Streaming Releases of the Week 

Ross McElwee has been making personal chronicles masquerading as documentaries for nearly 50 years, carrying a camera around filming his own life—and those of his loved ones—through several feature films, the most famous of which is this 1986 masterpiece that has been rereleased in a restored version for its 40th anniversary.

 

 

Ostensibly an excuse for McElwee to follow General Sherman’s infamous Civil War “march to the sea” as Union forces pillaged and burned everything in their path on their way to destroying the Confederates’ spirit, the film is a fascinatingly offbeat glimpse at the director’s own relationships with various young Southern women, all with the then-still horrifyingly real specter of nuclear war hanging over everyone and everything. (The film’s memorably long subtitle is A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation.)

 

 

 

Remake 

Russ McElwee’s new film, coming 15 years after his last feature, Photographic Memory, is his most personal, chronicling his grief after his son Adrian died of a fentanyl overdose on Christmas Eve, 2016, at age 27. Another insightful, self-reflective and even self-lacerating McElwee self-portrait, Remake illustrates a difficult relationship with Adrian, who, as he got older, also became interested in filmmaking and began making visual records of events in his own life.

 

 

McElwee uses his own voluminous footage along with that shot by Adrian to grab hold of his son’s memory, as he says, to make sure he lived and is now gone. There’s also a parallel plotline as Hollywood comes calling with an absurd request to turn his classic Sherman’s March into a fiction feature. But Remake’s heart is McElwee working out his grief over and pride in his son through footage from his earlier films, where we see his children as youngsters. Touchingly, McElwee gives his mother’s mantra as his own: “Everything begins and ends with family.” 

 

 

 

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

In Michael W. Gray’s comedy-drama, nostalgia becomes sentimentality as young Mikey plays baseball, chases girls, and deals with his absent military dad and harried mom during a tumultuous teenage summer.

 

 

There’s good acting by Logan Gray as our protagonist and Mia Talerico as Kelly, the object of his teen desire, but Gray also had the not-so-great idea to show older Mikey, played decently by Steve Guttenberg, who’s our onscreen narrator—and when older Kelly shows up at the end, she’s played amateurishly by Christie Brinkley. It would have been better to focus on the kids—Mikey’s friends are a Benetton ad—whose antics are at least diverting.

 

 

 

Barbara Forever 

Barbara Hammer, who died in 2019 at 79 of cancer, was a pioneering lesbian filmmaker who made dozens of personal films, from shorts to features, that brought a discerning eye to her challenging explorations of (often explicit) female sexuality.

 

 

Director Brydie O’Connor’s involving and ultimately moving portrait of this singular artist comprises Hammer’s own archival footage alongside sequences from her films, her own intelligent voiceover and the thoughts of her longtime partner, Florrie Burke.

 

 

 

Blu-ray Release of the Week 

This lively double bill of Gilbert & Sullivan’s first hit operetta, set in a courtroom that pits a jilted bride and her scheming groom, and a new operetta by composer Toby Hession and librettist Emma Jenkins, which takes the pulse of political corruption, mixes frivolousness and seriousness quite entertainingly.

 

 

This 2025 Scottish Opera production has terrific singing from both casts and choruses, marvelous musicmaking by the Scottish Opera orchestra under conductor Hession, and colorful stagings by, respectively, directors John Savournin and Laura Attridge. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week

American composer Mark Adamo’s 2005 riff on the classic ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes has, in the past 20 years, gained even more relevance in a world riven by ethnic, sexual, gender and identity strife. Although Adamo’s rhyming libretto is quite wordy, it does reach Sondheim-like moments of witty eloquence, especially when married to Adamo’s own melodious music.

 

 

In this excellent 2025 recording, Boston’s Odyssey Opera gives an enthusiastic performance that doesn’t overdo either the comedy or the politics—the formidable voice cast is led by the terrific soprano Anya Matanovič in the title role and tenor Dominic Armstrong as Lysistrata’s lover, Nico, who leads the men of Athenian men in trying to change the minds of begging Athenian women withholding sex until men stop waging war. Gil Rose adroitly conducts Adamo’s challenging score.