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January '25 Digital Week III

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 23 January 2025 15:31; Written by Kevin Filipski

In-Theater Releases of the Week

The Room Next Door

(Sony Classics)

For his first English-language feature, veteran Spanish director Pedro Almodovar cast Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton to headline a maudlin drama about how the relationship between two women who haven’t seen each other in years is tested when one, stricken by a rare and fatal cancer, asks the other to assist in her suicide.

It’s beautifully shot by Edu Grau and Almodovar’s eye is as sharp as ever, but the script is crammed with cliched and occasionally laughable dialogue—still, it’s always worth watching Swinton and Moore do their stuff both together and apart, excepting the wincingly bad sequence when Swinton play her character’s daughter.

Rose

(Cohen Media)

In actress and screenwriter Aurélie Saada’s pithy 2021 directorial debut, the great Françoise Fabian takes on the title role of the Goldberg family’s matriarch, whose life changes profoundly when her beloved husband of many decades suddenly dies and she must face widowhood and her judgmental adult children.

Even if some of what Saada shows of Rose not acting her age is borderline soap opera, but no matter what, Fabian commands the screen as she did as the irresistible Maud in Eric Rohmer’s 1969 My Night at Maud’s—right up until the very last image of Rose (and Fabian) fiercely looking directly at the camera…and us.

Girls Town

(Film Movement Classics)

Jim McKay’s low-budget, fiercely independent study of a group of high school girls debuted at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival and now returns in a new transfer; it was rehearsed extensively by the cast, written by McKay and shot in suburban New Jersey.

The result has a pleasing authenticity of place and character, but the situations and dialogue remain on a superficial level. Still, Lily Taylor, Anna Grace and Bruklin Harris make a forceful trio—and Aunjanue Ellis, seen at the beginning, is equally good—letting us care about these young women.

In-Theater/Streaming Release of the Week

Night Call

(Magnolia Pictures)

When young locksmith Mady answers an evening call in a Brussels apartment, he finds himself mixed up with violent thug Yannick, whose money was taken from the place and who blames Mady—the locksmith spends the rest of the night trying to track down the cash and clear his name, all while the city bursts with violent protests and civil unrest.

Michiel Blanchart’s tautly made thriller is quite exciting, but the chase scenes—like a ridiculous one after our hero steals a bike—become risible. Still, setting the action during a single night works well, and with a charismatic lead performance by Jonathan Feltre as Mady and a forceful turn by Romain Duris as Yannick, Night Call’s 95 minutes fly by.

Streaming Release of the Week

La Pietà

(Film Movement Plus)

Spanish writer-director Eduardo Casanova’s surreal journey into the toxic relationship between smothering mother Libertad and her teenage son Mateo has its arresting moments but provides diminishing dramatic returns as it splinters into plots that follow Mateo’s dying dad Roberto and his pregnant wife as well as a family in Kim Jong-Il’s Korea.

The latter subplot feels dragged in for reasons known only to the director, who also introduces a sympathetic psychiatrist and a brain tumor, both triggering more horrible actions from Libertad for unearned shock value. Ángela Molina, who plays Libertad, also starred in That Obscure Object of Desire, the final film of surrealist master Luis Buñuel, to whom La Pietà may be an homage, but Casanova’s own powers of provocation are stretched beyond endurance.

Blu-ray Release of the Week

My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock

(Cohen Media)

Outside of Steven Spielberg, there’s not a more familiar filmmaker than Alfred Hitchcock, instantly recognizable in his film cameos and the distinctive voice and dry humor heard in interviews. Director Mark Cousins uses those traits for his latest idiosyncratic documentary, with British actor Alistair McGowan giving an uncanny voice impression. The problem is, though it sounds like Hitchcock, it’s enough not like him to sound just off each time you hear it.

Otherwise, Cousins provides a master class in focusing on thematic strands in Hitchcock’s imposing body of work (more than 50 feature films, from the 1920s silent era to 1976’s Family Plot), divided into six chapters mainly as an excuse to dazzle viewers once again with some of the most celebrated sequences in film history, including Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Psycho and The Birds. The Blu-ray looks terrific; extras include an alternate trailer with Cousin’ narration, McGowan’s voice test, a Cousins interview and Cousins’ intros for Hitch’s Notorious, Rope and Saboteur.

CD Releases of the Week

Grażyna Bacewicz—Orchestral Works, Vols. 2 and 3

(CPO)

The first Polish female composer to earn recognition for her original, startlingly expressive scores, Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-69) is yet another accomplished classical artist who is earning belated but justified praise, as no less than two labels are in the process of recording and releasing her music. Chandos put out its first volume in 2023, comprising her superlative third and fourth symphonies. The enterprising CPO label has now just added to its series with the second and third volumes of Bacewicz’ orchestral works—the discs are anchored by the brilliant first and second symphonies, respectively, but also contain other formidable works like the Concerto for Large Symphony Orchestra and the Musica sinfonia in three movements.

