VOD/Virtual Cinema Releases of the Week 

Another Liam Neeson vehicle that’s as blunt and simplistic as the rest: he plays a successful bank robber who attempts to go straight when he meets the woman of his dreams, but unfortunately corrupt FBI agents get in his way.

 

 

Neeson is as gruffly no-nonsense as ever and Kate Walsh has a welcome engaging presence as his girlfriend, but director Matt Williams has taken his own flimsy script—every obvious bad guy move and Neeson response are telegraphed far in advance—and adds nothing but 90 minutes of action to make up for any originality or involvement.

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Eden 

Pietro Marcello’s intelligent adaptation recasts Jack London’s San Francisco story to Italy, as an uneducated lower-class lout decides to smarten himself up after meeting the lovely daughter of a rich family: but will his new-found writing talent and leftist beliefs destroy his chances with her?

 

 

Smartly, Marcello keeps the focus on his protagonist’s maturation as a writer and more importantly a human, and Luca Marinelli’s complex, nuanced portrayal is on-target. Equally compelling are Jessica Cressy as Martin’s unreachable love Elena and Elisabetta Valgoi as her mother. Bracingly directed, acted, and written, Martin Eden is one of the richest Italian films I’ve seen in awhile.

 

 

 

 

 

The Secrets We Keep 

A small-town American wife and mother is certain that a neighbor was a member of the SS who tortured her and killed her sister back in Europe; she hatches a plan to take justice—or, more honestly, revenge—into her own hands in this initially interesting but eventually risible drama by director Yuval Adler (who wrote the ill-conceived script with Ryan Covington).

 

 

Noomi Rapace works hard and efficiently as the woman, but how unbelievably easily she carries out her plan is only the beginning of a hopelessly contrived melodrama. Ill at ease are Chris Messina as Rapace’s husband, initially incredulous but quickly all in; and Joel Kinnaman, who could have been a credible villain/victim but who does little with the project’s plodding obviousness.

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

In the midst of a raging pandemic in Los Angeles, up-and-coming TV star Ava is tricked by her boyfriend into returning to her small hometown, where long-simmering recriminations fester among the townsfolk, and she realizes that life can be an even bigger living hell than the one she just escaped.

 

 

Despite its timely premise, this drama falls prey to star Jenna Lyng Adams’ scattershot script and Charles Buhler’s meandering direction, and we never care about what happens to Ava. Adams’ ferocious lead performance can’t carry this over the finish line. There’s a fine hi-def transfer; lone extra is a delete scene.

 

 

 

 

 

Drop Dead Gorgeous 

This labored 1999 satire of beauty pageants huffs and puffs and occasionally hits a bulls-eye, but the scattershot approach of director Michael Patrick Jann and writer Lona Williams effectively transforms the characters into utterly unlikeable caricatures who pall soon after they’re introduced.

 

 

The partial exceptions are Allison Janney and Ellen Barkin, who sometimes transcend the flimsy material by simultaneously laughing at and with their characters and become nearly human in the process. There’s a superior hi-def transfer.

 

 

 

 

 

The Hit 

Stephen Frears’ 1984 blackly comic drama subtly gives meat to characters that start as mere types—informer, efficient hit man, jittery newcomer, naïve innocent—but soon become full-blooded and even sympathetic.

 

 

Frears directs with skillful understatement, Peter Prince’s script is a marvel of economy, Paco de Lucia and Eric Clapton’s music is perfecte for the lonely Spanish countryside settings, and the performances are, literally, killer: Terence Stamp’s informer, John Hurt and Tim Roth’s veteran and rookie hit men, and Laura del Sol’s innocent who’s the most resourceful. Criterion’s Blu-ray upgrade looks smashing; extras include a commentary by Frears, Hurt, Roth, Prince and editor Mick Audsley as well as a 1988 Stamp TV interview.

 

 

 

 

 

Peer Gynt 

The great Danish composer Edvard Grieg composed his classic music for August Strindberg’s classic play Peer Gynt in 1875, and Danish choreographer Edward Clug has fashioned a potent and ultimately poignant ballet based on the play, with portions of Grieg’s wonderful Gynt music interspersed with other works like his Lyric Suite and Piano Concerto.

