VOD of the Week 

(Arrow)

Kirill Sokolov’s jet-black kind-of comedy follows a young man who’s egged on by his girlfriend to kill her father—and that’s just the beginning of 90 minutes’ worth of back-stabbings (figurative and literal), double-crossings and some of the most ridiculously over-the-top bloodlettings in a while.

Whether such violence is an acceptable form of entertainment is, of course, the sticking point; but Sokolov’s irreverence keeps one watching to see what lunacy he’s dreamed up, and his cast is game enough to make it seem as real—or at least as surreal—as possible. 

Blu-rays of the Week

Alastair Sim’s School for Laughter 

(Film Movement Classics)

The great British actor Alastair Sim—best known for playing Scrooge in the 1951 movie version of A Christmas Carol—is the focus of this boxed set containing four comedies to which he contributed: the best of the lot are the classic girls-school farce, 1954’s The Belles of St Trinian’s (in which he plays both the headmistress and her gambling brother) and 1960’s hilarious School for Scoundrels.

All four B&W films have been lovingly restored; extras include interviews with scholars, historians and even Sim’s daughter.

The Cremator 

In this caustic 1969 black comedy, the head of a crematorium in 1930s Czechoslovakia follows the Nazis’ agenda to its ultimate end, and his own “final solution”: beginning with his Jewish wife and children.

Czech director Juraj Herz’s allegory of evil might be too heavyhanded, but his dazzling visual slight-of-hand, Rudolf Hrušínský’s tremendously portentous performance and Zdeněk Liška’s scarily perfect score make this an especially potent example of the Czech New Wave. As usual, Criterion has an excellent hi-def transfer; extras comprise Herz’s 1965 short, The Junk Shop; 1993 Hrušínský interview; 2011 featurette of Herz returning to his film’s locations; and a 55-minute documentary about Liška.

Guns Akimbo 

(Lionsgate)

Daniel Radcliffe plays a nerdy video-game developer who becomes the prey in a terminal live-streamed death match in Jason Lei Howden’s pointlessly—and repetitively—ultra-violent actioner that’s heavy on blood, guts and flying bullets but light on everything else.

Radcliffe is unsurprisingly unable to fashion an interesting character out of someone with guns welded onto his hands; Samara Weaving persuasively plays the professional killer tracking him down, but how expert is she if 99.9 percent of her shots miss? The film looks fine on Blu.

CD of the Week 

(Alpha)

The remarkably daring Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan returns with another spectacular recording, as she does double duty as a singer—on two fiendishly difficult modernist works of the mid and late 20th century—and conductor, on Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 49, which gives this album its title.

Hannigan attacks the swooping and chattering vocal line of Luigi Nono's disturbingly raw five-minute solo Djamila Boupacha (1962) with her customary ease; but that brief work is a mere prelude to her mesmerizing tour de force as vocalist and conductor of Gerard Grisey's 1998 masterwork Quartre Chants Pour Franchir le Seuil (his last completed composition). Hannigan and the versatile Ludwig Orchestra forces bring it all home with a propulsive and—in the atypically mournful opening movement—somber reading of Haydn's minor-key symphony.

Blu-rays of the Week 

(Universal)

Doctor Dolittle, who could talk to the animals, has not been well-served onscreen: there was the ill-fated 1967 musical version with Rex Harrison, the enjoyable slight 1998 Eddie Murphy remake, and now this pointless reboot with a scenery-chewing Robert Downey (sporting a broad Welsh accent) as the good doctor who’s made himself a recluse after his wife dies, and the talking animals and enterprising children coax him back to life.

Director Stephen Gaughan is interested only in big set pieces, so the movie is less a coherent narrative than a series of disjointed sequences that show off the cute anthropomorphic animals, voiced by celebrities from Emma Thompson and Ralph Fiennes to Marion Cotillard and Selena Gomez. Young children might find some appeal to this harmless but ineffectual remake. The HD transfer looks stellar.

Just Mercy 

(Warner Bros)

The inspiring story of a real-life hero, lawyer Bryan Stevenson, is dramatized in this compelling if overlong courtroom procedural about the lengthy but eventually successful appeal of the wrongful conviction of Walter McMillan, a black man from rural Alabama railroaded onto death row for a still unsolved murder.

Director/co-writer Destin Daniel Cretton has a fine eye for detail, and his cast—Jaime Foxx (Walter), Michael B. Jordan (Bryan), Brie Larson (Bryan’s associate) and Tim Blake Nelson (perjured prisoner), for starters—give authenticity to a triumph of justice served that serves as a cautionary tale of other instances of justice denied. The film has a fine hi-def transfer; extras comprise deleted scenes and making-of featurettes. 

Police Squad—The Complete Series 

From the creators of the zany 1980 spoof Airplane!—the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams—comes this cult 1982 TV series (it only lasted six episodes), another spoof starring Leslie Nielsen as a doofus detective who manages to solve crimes. 

Police Squad is a hit-or-miss accumulation of physical comedy, one-liners, asides, puns, in-jokes and tongue-in-cheek parody: Nielsen is game, and the opening-credit sequences are fun, but like Airplane!, your mileage may vary. It looks adequate on Blu; extras are commentaries on three episodes, archival Nielsen interview, gag reel, featurette and casting tests.

VOD of the Week

Once Were Brothers—Robbie Robertson and the Band 

(Magnolia)

Director Daniel Roher engagingly recounts the eventful musical life of Robbie Robertson, leader of the Band, the great original roots-rock whose classic tunes like “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down” and “Up on Cripple Creek” remain staples of rock’n’roll playlists.

Robertson candidly discusses his early life in Canada, his move to the States and finding his future bandmates, working with Bob Dylan and, later—following the Last Waltz concert film—Martin Scorsese, for whom he has scored and compiled music for several films. 

CDs of the Week 

(Naxos)

So many composers left Europe during the Nazi era for the U.S. that it was inevitable that several would settle in and around Los Angeles, where they wrote music for movies and gave Hollywood a cultural cachet it had heretofore lacked.

This sterling disc collects short works by 11 of these men—a 12th work, an arrangement of George Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” is by violinist Jascha Heifitz, another émigré—including the familiar (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Rachmaninoff), the obscure (Godowsky, Achron, Gruenberg) and those best-known for their film scores (Korngold, Waxman, Rosza). These beguiling miniatures are attractively performed by cellist Brinton Averil Smith and pianist Evelyn Chen.

Hindemith—Kammermusik, Volume 1 

(Ondine)

Early in his career, German composer Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) wrote several concertos for soloists and orchestra under the rubric Kammermusiken. The four concertos collected on this superb recording, composed between 1921 and 1925, showcase Hindemith’s talent for balancing the virtuosic demands of the soloist parts and the orchestral underpinnings, notably on Kammermusik No. 1 & 2 (pianists) and No. 3 (cellist).

With Christopher Eschenbach adroitly conducting small ensembles culled from the Kornberg Academy Soloists and Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra, the first-rate solo performers are pianists Xi Zhai and Christopher Park and cellist Bruno Philippe.