The WDR Symphony Orchestra under the able baton of Lukasz Borowicz performs this music as pointedly and vigorously as the BBC Symphony Orchestra did on the Chandos disc. Let’s hope that both of these superb editions continue to put a spotlight on Bacewicz’ masterly music.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra Play Carnegie Hall

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 23 January 2025 14:42; Written by Jack Angstreich

Riccardo Muti directs the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Photo by Todd Rosenberg

At the marvelous Stern Auditorium, on the night of Tuesday, January 21st, I had the exceptional privilege to attend a superb concert presented by Carnegie Hall featuring the extraordinary musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the magnificent direction of the revered Riccardo Muti, one of the greatest living conductors.

The event began splendidly with a sterling account of Vincenzo Bellini’s pleasurable Overture to his brilliant opera, Norma, from 1831. In a useful note on the program, Phillip Huscher provides some background on the work:

Bellini was paid an unprecedented sum for the 1830 commission of Norma for Teatro alla scala in Milan, which suggests his preeminence in the operatic world at the time. Although the premiere was only a modest success, beginning with a run of performances in Bergamo the following summer, Norma grew to be revered more than any of the other crowd-pleasing Italian operas of the period, partly for the stately seriousness of its musical style and the elegance of Bellini’s expansive melodies.

Also rewarding was an impeccable performance of The Four Seasons, enjoyable ballet music from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, I vespri siciliani, which is especially famous for its remarkable Overture. The annotator records that:

Verdi’s grand opera—it was translated into Italian in 1861 and has since become better known as I vespri siciliani—is set at the time of the French occupation of the island of Sicily in the 13th century and the subsequent uprising by the people of Palermo on Easter Sunday of 1282. (The bells that ring for vespers signal the start of the uprising.) In Act III, Montforte, the French governor of Sicily, and Arrigo, a young Sicilian who is Montforte’s son and sworn enemy, proceed to the great hall, where a ballet is staged for the entertainment of the governor’s guests. The ballet of the Four Seasons has no direct connection, either musically or dramatically, to the opera itself—the composer later said it could be omitted without harm [ . . . .]

He adds:

Verdi begins with Winter. A young woman, wrapped in furs and representing Winter, steps out of an ice-covered basket. Three friends, all shivering in the cold, arrive and light a fire, but Winter prefers to dance to keep warm. Soon, the ice melts to reveal bunches of flowers, from which rises the spirit of Spring, who begins to dance. Eventually, the flowers are replaced by ears of corn; Summer and her companions gather the ears. Too hot to dance, they choose to swim instead, until a faun chases them away. The basket is now covered with vine leaves and fruit. Autumn and her companions dance in celebration of Bacchus.

Each of the seasons is treated as a series of varied dances and tuneful episodes.

Berlioz praised the music, “particularly the pieces for Spring and Summer, which give the virtuosi of the opera orchestra a chance to display their talents,” he wrote, the adagio for Spring and the siciliano from Summer were especially beautiful.

The summit of the evening, however, was its dazzling second half, a glorious realization of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s stunning Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 36. He wrote to the composer Sergei Taneyev, a former student, saying, “Of course, my symphony is programmatic, but this program is such that it cannot be formulated in words.”

The initial, Andante sostenuto movement opens with dramatic fanfares that recur throughout it; the primary theme—marked in movimento di valse—is expressive and Romantic. The music increases in intensity but then becomes more subdued, although eventually building to a powerful climax. The second movement, marked Andantino in modo di canzona, is indeed song-like and full of charm but nonetheless somewhat solemn, closing quietly. The relatively brief Scherzo that follows is sprightly but even more playful in the ensuing Trio-like section; the music then becomes march-like before recapitulating the beginning of the movement and continues on to end softly. The Allegro con fuoco Finale starts forcefully and a more dance-like interlude ensues; the movement becomes more urgent and then jubilant, concluding triumphantly. Exceedingly enthusiastic applause elicited a fabulous encore: Giuseppe Martucci’s exquisite Notturno, Op. 70, No. 1, from 1891.

Muti returns to this venue on February 28th and March 1st and 2nd with the Vienna Philharmonic, which promises to be three outstanding evenings of orchestral music.