 

 

It works beautifully thanks to Clug’s substantive movements and a superlative cast: as Peer, Jakob Feyferlik is unforgettable, and he dances brilliantly throughout with Alice Firenze as Solveig, his lost love. Both hi-def video and audio of this 2018 performance from Vienna are first-rate.

 

 

 

 

Reversal of Fortune 

French director Barbet Schroeder’s 1990 docudrama tackles the case of Klaus von Bulow, the unlikeable aristocrat found guilty of drugging his wife, socialite Sunny von Bulow, in 1979 and who hired Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz to handle his appeal.

 

 

It’s a fascinatingly disturbing true story, told with impressive control by Schroeder from a well-structured script by Nicholas Kazan, and anchored by two fine-tuned performances: Jeremy Irons’ arrogantly steely von Bulow, and Ron Silver’s arrogantly energetic Dershowitz. Strangely, Irons won the Best Actor Oscar while Silver wasn’t even nominated. The film looks sharp in hi-def; lone extra is a Schroeder/Kazan commentary.

 

 

 

 

 

Star Trek: Picard—Complete 1st Season 

Patrick Stewart returns to his iconic role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, who manned the Star Trek—The Next Generation ship for seven seasons (1987-94) in an unnecessary reboot that brings Picard out of a self-imposed 14-year retirement at his beloved vineyard.

 

 

Stewart is as gruff and ironical as ever, but the new storylines don’t have the same urgency or interest, except perhaps for die-hard Trekkies. The season’s 10 episodes look eye-popping in hi-def; extras include behind-the-scenes featurettes, deleted scenes, gag reel, commentary on episode one, short film Children of Mars and commentary on the short.

 

 

 

 

 

To Your Last Death 

This gleefully violent animated feature follows the heroine, Miriam—the lone survivor of her father’s vengeful “game”—who gets the chance to relive the past by trying to save her siblings this time around. Of course, this occasions dealing with the piling up of body parts and geysers of blood shooting up throughout.

 

 

There’s more crimson red than imagination on display by director Jason Axinn, but there are amusingly disgusting moments courtesy of the excellent animated crew, and the voice cast—led by Morena Baccarin as the malevolent Gamemaster—is topnotch. It all looks especially vivid on Blu-ray. 

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Release of the Week 

A collective that has taken on great importance since it was founded in 2014 by crusading British journalist Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat comprises committed citizen journalists from around the world whose research into headline news stories finds unexpected—and, often, unwanted—answers.

 

 

 

Director Hans Pool’s absorbing documentary allows us to follow these intrepid investigators as they take deep dives into such events as the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine or the poisoning of a Russian dissident in England and provide the receipts necessary to bring some accountability to a post-truth, “fake news” world.

 

 

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week

Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975) was one of the greatest film composers in history, and Psycho: A Narrative for String Orchestra—from his indelibly shrieking score for the Hitchcock classic—tautly shows why. Also worthwhile is Souvenir de Voyage, a lovely chamber piece that should be far better known (it’s the first time I’ve heard it).

 

 

But the 1944 radio drama from which this disc takes its title—and based on poet Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—is an embarrassingly treacly work, in which Herrmann’s snippets of pretty but insubstantial music don’t do justice to Whitman’s words. The musicians acquit themselves terrifically—especially clarinetist David Jones on Souvenirs, and the PostClassical Ensemble on Psycho—but despite being a welcome world premiere recording, Whitman itself is forgettable.

Now in its ninth year, the documentary festival DOC NYC—which this year comprises 135 features, among many other screenings and events—opened with John Chester’s The Biggest Little Farm and closes with the world premiere of Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, about two of the seminal NYC newspaper columnists. 

