4K/UHD Release of the Week 

The latest chapter in the Jurassic Park franchise is less risible that its immediate predecessors, and the storyline (David Koepp, who penned the first two Spielberg-Crichton films, is back as screenwriter) is not as ludicrous as it might have been. Of course, the main premise of Gareth Edwards’ film is, as always, people getting close enough to dinosaurs to become dinner (or almost), but the tension is ratcheted up effectively and the actors—with the exception of Scarlett Johansson, who tries hard but is rarely convincing—are decent enough to watch for two hours of maulings and other thrills.

 

 

The heavily CGIed visuals are impressive on 4K; extras are an hour-long making-of, featurettes, gag reel, deleted scenes, alternate opening and two commentaries.

 

 

 

In-Theater Releases of the Week

This sometimes amusing but unbelievably slender rom-com stars its cowriter Michael Strassner as a failed standup who, through various wince-inducing contrivances, ends up with divorced dentist Didi (Liz Larsen) on Christmas Eve.

 

 

Director and cowriter Jay Duplass hits every obvious note right from the opening Peanuts version of “O Christmas Tree,” with the nadir a long, inert comedy club sequence where the pair starts to fall for each other. Strassner and Larsen are certainly game, but what might have been a satisfying short has been expanded to an interminable 100 minutes.

 

 

 

Democracy Noir 

It’s a difficult moment for democracies across the world, with the rise of right-wing authoritarianism in Europe and in the U.S. Director Connie Field’s timely portrait of how one of Trump’s heroes, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, has readily and easily dismantled his country’s democratic norms is a reminder of these scary times and a hopeful glimpse at resistance.

 

 

Field urgent chronicles how three brave women attempt to sound the alarm on the corruption and lies happening right out in the open in their beloved homeland, with the implication that democracy is hanging by a thread in other places as well (hint hint).

 

 

 

Four Nights of a Dreamer 

Legendary French auteur Robert Bresson (1901-99) made many masterpieces, from Diary of a Country Priest and Pickpocket to Balthasar and L’Argent, but this 1971 romantic drama—little-seen for decades, which might account for the unaccountably positive reception of this restored version—is not one of them.

 

 

Based on a Dostoyevsky story, this modern transposition follows a couple that meets when painter Jacques rescues Marthe from jumping off the Pont-Neuf bridge after her lover doesn’t return as he promised. Then comes 80 meandering minutes between them until she returns to her lover when he finally returns Too bad Guillaume des Forêts as the artist is as wooden as Isabelle Weingarten is ravishing as the heroine. Bresson does play around effectively with a tape recorder and Parisian nights glisten thanks to Pierre Lhomme’s luminous camerawork, but the film is as big a misfire as Bresson’s The Devil, Probably.

 

 

 

A Little Prayer 

In Angus MacLachlan’s sensitive drama, David Strathairn gives a towering performance as Bill, a pious businessman in a small Southern town, who bonds with daughter-in-law Tammy after realizing his son David (Will Pullen) might be having an affair with an employee.

 

 

MacLachlan’s film is filled with bracing moments that are never overstated or sentimentalized; the family dynamics are sympathetically observed, and the central relationship between Bill and Tammy is enacted trenchantly by Strathairn and the wonderful Jane Levy. This small-scale gem hints at the interiorized dramas of Terrence Malick without ever becoming slavishly imitative.

 

 

 

A Savage Art—The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant 

The great political cartoonist, Australian-born Pat Oliphant, has been drawing unique and cutting cartoons for decades, and Bill Banowsky’s illuminating documentary provides a broad overview of his life, career and how he creates his brilliant caricatures and his beloved character, Punk the penguin, who speaks truths from the corner of each drawing.

 

 

Interviews with colleagues and his children—along with the master himself—give a fully-formed portrait of an idiosyncratic talent, with glimpses of dozens of his seminal, eye-opening cartoons, from Kennedy to Obama (too bad he retired before Trump rose up). 

 

 

 

Stranger Eyes 

In Singaporean writer-director Yeo Siew Hua’s unsettling drama, the aftermath of a child gone missing is potently dissected, as the young girl’s estranged parents discover that their everyday lives are being surreptitiously recorded and they are convinced that the person performing the surveillance also abducted their daughter.

 

 

The director’s misdirection, to coin a phrase, is fitting for a film about voyeurism in our connected digital age, and his refusal to turn this into a mere redo of something like Hitchcock’s Rear Window or Michael Haneke’s Cache—both of which it superficially resembles—is all to the good.

 

 

 

The Threesome 

What starts as an intriguingly offbeat comedy-drama about the repercussions of a drunken menage a trois among Connor, his former squeeze Olivia and Jenny, a new woman he just met quickly devolves into an often enervating soap opera, particularly when Connor, superman that he is, impregnates both women.

 

 

Some may find it cute to watch these shenanigans, especially when both babies are about to be delivered and Connor runs back and forth between Olivia’s and Jenny’s hospital rooms like a bad slapstick comedy, but even with nicely-turned performances by Zoey Deutch (Olivia), Jonah Hauer-King (Connor) and Ruby Cruz (Jenny), director Chad Hartigan and writer Ethan Ogilby’s film seems like an afterthought.

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week 

One of the most prolific classical composers, the great Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75) wrote much extraordinary and some ordinary music in many genres, from vocal works to symphonies to operas—it was Stalin’s insistence on an agenda of socialist realism that forced him to create rote pieces of disposable music. Then there are his cycles of 15 string quartets and 15 symphonies that are among the most imposing of the 20th century.

 

 

This excellent compilation of several recordings made between 2000 and 2005 collects three discs of some of Shostakovich’s signature chamber works, including string quartets 1 and 4, piano sonatas 1 and 2, the masterly piano quintet, 24 preludes for piano and the dark Chamber Symphony, an arrangement of perhaps his greatest chamber work, string quartet No. 8. Several first-class performers, including the Moscow Virtuosi ensemble and the Petersen Quartet, give estimable readings of these imposing works.