Festival Roundup—New York Jewish Film Festival 2025

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 21 January 2025 04:10; Written by Kevin Filipski

New York Jewish Film Festival

Through January 29, 2025

Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center

filmlinc.org

The films I saw at this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival—the 34th annual edition, co-presented by the Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center—were, with one notably memorable exception, all based on real people and true stories, whether dramatized feature or documentary accounts.

Midas Man

The festival opener was Midas Man, a long-gestating biopic of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, directed by Joe Stepehenson and written by Brigit Grant. It hits the usual beats: managing his dad’s record store in Liverpool, Brian sees the Beatles at the Cavern Club, changing his and the band members’ lives, and he guides the lads to a record contract with Parlophone through producer George Martin and onto The Ed Sullivan Show and worldwide Beatlemania, all while his messy personal life is filled with drugs, alcohol and casual sex with other men. While this familiar tale is told in a familiar way, there are compensations. With no Beatles songs on the soundtrack, only covers (it’s cheaper, obviously), someone else is at the center of their universe; Jacob Fortune-Lloyd is a charismatic Brian, even selling the hoary device of speaking directly to the camera. The actors playing the Fab Four are decent without being caricatures, but Jay Leno’s bizarre casting as Ed Sullivan is a headscratcher. Epstein died at 32 of an accidental overdose, which the filmmakers wisely keep offscreen, giving Brian his own Abbey Road cover moment for the final shot.

The Glory of Life

Also dying far too young was Czech writer Franz Kafka, who succumbed to tuberculosis a month shy of his 41st birthday; Georg Maas and Judith Kaufmann’s The Glory of Life takes the measure of the artist as a dying man, vacationing near the Baltic Sea for rest, but meeting and falling in love with Dora Diamant, who would accompany him through his final days. The filmmakers flirt with but manage to skirt soap opera thanks to a lack of hysteria and a pair of pitch-perfect portrayals by Sabin Tambrea (Franz) and Henriette Confurius, whose Dora is full-bodied and immensely sympathetic.

Ada—My Mother the Architect

A trio of documentaries chronicled three audacious lives. Yael Melamede’s touching and intensely personal Ada—My Mother the Architect is a first-person look at Ada Karmi-Melamede, an important Israeli architect who was even more importantly Yael’s mother. We get the sense of Ada as a creator of brilliantly conceived buildings alongside her loving relationship with her daughter, shown through touching discussions between them.

The Spoils

In The Spoils, a tragic and complex story is told of Jewish art dealer Max Stern, whose impressive gallery holdings were broken up, as were so many others by the Nazis, although he did escape to London and later to Canada. Jamie Kastner follows the trail of the ongoing attempts at repatriating his works alongside documenting the German city of Düsseldorf’s decision to pull the plug on a Stern museum exhibit in 2017, nominally over the provenance of a single artwork. The morality and legality of restitution is argued—especially by a Dusseldorf lawyer aptly named Ludwig von Pufendorf, whose pronouncements skirt anti-Semitism. For highly contentious subject matter, Kastner navigates the many sides and players with intelligence and clarity.

The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka and the Art of Survival

The title tells all in The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka and the Art of Survival, which is Julie Rubio’s informative if chatty portrait of the singular Polish artist who was famous in her circle in her lifetime but has become far more renowned now, nearly four decades after her death. For those with little or no knowledge of Lempicka’s artistry and legacy, Rubio has created a good primer, and her interviews with Lempicka’s granddaughter and great-granddaughters provide a welcome personal touch.

Blind at Heart

The lone fiction feature I saw, Blind at Heart, was in many ways the most remarkable. Based on Julia Franck's prizewinning novel Die Mittagsfrau (The Blindness of the Heart), Barbara Albert’s arresting and formidable feature follows Hélène, a young Jewish woman who arrives in Berlin in the midst of the liberal Weimar Republic hoping to become a doctor and hiding her identity—when the Nazis come to power, she makes decisions that will change the course of her life. Albert tells this intimate story about extraordinary resilience on an appropriately epic scale, and it’s centered by the tremendous performance of Mala Emde, whose Hélène is an unforgettable creation.

January '25 Digital Week II

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 16 January 2025 03:17; Written by Kevin Filipski

4K/UHD Release of the Week

The Mother and the Whore

(Criterion)

French director Jean Eustache’s 1973 masterpiece may be the greatest film his compatriots Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer or Jean-Luc Godard never made—its mammoth length (3 hours and 40 minutes) belies the simplicity of its subject and execution: it’s a look at a narcissistic young man’s relationships with his live-in lover and a new woman in his life. Although it’s nearly all talk, since it’s Eustache’s script—with supposedly no improvisation—it’s emotionally direct and honest.

