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

(Film Movement) 

An often riotous blackly comic revenge picture for our social media age, Ivo van Aart’s deliriously demented look at how an online columnist deals with trolls and stalkers—many physically threatening her—manages the impressive feat of getting viewers to root for her style of vengeance.

 

 

Although it does go too far (she wouldn’t be able to pull off what she does without anyone catching on), Katja Herbers is perfect as the eponymous anti-heroine, and the director saves his best bit for a satisfyingly crazed ending. This is the movie that Promising Young Woman wanted to be (and that Herbers looks like Carey Mulligan is a wonderful coincidence).

 

 

 

 

 

Queen Marie 

It might just be a standard biopic, but Alexis Sweet Cahill’s study of how the queen of Romania went to Paris after World War I to try and convince, against huge odds, the leaders of the U.S., France, and Great Britain, that her country deserves a seat at the post-war table, is a sweeping entertainment in the best old-fashioned sense.

 

 

Roxana Lupu is exuberant as Marie, the backroom political chicanery is plausibly presented, and there just might be a history lesson hidden in the handsomely mounted film’s melodramatic excess.

 

 

 

 

 

Silo 

For those who don’t live on a farm, this tense drama might be an eye-opener: it shows how a silo accident can have lasting, even fatal, consequences. Director Marshall Josh Burnette smartly narrows his focus almost immediately and, in a fleet 76 minutes, he not only recounts the incident and its aftermath but brings individual characters to life in an area of the Midwest that’s quite religious; there’s no condescension, only sympathy for everyone—and with an added scary moment for me when the teen stuck in the silo cannot reach his asthma inhaler (my worst nightmare).

 

 

The movie might be too on the nose, but there’s no denying it’s accomplished filmmaking that also subtly rages against a loosely regulated industry.

 

 

 

 

 

Street Gang—How We Got to Sesame Street 

For more than 50 years, Sesame Street has been the gold standard of children’s television programming, but Marilyn Agrelo’s breezy and informative documentary displays how experimental, even risky, the show was when it first hit the airwaves in 1969.

 

 

Through interviews with many of the principals—creators, producers, directors, writers, performers (human and Muppet)—and a trove of archival footage from the show and behind the scenes, Street Gang celebrates one of the great American television success stories and is also a worthy memorial to the great Jim Henson, who died at age 53 in 1990.

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

A double shot of British film noir, these B&W features are spiffily straightforward in their plotting, each following a killer just one step ahead of the authorities. In 1955’s Cast a Dark Shadow, curtly directed by Lewis Gilbert, Dirk Bogarde effectively plays a young man who kills his older wives for the money, but discovers too late that his latest diabolical plot has ensnared himself.

 

 

In 1946’s Wanted for Murder, directed gruffly by Lawrence Huntington, a strangler loose in London is right under the cops’ eyes, but they need more evidence to arrest him. Both of these by-the-numbers crime dramas at least look nice in new hi-def transfers.

 

 

 

 

 

Hemingway 

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s latest mega-documentary intelligently explores the life, career, artistry and legacy of one of America’s greatest—and most self-destructive—writers, Ernest Hemingway: his novels The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms are recognizable titles even to those who haven’t read his books, and he’s the last word in boozy, suicidal artists.

 

 

The six-hour series delves deeply into a troubled life filled with turbulence, much of it self-inflicted but also a lot of it most likely inherited. Although Jeff Daniels’s voice isn’t my idea of Hemingway’s, Peter Coyote is always a dependable narrator; there’s an excellent hi-def transfer but, disappointingly, no extra features.

 

 

 

 

 

Judas and the Black Messiah 

Daniel Kaluuya’s fiery, Oscar-winning portrayal of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton is the centerpiece of this occasionally clunky but engrossing docudrama about how the FBI infiltrated the Panthers in Illinois, leading to Hampton’s cold-blooded murder at age 21 in a 1969 raid.

 

 

As William O’Neal, the FBI informant, LaKeith Stanfield is nearly a match for Kaluuya’s passionate presence, but too much of the film is given over to the rote workings of the FBI, with Martin Sheen a caricatured J. Edgar Hoover. Director Shana King does get the atmosphere of paranoia amid the black power movement right. The film looks splendid on Blu-ray; extras are featurettes on Hampton and O’Neal.

 

 

 

 

 

The Little Things 

Although John Lee Hancock’s police procedural is unnecessarily convoluted—even by the standards of the genre—the director’s script does allow its three lead actors a chance to shine, individually and together.

 

 

As the main suspect, Jared Leto is appropriately creepy, while Denzel Washington and Remi Malek give the detective odd couple needed shading, with Washington’s seen-it-all worldweariness and Malek’s youthful swagger blending well enough to smooth over Hancock’s bumpy plotting and dialogue. There’s an excellent hi-def transfer; extras are featurettes on Washington’s cop roles and the give-and-take between Washington and Malek.

 

 

 

 

 

Quick Change 

In a long TV and film career, this 1990 caper comedy is Bill Murray’s lone directorial credit: he co-directed with Howard Franklin, from Franklin’s script, about a daring daylight bank robbery that goes perfectly—until the robbers’ trek to JFK airport goes spectacularly wrong.

 

 

As a jaundiced love-hate letter to New York City, Quick Change is often uproariously funny, although too often it pushes the absurdity to After Hours levels; luckily, Murray is his usual perfectly deadpan self, Geena Davis is delightful as his girlfriend and Randy Quaid amusingly nutty as their third-wheel sidekick. Best of all is Jason Robards as the police chief who won’t stop until he tracks down the gang who escaped the bank from under his nose, a typical Robards performance of equal parts boisterous bellowing and canny understatement. The New York locations look sublimely ratty on Blu-ray.

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Release of the Week

When luminaries from the pastry and dessert world, led by Israeli chef Yoham Ottolenghi,  converge on Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for an event celebrating the court of Versailles, the result is delectably eye-filling and mouth-watering, but what it took to get there—the mental stress, the long hours, the outside pressure—is recounted in director Laura Gabbert’s enjoyable documentary.

 

 

Although Ottolenghi is the star, he has surrounded himself with some of the best innovators in his culinary field, and the result is one scrumptious creation after another, all rendered beautifully by Gabbert’s camera.