Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

Connoisseurs of low-budget flicks will make a beeline to these forgotten films, starting with the Z-grade Frankenstein’s Daughter (1958), a paltry addition to the classic series, shot in muddy B&W on flimsy sets with atrocious acting and a risible, unscary monster.

 

 

Then there’s The Amazing Mr. X (1948), an eerie drama about a phony clairvoyant who pretends to help a grieving widow contact her dead husband—and who ends up trying to help her survive in a nice twisty finale. Both films have fine hi-def transfers; extras include commentaries and featurettes.

 

 

 

 

 

Black Lightning—Final Season 

In the fourth and final season of Black Lightning, school principal Jefferson Pierce again comes out of superhero retirement to become Black Lightning one last time to battle The 100 as well as symbolically pass the torch to his daughters, Thunder and Lightning.

 

 

A terrific “metahuman” propels it forward: Cress Williams in the title role and Nefessa Wiliams and China Anne McClain as his daughters/protégés. All 13 episodes look sharp on Blu; lone extra is a making-of featurette. 

 

 

 

 

 

Chernobyl 1986 

Ciboulette 

French composer Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947) created this charming operetta about a beautiful young woman with a hold on the men in her small village, as this frothy 2013 staging at Paris’ Opera Comique by director/actor Michel Fau shows.

 

 

Fau has corralled several topnotch performers—led by Julie Fuchs as the irresistible Ciboulette, along with a French film grand dame, Bernadette Lafont, as Madame Pingret—and paired them with an exquisite-sounding chorus and orchestra conducted by Laurence Equilbey. There are superb hi-def video and audio.

 

 

 

 

 

Corridor of Mirrors 

For his first film, director Terence Young (who went to make the first two James Bond films, Dr. No and From Russia with Love) made this tense 1948 drama about a man who, having fallen in love with a young woman, is convinced he already loved her in another lifetime.

 

 

Christopher Lee also made his onscreen debut in a supporting role, while Edana Romney makes a fine femme fatale. There’s a gritty-looking B&W hi-def transfer.

 

 

 

 

 

Deadly Friend 

When this tongue-in-cheek romantic horror flick came out in 1986, it was noted that Wes Craven—of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Last House on the Left infamy—had made a gentler version of his usual slasher flicks in this weird tale of a smart teen with a homemade robot friend who falls for the cute girl next door…until horrors ensue.

 

 

Too bad the movie is pretty toothless, despite what’s probably the only time you’ll ever see someone decapitated by a basketball. There’s also cute chemistry between Matthew Labyorteaux and Kristy Swanson. The movie has an excellent hi-def transfer; extras are new interviews with Swanson, screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin, makeup effects artist Lance Anderson and composer Charles Bernstein.

 

 

 

 

 

Mad Love 

In 1935’s tense Mad Love, Peter Lorre made his American movie debut as a crazed doctor who, through sheer happenstance after an accident, operates on the mangled hands of the pianist husband (Colin Clive) of a theater actress (Frances Drake) he’s infatuated with—of course, things soon spiral out of control.

 

 

A double feature of thrillers by legendary producer Val Lewton pairs 1943’s The Ghost Ship, a tidy psychological drama about a crazed freighter’s captain, with the creepy and controlled Bedlam (1946), with Boris Korloff perfectly cast as the head of the infamous 18th century London mental hospital. Both B&W films have excellent hi-def transfers; Mad Love and Bedlam include audio commentaries.

 

 

 

 

 

Night Shift

Ron Howard’s 1982 feature has a good straight-man role for Henry Winkler—by then typecast as Fonzie from Happy Days, costarring Howard—as a put-upon morgue attendant with an annoying fiancée and an obnoxious new partner, played with explosive energy by then-newcomer Michael Keaton, whose appearance catapulted him to Mr. Mom and stardom.

 

 

There’s also a bright comic turn by the always appealing Shelley Long as a hooker with a heart of gold. Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz’s script is fairly ridiculous and too often goes for cheap laughs, but the three leads keep us entertained throughout.

 

 

 

 

 

Superman & Lois—Complete 1st Season 

This newest reboot of the man of steel saga finds Clark Kent and Lois Lane returning to Smallville to raise their two sons out of the spotlight of Metropolis.

 

 

Though difficult at this late date to add anything original to the Superman universe, this series is diverting enough, with charming performances by Tyler Hoechlin (Clark) and Elizabeth Tulloch (Lois) and the welcome presence of Emmanuelle Chirqui as a Smallville friend. The first season’s 15 episodes look fine on Blu; extras include extended episodes and featurettes.

 

 

 

 

 

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week

Marguerite Duras, who died in 1996 at age 81, was an author, playwright, screenwriter and director whose work enraged and infuriated as much as it engaged and fascinated viewers. Her films were marked by a visual and verbal disjunction that deconstructed and reprocessed form instead of following a well-worn narrative.

 

 

This 1979 feature is a prime example: it consists entirely of Duras and Benoit Jacquot’s voices describing a telephone romance that is decidedly not enacted onscreen by stars Dominique Sanda, Bulle Ogier and Mathieu Carrière. Pierre Lhomme’s photography—especially in a new restoration—is striking, as is Sanda.

 

 

 

 

 

Suzanna Andler 

Marguerite Duras’ typically stripped-down play about a middle-aged wife and mother dealing with the fallout of her infidelity with a younger man has been turned into a claustrophobic if not very interesting film by Benoit Jacquot, whose meager speciality—studies of various women, from the pregnant teenager in A Single Girl to the would-be lover of the aging seucer in Casanova, Last Love—would seem tailor-made for this material.

 

 

But, despite Charlotte Gainsbourg’s intensity in the title role, Jacquot does little than create a handsome-looking but empty character study.

 

 

 

 

 

CD Releases of the Week

Although not well-received at its 1956 premiere, Leonard Bernstein’s operetta based on Voltaire’s 18th century classic about an eternal optimist naively believing in the “best of all possible worlds” has grown in stature since, even though its glorious high points like “Glitter and Be Gay” and the ravishing finale, “Make Our Garden Grow,” are separated by stretches of less-than-scintillating music.

 

 

For this 2018 London recording, Marin Alsop adroitly conducts the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with a capable cast at her disposal, with Leonardo Capalbo’s Candide, Thomas Allen’s Dr. Pangloss and Anne Sofie von Otter’s Old Lady leading the way. 

 

 

 

 

 

Leonard Bernstein—Mass 

Another Bernstein work that has grown in stature since its 1971 premiere at the Kennedy Center, Mass remains problematic, thanks to its bumpy attempt to marry the sounds of Broadway and rock with the groovy feeling of the spiritual. There are lovely moments here—even if they often sound like outtakes from West Side Story or On the Town—but the sheer verve of the performers, both vocal and instrumental, more than make up for the lack of coherence musically or philosophically.

 

 

This world-premiere recording, conducted by Bernstein and starring baritone Alan Titus as the Celebrant, with two choirs and a full orchestra doing the honors. Despite all their efforts, however, Mass is a Mess.