This is by far Jean-Pierre Leaud’s best performance, and Bernadette Lafont and Francoise Lebrun equal him as his eponymous lovers. The photography and editing are sublime, and the shattering ending reminds one of Ozu, which is high praise indeed. The B&W film looks stupendously sharp in UHD; extras comprise new interviews with Lebrun and filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin; archival interviews with Eustache, Leaud, Lafont and Lebrun; and a restoration featurette.

In-Theater/Streaming Release of the Week

Wicked

(Universal)

It starts with an ugly, CGI-drenched opening and ends more than two and a half hours later with the showstopper “Defying Gravity”—which is only the end of the first act of Steven Schwartz’s blockbuster Broadway musical. That means we have to sit through another two-plus hours next holiday season to finish this thing.

So is it all worth it? Not really—it’s a mighty slog to get through, the songs are mainly negligible, the story isn’t as clever as it should be, and only Cynthia Erivo has the requisite vocal chops and acting prowess to make Elphaba soar into the stratosphere. Ariana Grande also has a powerhouse voice, but when she tries to act, she’s laughably inadequate. Further, Bowen Tang, Jeff Goldblum, and Michelle Yeoh are wincingly hammy, while Jon M. Chu’s direction consists of making things bigger, louder and more garish without settling on a consistent tone or style.

In-Theater Release of the Week

Every Little Thing

(Kino Lorber)

Sally Aitken’s heartwarming documentary is an intimate portrait of author Terry Masear, who diligently and lovingly rehabs hummingbirds out of her California home, taking in those that were orphaned or injured and meticulously nurses them back to health.

Aitken’s camera follows Masear, who founded Los Angeles Hummingbird Rescue 20 years ago and wrote the book Fastest Things on Wings in 2016, and also provides stunning views of the birds themselves—as Maseur notes, hummingbirds flap their wings 50 times a second, something that seems impossible to contemplate even as Aitken records it.

Streaming/Blu-ray Release of the Week

Touristic Intents

(First Run)

Prora, which was a huge resort complex on Germany’s Baltic Sea, was built but left unfinished by the Nazi regime, and Mat Rappaport’s informative and thoughtful documentary explores its postwar life: the East German government continued its construction, using the place for military operations as well as housing for conscientious objectors.

Then there are the lasting implications of its history—through insightful interviews and on-location footage, Rappaport raises important questions exploring the dissection of tourism and politics. There’s an excellent hi-def transfer.

Blu-ray Release of the Week

Mozart—Mitridate re di Ponto

(Unitel)

One of Mozart’s early operas, a tragedy about a king and his two sons who are all in love with the same woman, comes off as stately and often static in director Satoshi Miyagi’s 2022 Berlin State Opera staging, despite Mozart’s often melodious music.

The cast, led by Pene Pati, Ana Maria Labin, Angela Brower, Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian, Sarah Aristidou and Ken Sugiyama, is impeccable, while the Les Musiciens du Louvre under conductor Marc Minkowski provide solid support. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.

DVD Release of the Week

Sisterhood

(Distrib Films US)

Although the French title, HLM Pussy, gets right to the point—if too rudely for some, obviously— Nora El Hourch’s trenchant character study dramatizes how a close-knit group of teenage female friends becomes partially estranged when one calls out her brother’s best friend for sexual harassment.

Bringing “MeToo” into a different arena, El Hourch finds space for sympathy and understanding as well as justified rage, and she has assembled a perfect cast of mostly unknown performers—I only recognized the elegant Berenice Bejo, who plays the mom of one of the teens—for a clear-eyed, truthful study that’s all the more remarkable for being El Hourch’s debut feature.

CD Release of the Week

Ruth Gipps—Orchestral Works, Vol. 3

(Chandos)

Englishwoman Ruth Gipps (1921-99), like many women composers of the 20th century, was automatically considered second class, despite having gotten a doctorate and showing the facility to write sophisticated works. Now, decades after her death, her works are have been justly resurrected, as this third volume in a series by conductor Rumon Gamba and the BBC Philharmonic of her orchestral works rewardingly shows.

There are three shorter pieces: Coronation Procession is a sparkling opener, followed by the wistful Ambarvalia and the passionate pastoral Cringlemire Garden, whose lovely string writing is reminiscent of Gipps’ teacher Vaughan Williams. The two major works are Gipps at her most original: the Horn Concerto has a lyricism that soloist Martin Owen brings to the fore, while Gamba and the orchestra give the superb first symphony a vigorous workout in its first-ever recording.

Reviews

January '25 Digital Week III

Chicago Symphony Orchestra Play Carnegie Hall

Festival Roundup—New York Jewish Film Festival 2025

January '25 Digital Week II

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