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

Caroline Link last dramatized a family fleeing Hitler’s Germany in the ‘30s before it was too late in her 2001 Oscar-winning Best Foreign Film, Nowhere in Africa. Link returns to the Nazi era with this touching look at the early life of Judith Kerr, who survived the war when her family left  Germany, first for Switzerland, then Paris, and finally to London: later Kerr would go on to write the hugely popular children’s book, also titled When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. 

 

 

Link’s affinity with child actors is apparent in the affecting and natural performance by newcomer Riva Krymalowski, who plays the young Judith. Marinus Hohmann as her brother Max is not far behind, and the parents—are beautifully enacted by Oliver Masucci (father) and Carla Juri (mother). 

 

 

 

 

 

New Deal for Artists 

This 1981 PBS documentary about how FDR’s presidency literally saved many artists and their careers through valuable cultural initiatives is a sober recounting by director Wieland Schulz-Keil. 

 

 

He got so many luminaries to discuss their personal histories of the era—from the just-deceased Norman Lloyd, Howard da Silva and John Houseman to Studs Terkel, the renowned historian and writer who opens the film—and the chief New Deal alumnus himself, Orson Welles, to narrate, that it now feels more like an historical document than a mere film. 

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

In this 2009 Paris staging of Bizet’s Carmen, one of the seminal female roles in opera is taken by the Italian singer Anna Caterina Antonacci, who gives an intelligent performance that fatally lacks any eroticism; John Eliot Gardner conducts his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique and Monteverdi Choir in a fine reading of the famous score. 

 

 

The famous duo of 1890s Italian one-acts by Mascagni (Cavalleria Rusticana) and Leoncavallo (Pagliacci), staged in reverse order by Robert Carsen in Amsterdam in 2019, have tuneful scores that beat out the awkward modern settings; American soprano Ailyn Perez shines in Pagliacci. Both discs have first-rate hi-def video and audio.

 

 

 

 

 

Cosi fan tutte

Mozart’s classic opera Cosi fan tutte—a romantic chamber comedy for six characters—achieves a new intimacy in this 2014 semi-staging in Vienna led by renowned conductor Nikolas Harnoncourt (who died in 2016), among his final stamps on some of the great works he most admired. 

 

 

Handel’s overlong baroque drama Ariodante, the novelty of director Christof Loy’s 2017 Salzburg staging is in superstar soprano Cecilia Bartoli playing the title hero with a fake beard and a vividly animated performance. Both operas sound and look great on Blu-ray; lone Mozart extra is a 52-minute documentary about Harnoncourt’s approach to Mozart.

 

 

 

 

 

Drunken Master II 

Even by Jackie Chan’s standards, the fighting sequences in this fast-paced and often hilarious action flick are astonishing to behold and at times unbelievable to watch. Director Lau Ka Leung, together with Chan, has choreographed a stunning array of battles, culminating in a splendidly over-the-top finale that includes the star turning himself into a blowtorch. 

 

 

There’s an excellent Blu-ray transfer; there are also three audio options—the original Cantonese, Chinese, and an English dub—along with the original, sometimes humorously misspelled English subtitles accompanying the Cantonese dialogue.

 

 

 

 

 

The Ghosts of Versailles 

John Corigliano’s sumptuous Mozartean/Rossinian riff had its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in 1991—the first new opera by an American composer to have its first performance there in a quarter-century—but this staging, at Versailles itself, is equally significant. 

 

 

Corigliano’s musical pastiche is eminently tuneful, and the Orchestra de l’Opera Royal and Glimmerglass Festival Choir and chorus, under conductor Joseph Colaneri, make the best possible case for it. The singers are first-rate; the costumes and sets are, of course, lovely. There are also a DVD of the performance and two CDs of the audio recording; lone extra is Of Rage and Remembrance, a documentary about Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1, a personal account of the AIDS epidemic that won a 1991 Grammy Award.