 

I caught a dozen films that range from contemporary politics to artist profiles, including The Ghost of Peter Sellers, director Peter Medak’s account of the ill-fated movie he made with the great comic actor in 1973—after Medak was flying high with The Ruling Class and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg—a pirate adventure called Ghost in the Noonday Sun, in which everything that could go wrong did. The biggest problem was the mercurial Sellers himself, who had never enjoyed the best on-set reputation, and Medak digs through memories as he reminisces with others around back then to assuage his own feelings that, decades later, he still feels responsible for this disaster. It’s a weirdly funny and fascinating on-set journey.

 

In The Artist and the Pervert, Beatrice Behn and Ren̩é Gebhardt chronicle the fascinating love (and kinky sex) story of an eye-opening couple: Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas—whose parents were Nazi sympathizers—and African-American performance artist Mollena Williams. The film’s title raises a pertinent question: which is which? 

 

The Greenaway Alphabet, a personal look at British filmmaker Peter Greenaway by his artistic and life partner Saskia Boddeke, could also have been called The Artist and the Pervert, as anyone who’s seen Greenaway’s visually and thematically complex films can attest. But Boddeke and their teenage daughter Pip actually bring some humanity to Greenaway, especially when he and his daughter discuss autism when they go through the A’s.

 

Today’s right-wing extremists—and those gung-ho in their youth but who left the movement, for various reasons—are the subjects of Exit, an engrossing study by director (and former hate-group member) Karen Winther.

 

The dangerous conditions under which war correspondents toil are explored in Chris Martin’s shattering Under the Wire, a tribute to and eulogy for (among others) U.S. journalist Marie Colvin, who died covering the civil war in Syria. 

 

Katrine Philp’s False Confessions eye-openingly shows how many people are trying to remedy an intolerable situation: notably defense attorney Jane Fisher-Byrialsen, who goes to Amherst, an affluent Buffalo suburb, to look into the case of Renay Lynch, behind bars for more than 20 years for a 1995 murder she did not commit. Under the microscope are coercive police interrogations, which Philp and Fisher-Byrialsen shine a necessary light on.

 

Maxine Trump (no relation, I hope!) describes her life without children in To Kid or Not to Kid, an evenhanded documentary about how women—whether by choice or by chance—deal with their childless lives and the shaming that still takes place, whether by well-meaning family members and strangers or anonymous people on social media. 

 

Patrimonio, set in Baja, Mexico—near vacation paradise Los Cabos—is a David vs. Goliath story of village fishermen going against a rich developer that wants to take over their local lands and waters, shown by directors Sarah Teale and Lisa F. Jackson as a possibly optimistic result. 

 

Vivian Vazquez and Gretchen Hildebran’s emotional Decade of Fire looks past the conventional thinking about the “Bronx is burning” 1970s and uncovers that not only were its inhabitants—primarily blacks and Latinos—painted with a broadly racist brush, but they were also the catalysts for the completely trashed area’s later revitalization. 

 

Another monstrous corporation is given the once-over in Inside Lehman Brothers, Jennifer Deschamps’ feature that trods familiar ground—did the bigwigs from the big banks get away with high crimes after the 2008 financial meltdown?—but remains an enraging cautionary tale. 

 

Our own inadequate medical system is given a merciless treatment in The Providers, Anna Moot-Levin and Laura Green’s clear-eyed but encouraging look at a collapsed community in New Mexico cared for by a few health-care providers who help a financially vulnerable population deal with the widespread opioid crisis. 

 

Finally, another world premiere, Barbara Kopple’s New Homeland, is also extremely relevant to our tRumped-up world, sympathetically following Middle Eastern families given refugee status that are welcomed to Canada by their local sponsors. The difficulties of one of the teenage boys to assimilate into his new society is heartrending, but there are also feel-good successes that make any viewer hopeful about our shared future.

Blu-rays of the Week 

(Eagle Vision)

Accompanying the massive new boxed set celebrating John Lennon’s seminal Imagine album (1971), this release contains John and Yoko’s film Imagine, which intersperses performances like the classic white-piano version of the title song with footage of the couple in New York and London, joining protests and frolicking on the beach. It’s a mixture of self-parody and self-indulgence that’s at times dated but still provides a valuable insight into Lennon as an artist, along with his famous friends like Jack Palance, Dick Cavett and Fred Astaire.

