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October '25 Digital Week I

In-Theater Releases of the Week 
Are We Good? 
(Utopia)
Comedian and podcaster Marc Maron finds most of his material from his own life, however personal and tragic, and Steven Feinartz’s fly-on-the-wall documentary follows Maron during the COVID lockdown and tentative steps back onstage.
 
 
Informed by the biggest tragedy of his life, the sudden and unexpected death of his partner, director Lynn Shelton, at age 54 of leukemia in May 2020, Maron is shown at his most vulnerable—that is, if he can be even more vulnerable than he is onstage. This is a remarkably candid film about a remarkably candid man.
 
 
 
Bone Lake 
(Bleecker Street)
What begins as an unoriginal but enticing roundelay of two couples staying at a secluded B&B they apparently reserved at the same time soon devolves into a risible thriller comprising sex, jealousy, betrayal and survival after it’s revealed one couple is definitely not whom they seem.
 
 
Director Mercedes Bryce Morgan and writer Joshua Friedlander rely too much on cleverness, but right from the opening—the grisly killing of two nude people in the woods in what turns out to be a visualization of a character’s novel—they pile on lazy horror-flick clichés, which hampers the otherwise able acting by Maddie Hasson, Alex Roe, Andra Nechita and Marco Pigossi.  
 
 
 
The Ice Tower 
(Yellow Veil Pictures)
Not much happens in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s visually luminous but dramatically opaque drama about the unusual relationship between famous actress Cristina (the enchantingly chilly Marion Cotillard) and teenage orphan Jeanne (the excellent Clara Pacini) after they meet on the set of a new adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen.
 
 
As in her earlier films, Hadžihalilović psychoanalyzes her characters in symbolic surroundings; Jonathan Ricquebourg’s exquisite photography, Nassim Gordji Tehrani’s razor-sharp editing and Julia Irribarria’s alluring production design fill in the blanks in Hadžihalilović and Geoff Cox’s script. Admittedly, the final momentous shots say more in their brevity and silence than the previous 110 minutes.
 
 
 
Jacob’s Ladder 
(Rialto Pictures)
The combination of Bruce Joel Rubin’s script laden with Christian symbolism and director Adrian Lyne’s visuals that toggle between tantalizing and turgid makes this often soggy 1990 drama about a Vietnam vet whose postwar existence in New York City may or may not be real creepily effective.
 
 
The special effects have an old-school feel, Maurice Jarre’s score worms its way into your unconscious, Tim Robbins is a properly intense hero, Elizabeth Pena (who sadly died in 2014 of alcoholism at age 55) is perfectly cast as his uncomprehending girlfriend, and there’s a solid (and surprisingly uncredited) appearance by a pre-Home Alone Macaulay Culkin as Robbins’ son. It’s basically a 105-minute Twilight Zone episode with an unsurprising but potent twist.
 
 
 
Ju Dou 
(Film Movement Classics)
This 1990 collaboration between Chinese master Zhang Yimou (who codirected with Yang Fengliang) and his then-muse Gong Li is an erotic, authentically grimy adaptation of a Liu Heng novel that nods to The Postman Always Rings Twice in its story of a young wife, saddled with an old and impotent husband, whose affair with one of their farm workers has moral and mortal repercussions.
 
 
Shot in the square Academy ratio that provides an ideally claustrophobic atmosphere, this blunt morality tale might be too on the nose in its color symbolism, but the magnificent presence of Gong Li as the title character is prime compensation. 
 
 
 
The Librarians 
(8 Above)
Kim A. Snyder’s timely exposé shows how fascist organizations like Moms for Liberty are destroying our country from within: under the guise of protecting kids, these groups—funded by dark right-wing money—are taking over school boards and helping ban books about subjects they don’t like, like LGBTQ+ and slavery, from school library shelves.
 
 
If there weren’t so many heroic librarians fighting back—including several who appear on camera, a couple of them anonymously—however pyrrhic some victories are, then this battle would have already been lost. But it might be too late, since Trump 2 is becoming even worse than Trump 1. 
 
 
 
Streaming Release of the Week 
Stella—A Life 
(Film Movement)
Stella Goldschlag’s story is sobering: a German Jew who first used forged documents to help her family escape Nazi prosecution, she soon discovered survival depended on turning in Jews herself to keep the Nazis at bay. This sordid tale, dramatically and morally complicated, needs a subtle hand to explore its terrible but all too human consequences.
 
 
Yet director-cowriter Kilian Riedhof and cowriters Marc Blöbaum and Jan Braren only skim the surface of this rich ore; there’s a complexity and richness that’s missing, which makes the admittedly striking final image less powerful that it should be. Paula Beer’s tremendously nuanced portrayal of Stella—she is impossible to look away from—helps ground the drama in her flawed but fascinating humanity.  
 
 
 
Blu-ray Release of the Week
Lohengrin 
(C Major)
Though German composer Richard Wagner (1813-83) was best known for his Ring cycle, this earlier opera is among his finest—it follows Lohengrin, a mysterious knight, who defends Elsa when she’s under suspicion for her brother’s death in a town rent by political upheaval and hostility. In this 2024 Vienna State Opera staging by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, Elsa is not the innocent love interest Wagner created her as.
 
 
But even a risible ending doesn’t ruin a magisterial music drama, with supple orchestra and choral work under Christian Thielemann’s baton and accomplished lead performances by British tenor David Butt Philip (Lohengrin), Swedish soprano Malin Byström (Elsa), German baritone Martin Gantner (villain Telramund) and Italian soprano Anja Kempe (Telramund’s wife Ortrud). There’s topnotch hi-def video and audio.
 
 
 
CD Release of the Week 
Bach Cello Suites—Anastasia Kobekina 
(Sony Classical)
The cover of Anastasia Kobekina’s superb new disc of the complete Bach unaccompanied cello suites—whose towering influence has only grown in the three centuries since they’ve been written—sums up how she performs these works: she sits holding a camera as if about to take a selfie.
 
 
That’s how she approaches the six suites, as a self-portrait, since playing them tells as much about the performer as about the master who created them. And it tells us that the 31-year-old Russian cellist is the perfect artist to both draw out the mysteries at the heart of these suites as well as leave their ultimate interpretations to the listener.

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