VOD/Virtual Cinema/Streaming/In Theater Releases of the Week 

Norwegian writer-director Maria Sødahl’s intensely personal drama about a wife and mother getting a terminal cancer diagnosis could have easily become sentimental mush a la Love Story, but Sødahl instead tackles her subject emotionally and viscerally, through the heart and the head, and the result is an intelligent tearjerker.

 

 

Of course, she has terrific actors, and Andrea Bræin Hovig gives a fearless, nakedly real portrayal of a middle-aged woman wavering between bravery and giving up in the face of a doubtful future with husband, children and stepchildren, and the redoubtable Stellan Skarsgård is very nearly her equal as her husband, who must rally back to her side after their relationship grew more distant in the past few years. I dare anyone to stay unaffected after the breathtakingly perfect final shot.

 

 

 

 

 

Downstream to Kinshasa 

Congolese director Dieudo Hamadi's incredibly moving documentary introduces several physically and emotionally scarred victims of the six-day war between Uganda and Rwanda in 2000: they were caught in the crossfire of a battle in the Congolese town of Kisangani, but despite their best efforts, have yet to be compensated for their injuries.

 

 

Hamadi’s sensitive camera follows them as, nearly two decades later, they try and make their cases while keeping their dignity intact amid continuing horrific pain and memories. 

 

 

 

 

 

Gunda 

Director Victor Kossakovsky’s 93-minute, black and white documentary about a mother pig, her litter of piglets as well as chickens and cows on a farm is utterly mesmerizing from the very first long shot of the mom lying inside the barn as the piglets scurry around her.

 

 

Kossakovsky also edited the film and did the cinematography with Egil Håskjold Larsen, and the result—especially since there is no narration, no humans onscreen and no titles, just the animals’ oinks, clucks and moos—is a truly unique visual and aural experience, just as nature (mostly) intended. 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday 

This drama about the relationship between two American expats who fall in love—or lust—while living in Greece is undermined by two unpleasant and unsympathetic characters.

 

 

Director-writer Argyris Papadimitropoulos and cowriter Rob Hayes miss the mark while exploring the heady romance between two immature and juvenile individuals, especially in a sequence of exceeding absurdity when they ride naked on a motorbike, racing away from cops, right before the man is to go to court to get custody of his young son with a Greek woman. Even the energetic acting of Denise Gough and Sebastian Stan is superficial, and this couple remains woefully unexamined. 

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

In the final of five annual Broadway Melodies featuring spectacular song-and-dance set pieces inside a routine showbiz story, director Norman Taurog smartly concentrates on his astonishing dancers, Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell, who get many opportunities, singly and together, to show off.

 

 

Although Astaire is terrific as always, Powell is extraordinary in her dancing sequences, especially her first solo, “I Am the Captain”; of course, when they team for the tap-dancing duet “Jukebox Dance” and exhilarating finale “Begin the Beguine” (all songs are by Cole Porter), they are unstoppable. Too bad this was shot in B&W—the last MGM musical not in color—but it looks sensational on Blu. Extras are an Astaire-Powell featurette, Our Gang short and classic cartoon.

 

 

 

 

 

The Furies 

In Anthony Mann’s dark, cynical western, Walter Huston gives an impressive final performance—he died before the film’s summer 1950 release—as a bastard of a patriarch who literally dares his headstrong daughter to hate him: she does, in Barbara Stanwyck’s equally ferocious performance.

 

 

This B&W epic—beautifully shot by Victor Milner—has its clichéd moments but also a refreshingly mature point of view that leads inexorably to a relentlessly downbeat ending. Criterion’s restored hi-def image is superb; extras include a commentary, 1967 TV interview with Mann, 1931 interview with Huston and a 2008 interview with the director’s daughter, Abbie Mann. Also included is a new edition of Niven Brush’s 1948 novel on which the film is based.

 

 

 

 

 

History Is Made at Night 

Frank Borzage’s ultra-romantic 1937 melodrama opens with Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur falling in love at first sight—except she’s married to a horrible billionaire and he’s accused of killing another man—and follows them from Paris to New York to a cruise ship that hits an iceberg (no, seriously!).

 

 

Rarely has a movie flaunted its romantic idealism to the breaking point, but Borzage and his stars push it to the limit of sentiment, making this a truly glorious romance. The hi-def B&W transfer looks luminous; extras are a 1958 audio interview with Borzage, a 1940 radio adaptation with Boyer and two critical conversations.

 

 

 

 

 

Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space—Complete Series

Two strange sci-fi animated series debut on Blu-ray, starting with Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space, which ran for two seasons (1971-72): the gang accidentally get shot into space, where they have weekly adventures on various alien worlds. It’s as silly as it sounds, but the bizarre creatures, half-human, half-alien, they meet are worth a chuckle.

 

 

1980’s Thundarr the Barbarian is even weirder: 2000 years after civilization ends, our hero Thundarr and his sidekicks Princess Ariel and Ookla the Mok ride on horseback through the stark landscape. There’s a lack of imagination throughout, but the first episode, set in the ruins of Manhattan, shows the remains of the Twin Towers, making for an inadvertent bit of poignancy. Both series look fine on Blu-ray.

 

 

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week 

Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942), one of many accomplished artists who did not leave Europe before World War II, was murdered in a concentration camp in 1942. As with many of these composers, Schulhoff and his music deserve wider currency, but recordings have been few and far between, and live performances even rarer. His opera Flammen, a surreal version of the Don Juan legend, had its premiere in 1932 then virtually disappeared until a celebrated 1995 Decca recording as part of the classic Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music) series brought it back from obscurity.

 

 

This 2006 recording, tautly conducted by Bertrand de Billy, features German mezzo-soprano Iris Vermillion in the pivotal role of the angel of death, which she also memorably sang on the Decca release. Raymond Very is a very powerful Don, several singers and the Arnold Schoenberg Chorus give eerie voice to the choir sections, and the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra expertly performs Schulhoff’s eclectic score, which combines tantalizing snatches of jazz, chromatic textures, and long stretches of mighty orchestral interludes into a vivid if unsettling musical mélange.