In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Updating Shakespeare has become such a mania that it’s rare to find an adaptation that takes the text at face value—unfortunately, director Aneil Karia and writer Michael Lesslie’s modern take, set among London’s South Asian upper-crust, is not that adaptation.

 

 

If English colonial history of subjugation over South Asia is a subtext, it has little to say about it, while eye-rollingly literal tropes like our hero (a game Riz Ahmed) speeding on a highway in his sports car while contemplating the suicidal “To be or not to be” are misguided. Morfydd Clark makes a perfectly pitiable Ophelia, but her sincere performance might have had greater resonance in a better film. 

 

 

 

Fiume o morte! 

In this endlessly fascinating history lesson, Igor Bezinović’s documentary about Italian fascist writer Gabriele D’Annunzio’s year-long occupation (1919 to 1920) of what is now the Croatian city of Rijeka. Actually, the irony is that most of those who live there today barely know anything about D’Annunzio and what ideas and actions wrought.

 

 

So Bezinović tells the whole cautionary tale through their eyes—locals reenact the takeover and its aftermath with a combination of bemusement and good humor, which is what Bezinović has said he was looking to do, present history in an entertaining but not dumbed-down way.

 

 

 

Steal This Story, Please! 

Journalist Amy Goodman has been fighting the good fight for decades as founder and main face of Democracy Now, one of the few self-sustaining news organizations grappling with tough issues here and abroad. Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s rage-inducing documentary portrait shows that Goodman’s doggedness and fairness are being increasingly marginalized by a hostile media environment.

 

 

Several well-chosen clips include one that shows Goodman’s legendary ability to remain independent and hold leaders’ feet to the fire: then-President Clinton is so upset by her tough questions that he stays on the phone talking to her but his team blames her for ambushing him. Of course, the Trump administration’s assault on all norms sweeps away all who came before, but Goodman will continue to fight.

 

 

 

Blu-ray Release of the Week

Giuseppe Verdi’s first adaptation of a Shakespeare play came in the middle of his career, and although it’s a tautly told operatic transposition, it’s nowhere near the later masterpieces Otello and Falstaff. Pierre Audi’s absorbing production, from Parma, Italy’s Verdi Festival in 2024, uses the 1865 French version that’s more spectacular and includes ballet music that are among the opera’s highlights.

 

 

Ernesto Petti is a fine Macbeth but Lidia Fridman steals the show as Lady Macbeth—hers is the juicier role, of course, but Fridman is gripping every time she appears onstage. Roberto Abbado persuasively conducts the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini and Parma Teatro Regio Chorus; hi-def video and audio are well-done. 

 

 

 

DVD Release of the Week 

The famous French dramatic actress Sarah Bernhardt was a larger-than-life character, and Guillaume Nicloux’s frisky biopic has an actress equal to the task: Sandrine Kiberlain, who hams it up mightily but—crucially—always in character, so her Sarah is not simply a blustering diva but a woman who loved the spotlight even when it came to her own offstage relationships (which were legion).

 

 

There are many entertaining gossipy moments like her love affair with actor Lucien Guitry and the appearance of his son Sacha, who would later become a great theater and film director in own right. Nicloux also gets credit for well-chosen music of the era by the likes of Chopin, Franck, Ravel and Debussy, which appropriately underscore Kiberlain’s boisterous scenery-chewing.