In-Theater Releases of the Week 

The mid-’70s were anything but a glorious time for New York City: its finances were a mess, and when Abe Beame became mayor, it was discovered that the city was $6 billion in debt. Michael Rohatyn and Peter Yost’s engrossing documentary does a fine job telling the complex story of the complex machinery among local, state and federal government to try and correct the economic downturn before the city’s default would create a domino effect, taking down banks across the country and internationally.

 

 

The famous Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead” is the impetus for the title; the directors—Michael Rohatyn is the son of Felix Rohatyn, who headed the committee to fix the city’s finances—make excellent use of archival footage to tell a complicated but straightforward story alongside new interviews with those present for the mess. (RIP, congressman Charles Rangel.)

 

 

E. 1027—Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea 

Irish architect Eileen Gray designed a house for herself in France’s Côte d’Azur in the 1920s, which is the focus of Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub’s intriguing but diffuse hybrid that alternates documentary footage with reenactments of Gray dealing with rivals like Le Corbusier, the Swiss architect who took it upon himself to “improve” her house by painting murals on the walls, something Gray considered an act of vandalism.

 

 

Although Minger and Straub marry nonfiction and fiction with aplomb—and Natalie Radmalle-Quirke makes a persuasive stand-in for Gray herself (who is also seen in actual interview clips)—the end result is more often opaque and on the surface rather than insightful. 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

Despite firepower both in front of and behind the camera—Robert DeNiro plays mob bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, Barry Levinson directs, Nicholas Pileggi wrote the script, Irwin Winkler produces—this mob saga about infighting in the New York/New Jersey underworld never shakes the feeling that it’s déjà vu all over again. Levinson is no Scorsese, who breathed new life into shopworn material in The Irishman; Levinson lets DeNiro ham it up in both roles (and the actor’s prosthetic nose as Costello is unintentionally funny).

 

 

A game supporting cast led by Debra Messing as Costello’s wife and Kathrine Narducci as Genovese’s wife has little to do, and the two-hour drama moves along with little urgency. There’s a superior hi-def transfer, but no extras. 

 

 

Wan Pipel 

Pim de la Parra, a Surimanese-Dutch director who died last year at age 84, made this 1976 drama about Roy, an Afro-Surimanese man, who’s in relationships with two women: Karina, who’s Dutch, and Rubia, who’s Hindu. Historically, the film is important, as the first feature made after Suriname’s 1975 independence.

 

But even if it’s crudely made, there’s an almost documentary-like realism to it, and it has superb performances by Willeke van Ammelrooy (Karina) and Diana Gangaram Panday (Rubia); Borger Breeveld, however, seems straitjacketed as Roy. There’s a nicely grainy texture on the Blu-ray; extras include a director intro, Ammelrooy interview and archival featurette.

 

 

 

The Woman in the Yard 

A widowed mom living with her two children on a remote farm must deal with the sudden appearance of an elderly crone on their lawn who soon terrorizes the family in Jaume Collet-Serra’s glossy but one-note horror yarn written by Sam Stefanak, whose lean script is too obvious and—in its final reveal—risible.

 

 

Danielle Deadwyler is intensely unwound as the mom, Peyton Jackson and Estella Kahihaare are quite good as her kids, and Okwui Okpokwasili is properly scary as the title character, but the film is too familiar and not inspired enough, more like an overlong Twilight Zone episode that misses the mark. The film looks good on Blu; extras are two making-of featurettes.