Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

The best film at the 2021 New York Film Festival was, unsurprisingly, French director Celine Sciamma’s emotionally precise and ingenious follow-up to her brilliant Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the best film at the 2019 festival. In this understated but shattering chamber piece, an eight-year-old girl whose beloved grandmother has just died accompanies her parents to clean out the grandmother’s house, where she meets and befriends a familiar-looking young girl.

 

 

Sciamma, probably the most accomplished and confident filmmaker working today, has created a movie that’s almost impossible to describe: The Twilight Zone meets Ponette gives a broad outline, but Sciamma works on such a fragile, delicate canvas that the effect is of a master miniaturist working at the very height of her powers, like a Vermeer or a Fauré, one with insights into the thinking of children of all ages—as well as their parents. 

 

 

 

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge 

Shohei Imamura’s documentary-like portraits of the underbelly of Japanese society are filled with underdogs who are allowed to display their genuine humanity. His last feature, made in 2001 (Imamura died five years later, at age 80), is of a piece with his other films: shot through with sardonic humor and humane observation, it follows a middle-aged Tokyo office worker who goes to a small village, where he meets and has a sexual relationship with a woman who shoots out a geyser of water during lovemaking—whenever she’s “full,” as she tells him.

 

 

Simultaneously realistic and symbolic—which the title wittily alludes to—what in lesser hands might have been contrived or stilted becomes a wonderfully offbeat romantic comedy of manners, carried along by Shin’ichirō Ikebe’s inventively boisterous score. The film looks muted but sharply detailed on Blu-ray; the lone extra is a short video essay.

 

 

 

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

“What makes a Vermeer a Vermeer?” is the question that opens Suzanne Raes’ meticulously observed documentary, which examines the enigmatic painter on the eve of the largest Vermeer exhibition ever mounted (now at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum through June 4). Curators Gregor Weder and Pieter Roelofs hope to acquire as many Vermeers as they can, and Raes follows them through Europe and the U.S. as they visit other museums. Raes also documents the grunt work behind the scenes, as personnel prepares the galleries for the upcoming show and closely analyze certain works that have come into possession with the high-powered tools available to them.

 

 

But for all its painstaking depiction of the legwork needed to put together the exhibit, the film shows the esteem, even love, that art experts feel for Vermeer. There are touching reminiscences by Weder and painter/Vermeer expert Jonathan Janson about the first (Weder) and most recent (Janson) times they saw a new Vermeer painting. Both men get so emotional that they must stop speaking and compose themselves, since the memories still have a powerful hold on them. And that’s what Vermeer’s art still does to viewers.

 

 

 

White Balls on Walls 

The changing landscape of the art world—which has been white male-focused for centuries, as the film’s cheeky title, sardonically intoned by museum curator Charl Landvreugd, underscores—is illuminatingly chronicled in Sarah Vos’ documentary about behind-the-scenes workings at Amsterdam’s modern-art Stedelijk Museum, as its leaders try and adjust their focus.

 

 

Questions and worries abound on whatever is decided—adding more non-white and female artists to enter the collection while jettisoning problematic masters like Picasso might seem like merely filling quotas to some—and Vos records Zoom and in-person meetings where curators and administrators hash out the difficulties of walking a thin line that may subject them to criticism no matter what they decide.

 

 

 

4K Release of the Week 

This overlong, clunky sequel to 2019’s Shazam! follows the heavy-handed blueprint of so many recent superhero movies: drawn-out, haphazardly thought-out subplots with ludicrous villains and improbable allies that ultimately save the day.

 

 

Even with Helen Mirren and Lucy Lui as the dastardly gods—and a game Rachel Zegler as their wavering comrade—director David F. Sandberg is unable to shake the torpor off, although his appealing “good guys/gals” cast (led by Zachary Levi, Jack Dylan Grazer, Grace Caroline Currey and Meagan Good) makes it at least watchable. The whole thing has a high-style gloss in 4K; extras include featurettes, Sandberg’s commentary and a half-hour of deleted scenes.

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week

Just a few months ago, in a crowded pool of complete Beethoven piano concerto recordings, young Chinese pianist Haochen Zhang made an impressive splash; now veteran keyboard master Garrick Ohlsson takes the latest stab at traversing one of the most imposing concerto cycles in the entire repertoire.

 

 

Another accomplished Beethoven interpreter, Sir Donald Runnicles, sensitively leads the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra, and these recordings—made during last summer’s music festival—find Ohlsson in top form, playing these five imposing works with control and finesse. In fact, the  towering fifth concerto (the “Emperor”) may approach the summit of Ohlsson’s six decades of Beethoven performing.