remarkable performance as Cecilia, making her far more than just another female footnote in a male-dominated artistic era.

Valeria Golino and Pilar Fogliati in A Brief Affair

Rampoldi also wrote and directed A Brief Affair, a one-note comedy-drama about two people who meet cute one night and reluctantly fall into an adulterous affair, managing to keep their illicit encounters secret—at least until a couple of unsurprising plot twists end up bringing everything into the open. It’s all attractively acted by Pilar Fogliati, Adriano Giannini, Andrea Carpenzano and Valeria Golino (again), but Rampoldi’s derivative script and direction keep this from becoming a true guilty pleasure.

New York Philharmonic Present Haydn & Mozart at Lincoln Center

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 29 May 2026 13:53; Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Chris Lee

At Lincoln Center’s wonderful David Geffen Hall, on the morning of Friday, May 22nd, I had the privilege to attend a fabulous concert presented by the New York Philharmonic, under the stellar direction of Marek Janowski,

The event started splendidly with an accomplished account of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s exquisite Serenade No. 6 in D major, K.239, the Serenata notturna, from 1776. (It featured violinists Frank Huang and Qianqian Li, violist Cynthia Phelps, and bassist Max Zeugner.) The initial Marcia movement, marked Maestoso, is charming and effervescent, although with a more subdued but graceful, contrasting section. The ensuing Menuetto is stately and march-like too, while its Trio is more playful and ebullient. The energetic Rondeau finale, marked Allegretto, is also delightful—it has a more serious, slower interlude.

Even more memorably, Philharmonic principal Christopher Martin then entered the stage as soloist in a superb rendition of Franz Joseph Haydn’s brilliant Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major, from 1796. The Allegro, firstmovement has a noble, even majestic, quality but acquires a great depth of feeling as it unfolds—it features a marvelous cadenza. The succeeding Andante is more solemn and restrained but lovely—it closes quietly. The Allegro Finale is lively, indeed jubilant, and enchanting.

The second half of the program was even better: a masterly realization of Felix Mendelssohn’s extraordinary Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 56, completed in 1842. The composer wrote interestingly on the work’s genesis:

In the evening twilight we went today to the palace where Queen Mary lived and loved; a little room is shown there with a winding staircase leading up to the door: up this way they came and found Rizzio in that dark corner, where they pulled him out, and three rooms off there is a dark corner, where they murdered him. The chapel close to it is now roofless, grass and ivy grow there, and at that broken altar Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything round is broken and mouldering and the bright sky shines in. I believe I have found today in that old chapel the beginning of my Scottish Symphony.

The beginning movement has a somber introduction, marked Andante con moto, that precedes its complex, more characteristically Mendelssohnian, and passionately Romantic main body—its tempo is Allegro in poco agitato—with many turbulent passages; it finishes softly. The following, Vivace non troppo is dance-like, spirited, and often dynamic but not without a certain gravity at times—it too concludes gently. The subsequent Adagio more intensively elaborates the serious elements in the earlier movements; it closes serenely. The last movement is generally faster, with considerable forward momentum and some impressive fugal writing—one can discern the influence of Ludwig van Beethoven most strongly here—it builds finally to a powerful and affirmative climax, ending triumphantly.

The artists deservedly received a standing ovation.

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