 

 

 

 

 

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House 

The punning title of this mild 1948 Cary Grant comedy about a businessman whose plans to build a new suburban home for himself and his family are constantly beset by problems also refers to the movie itself. 

 

 

A bloated, bland movie, it floats for long stretches on Grant’s charm, costar Melvyn Douglas’ constant putdowns and Myrna Loy’s sturdy wife and mother. Director H.C. Potter doesn’t do much to help, and although it’s always watchable, amazingly it’s only marginally better than The Money Pit, the pointless 1986 Tom Hanks-Shelley Long remake. The B&W visuals look appealing on Blu; extras are two (!) radio adaptations with Grant and a funny—and relevant—classic cartoon, The House of Tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex 

It’s ludicrous history but grand entertainment: Bette Davis and Errol Flynn butt heads as Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Devereaux, the Duke of Essex, in this superior melodrama filled with romance, intrigue, colorful characterizations—Olivia de Havilland, Vincent Price, and Donald Crisp are among the large supporting cast—and a swelling Erich Wolfgang Korngold score. 

 

 

Director Michael Curtiz marshals his forces for a most engrossing ahistorical Hollywood spectacle; on Blu-ray, the restored transfer of the Technicolor film looks gorgeous. Extras include a vintage featurette and Warner Night at the Movies, hosted by Leonard Maltin, which recreates what viewers would have sat through if they saw this movie in its 1939 theater run.

Not many cult dramas last 15 seasons, but Supernatural has been able to retain its popularity for so long among certain segments of the viewing public: probably the cover image of the four men—featuring the series’ leads, the Winchester brothers Sam and Dean—goes a long way toward explaining that fact. 

 

 

Still, the show is entertaining, and its creators cannily allow certain throwaway bits to illuminate their fantasy fight between good and evil—even if, in the series-ending episodes,  the brothers’ final fight is against God Himself—such as the haunting use of the Dire Straits’ classic song “Brothers in Arms.” These final; 20 episodes look exceptional on Blu; extras include featurettes, deleted scenes and a gag reel. 

 

 

 

 

 

Tom & Jerry—The Movie 

As features based on classic cartoons go, Tom & Jerry is certainly not the worst, but this frantic blend of animation and live-action is also certainly among the most forgettable. 

 

 

Director Tim Story is content to let his cat and mouse take over Manhattan among a collection of the least interesting humans to be in a movie like this: Colin Jost, Chloe Grace Moretz, Michael Pena, Rob Delaney and Ken Jeong all look properly embarrassed, and even the often diverting visuals are unable to carry the day for 101 very long minutes. There’s an excellent hi-def transfer; extras include a gag reel and featurettes.

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Release of the Week 

As a sound man who tracks and fixes ambient sounds from the dwellings and lives of affected New Yorkers, Peter Saarsgaard gives a perfectly-pitched portrayal of an insular man whose emotional well-being is of a piece with his work, while Rashida Jones nicely underplays the woman whose “sound” he works on and who might coax him out of his internalized shell. 

 

 

This is certainly an original idea for a film, but director Michael Tyburski—who cowrote with Ben Nabors—paints himself into a corner and has his protagonist’s story abruptly end, without confronting his emotional instability. Lone extra is an on-set featurette.

 

 

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week

Vadim Gluzman brings the same passionate frenzy to his playing in two works written nearly 175 years apart, binding them together by choosing to play Beethoven’s towering Violin Concerto (composed in 1806) with Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke’s own cadenzas for the piece, which are a prime example of Schnittke’s remarkable synthesis of modernist techniques and classical idioms. 

 

 

After hearing Beethoven/Schnittke, the latter’s own Violin Concerto No. 3 (composed in 1978), a thorny yet thoroughly accessible work, won’t seem too alien to the listener despite the 175 years separating these masterpieces. James Gaffigan conducts the Luzerne Symphony Orchestra in a sympathetic reading that underscores how both composers regarded the orchestral players as important as the soloist.