In-Theater Releases of the Week 

A painting by Austrian artist Egon Schiele turns up in the house of a young man, and André, an enterprising dealer from a famed Paris auction house, discovers that it was taken from its rightful owner by the Nazis in 1939, and the owner’s heirs are making a claim to it.

 

 

Director Pascal Bonitzer’s accomplished drama unfolds like a slow-burning thriller, but it’s also a clear-eyed look at ethics and morality in a world that’s anything but black and white. Bonitzer and top actors like Alex Lutz (as André), the great Léa Drucker (as Bertina, his colleague and ex) and Louise Chevillotte (as his oddball intern) help make Auction smart and involving from the get-go. 

 

 

 

It Was Just an Accident 

The latest from Iranian master Jafar Panahi—who has made ironical dramas about contemporary Iranian life for the past 30 years, since his debut, The White Balloon—is possibly his most incendiary yet, confronting defenders of the current authoritarian regime through their vicious actions against those in opposition.

 

 

Vahid, who was arrested years earlier by an unapologetic pawn of the regime who’s nicknamed Peg Leg, realizes his torturer is living an ordinary family life and decides to kidnap him—but then hesitates about what to do next. Suspenseful and tense sequences abound, including a few truly stunning one-shot moments that make the flamboyant visuals of One Battle After Another look like amateurish meandering. Panahi filmed this surreptitiously—and illegally, according to incensed government officials—but every frame is filled with unparalleled urgency and artistry.

 

 

 

The Mastermind 

Kelly Reichardt’s latest stripped-down anti-comic drama is crammed with contrivances that show a filmmaker who’s run out of ideas. When James, a disaffected, unemployed father, decides to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from a Massachusetts art museum, he soon finds himself in trouble with his family, the mob and the law (duh). Although Jack O’Connor gives an appealing hangdog quality to James, a man who doesn’t quite know what his American dream but is desperate to try anything to achieve it, there’s not much else to recommend this shockingly sloppy movie. Rob Mazurek’s rhythmic score is more enervating than tense, while Alana Haim as Terri, James’ wife, is as inexpressive as she was in Paul Thomas Anderson’s worst movie, Licorice Pizza.

 

 

Though set in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam, evidence of the war is scant until there’s a climactic peace demonstration in which James gets his comeuppance; it’s one of the most leaden bits of dramatic irony I’ve seen in a long time but is the perfect ending for such a lazy film.

 

 

 

4K/UHD Releases of the Week

Mexican master Arturo Ripstein’s take on The Honeymoon Killers is a fairly lurid, fairly sensational and fairly interesting crime melodrama—except that all those “fairly”s add up to a well-done missed opportunity. There are some very good, even memorable moments like each of the murder sequences, which are treated in a matter-of-fact fashion that’s all the more disturbing. And Ripstein’s vivid visual sense is made manifest by his subtly roving camera that moves among the criminals and their prey.

 

 

But a routine atmosphere soon settles in, and by the final scenes of the couple’s capture and execution, what started dynamically ends in lurching fits and starts. Even David Mansfield’s chamber score seems out of place. There’s an exceptional 4K transfer; extras are interviews with Ripstein and cowriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego along with a post-screening Q&A they gave.

 

 

 

Weapons 

In Zach Cregger’s convoluted thriller, new teacher Justine is the prime suspect when all of the young students in her classroom disappear one night, except for one—but there’s much more to the seemingly inscrutable happenings once she, Archer (father of one of the children) and policeman Paul (a married ex she’s still sleeping with) start snooping around.

 

 

Cregger cheats right from the start—shots of the kids running through the streets at night have an eerily similar look to the famous photo of a Vietnamese child burned by napalm, which I hope isn’t intentional—and he ends up telling a familiar tale of a witch’s spell that destroys all in its nonsensical path. The acting by Julia Garner (Julie), Josh Brolin (Archer), Alden Ehrenreich (Paul) and an unrecognizable Amy Madigan (the witchy villain) partially elevates Cregger’s derivative script and direction. The film looks impressive on UHD; extras are short on-set featurettes and interviews.

 

Blu-ray Release of the Week

Japanese auteur Nobuhiko Obayashi, whose unclassifiable but classic 1977 magnum opus House is his best-known film, made this even more surreal sci-fi parody-cum-homage in 1981. It follows the exploits of a high-school student (played by Hiroko Yakushimaru, a teen heartthrob at the time) who discovers she has telekinetic powers one day at school and soon realizes that a malevolent alien invasion is imminent.

 

 

Obayashi’s droll social commentary comes to the fore when several students’ minds begin to be controlled by extraterrestrials, stifling free speech; a welcome sense of playfulness in Obayashi’s directing and writing is on display, as it was in House. The restored film looks quite good on Blu; extras include a commentary and visual essay.

 

 

 

DVD Release of the Week 

Charlotte Le Bon’s fiery performance as French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002), who overcame incestuous abuse as a young girl from her father—which led to mental health issues for which things like shock therapy were deemed appropriate treatment—to find her voice in painting, sculptures and collages, centers this conventional but well-made portrait of the artist as a young woman.

 

 

Making her directorial debut, Céline Sallette imbues time-honored devices like split screens and title cards with remarkable freshness, but it’s all at the service of telling an honest account of a difficult story that ultimately shows how art can be a way to overcome trauma.