 

 

 

Also included is Gimme Some Truth, an insightful hour-long documentary of the making of the Imagine album, with glimpses of producer Phil Spector and former Beatle George Harrison in the studio with John. Both films have been painstakingly restored in hi-def, and look (ad sound) as good as possible; extras are studio outtakes of the songs “Imagine,” “How?” and “Gimme Some Truth,” and a glimpse at a David Bailey photo shoot.

 

Looker 

(Warner Archive)

In Michael Crichton’s 1981 futuristic thriller, early computer-generated effects play a big role in this convoluted story of a plastic surgeon looking into the murders of the beautiful models who were his patients: although Albert Finney, James Coburn, Susan Dey and Leigh Taylor-Young look embarrassed at times speaking the borderline risible dialogue, there’s a certain prescience in Crichton’s cautionary tale of malevolent technology.

 

 

 

The film has an adequate hi-def transfer; extras are writer-director Crichton’s intro and commentary and an eight-minute sequence added to the network television version.

 

 

 

 

 

Queen of Outer Space 

This 1958 campfest, shot on the sets of other sci-fi movies of its era like Forbidden Planet and World Without End, follows its male astronauts to Venus, which is exclusively populated by females, but since this is a 1958 campfest not much happens except for some wink wink nudge nudging and innocent embraces and kisses.

 

 

 

Among the women are Zsa Zsa Gabor and Laurie Mitchell, who plays the masked queen of Venus hiding her deformed face; the men are much less interesting. There’s a solid hi-def transfer and a commentary featuring Mitchell.

 

Rodin 

(Cohen Media)

Vincent Lindon has made his name playing ordinary people living quotidian lives, but he gets his teeth into the larger-than-life figure of French sculptor Auguste Rodin in Jacques Doillon’s warts-and-all biopic that concentrates on his volatile relationship with fellow sculptor (and protégé) Camille Claudel—played with equal intensity by French pop singer Izïa Higelin.

 

 

 

Doillon, like fellow Frenchman Maurice Pialat in Van Gogh, strips the master’s life story to its essentials, mostly eschewing music and melodrama to create this engrossing portrait of the artist. The hi-def transfer is exceptional; lone extra is a 30-minute making-of.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Swarm 

When disaster-movie maven Irwin Allen made this hokey thriller in 1978, killer bees were all the rage, so there was a scientific basis to the premise, but the script is chockful of holes, there are many howlers in the dialogue and the clichéd characters are lazily embodied by an all-star cast of Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, Katharine Ross, Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson, Lee Grant, Richard Chamberlain and, in a bizarre scene, Slim Pickens.

 

 

 

A few bee-killing scenes are effective, but at 2-1/2 hours—more than 30 minutes was added to the original theatrical release—The Swarm simply goes on and on and on. The hi-def transfer is excellent.

 

DVD of the Week

Mister Rogers—It’s You I Like 

(PBS)

This lovely valentine to Fred Rogers, whose decency and goodness shone on his beloved children’s show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, is an OK overview of his legacy and how much he affected people, families, children and adults.

 

 

 

Host Michael Keaton guides us through interviews with celebrities and people associated with the show, and clips of Rogers on the show remind us how slyly subversive this conservative Republican was on our TV screens for decades. This PBS program can be seen as an adjunct to the feature documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, which covers the same material. Extras are an additional 30 minutes of footage.

 

CD of the Week 

(Chandos)

British composer Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) finished writing his dramatic and sweeping Cello Concerto about a year before his untimely death of Hodgkin’s at age 55—the concerto actually had its premiere the night before he died. The first movement’s storminess no doubt alludes to his disease, the quieter middle movement is a loving portrait of the composer’s wife and the upbeat finale makes for a most satisfying resolution. Cellist Paul Watkins plays the solo part with thrilling artistry, and Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra provide notable accompaniment.

 

 

 

This superb disc is rounded out by two attractive piano and orchestra works, Eclogue and Grand Fantasia and Toccata—with Louis Lortie impressively handling the solo parts—and the moody orchestral work, Nocturne (New Year Music).