In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Based on the sordid true story of a group of Europeans moving to an isolated island in the Galapagos in the early 1930s to escape what they see as the decline of civilization only to discover they are also capable of destroying themselves in utopia, Ron Howard’s drama is blunt and often eye-rollingly unsubtle, but the strange goings-on hold interest for two hours along with an array of bizarrely idiosyncratic performances.

 

 

There’s Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby, intense as the original couple; Daniel Bruehl and Sydney Sweeney, understated as the first visitors to arrive; and Ana de Armas, brazenly scenery-chewing as a self-styled, sexually voracious Baroness. A 2013 documentary, The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, covers the same tale but gives the disappearances and deaths a more mysterious air.

 

 

 

Angelheaded Hipster 

Although Marc Bolan and his band T. Rex are known here solely for the hit “Bang a Gong (Get It On),” in England Bolan was a national treasure, as popular in his early ’70s heyday as Bowie, Elton John and Queen.

 

 

In keeping with their near-invisibility stateside, Ethan Silverman’s illuminating documentary was made in 2022 and is only getting released—it returns to that moment to show how Bolan’s personality and unique genius bolstered his popularity until his seemingly inevitable early death, at age 35 in a 1980 car crash. Voluminous archival footage, concert clips and interviews present a colorful portrait of a singular artist in rock history.

 

 

 

Checkpoint Zoo 

Russia’s unprovoked 2022 invasion of Ukraine has not only put people and property at great risk for the past 3-1/2 years but also countless animals; Joshua Zeman’s wrenching documentary focuses on Feldman Ecopark, an animal refuge near Ukraine’s second-largest city where those in residence needed to be removed from their dangerous location to safer spaces once the invasion began.

 

 

Zeman also introduces the many brave people, from zoo workers to volunteers, who risk their very lives to try and get the animals to safety, all while the deadly war rages around them. In fact, the most memorable moments of the documentary are the raw footage from the front lines that these same people record for posterity.

 

 

 

The Glassworker 

In the first hand-drawn animated film to be produced entirely in Pakistan, director Usman Riaz has created an often visually stunning if diffuse drama about Vincent, who follows in his father Tomas’ footsteps to become an original glassmaker; he also falls in love with Alliz, a young musician from an army colonel’s family.

 

 

There’s also a war that kills Alliz’s father and indirectly cripples Tomas; if parts are borderline cheesy and shamelessly sentimental, there’s no denying the mindblowing animation that spectacularly recreates the exacting glassworks. 

 

 

 

My Mother’s Wedding 

Although it’s laudable that Kristin Scott Thomas makes her directorial debut from a script she cowrote with her current husband John Micklethwait based on how her father’s and stepfather’s tragic deaths affected her and her family, the resulting film is a soggy mess, with the director herself playing Diana, marrying for the third time while her grown daughters—Victoria, a famous Hollywood actress; Katherine, a Navy officer; and Georgina, a harried wife and mother—must deal with the heavy emotional baggage of the event and family history.

 

 

To be sure, some of the acting is excellent, with Sienna Miller particularly effective as the pampered Victoria, Scott Thomas her incandescent self as Diana and Emily Beecham a heartbreaking Georgina, but Scarlett Johannsen is out of her element as Katherine, with a wavering British accent and no chemistry with the charming Frieda Pinto as her lover Jack. 

 

 

 

My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow

This monumental five-hour documentary by director Julia Loktev is an upsetting yet hopeful chronicle of the state of opposition journalists in Russia—specifically, those who, against all odds and with punishment hanging over their heads, counter the party line that Putin is infallible. (According to law, they must admit, in their writings and TV appearances, that they are “foreign agents.”)

 

 

Anna Nemzer, one of these enterprising and unabashedly brave journalists, codirects, and together she and Loktev have created an urgent time capsule of Russian resistance just before and immediately after Putin’s illegal 2022 invasion of Ukraine. 

 

 

 

4K/UHD Releases of the Week 

Japanese director Kon Ichikawa (1915-2008) made several classics, including An Actor’s Revenge (1963) and Tokyo Olympiad (1964)—both also released by Criterion—but his greatest may be this pair of anti-war dramas that home in on how individual soldiers are forever changed by the insanity of war. 

 

 

The Burmese Harp (1956) follows several prisoners of war in a British labor camp and how their spirituality helps them overcome all odds, while Fires on the Plain (1959) poetically but terrifyingly evokes the complete loss of humanity among a group of soldiers lost inside war’s horrors. Ichikawa was a humanist who was also a realist and his films are a difficult but worthwhile watch. Both films have luminous UHD transfers; extras include interviews with Ichikawa, actors Rentaro Mikuni and Mickey Curtis and an intro by scholar Donald Richie.

 

 

 

The Accountant 2 

Did we really need a sequel to the autistic hitman movie of a few years ago? Apparently so—and, it must be admitted, the second go-round of accountant/killer Christian Wolff’s exploits is more entertaining than the first time.

 

 

If director Gavin O’Connor takes his sweet time setting things up—and almost losing control during a drawn-out set piece concerning a bus filled with migrant children—the payoff is in the chemistry between Ben Affleck’s Christopher and Jon Bernthal’s Braxton, Christian’s brother and fellow hitman. (How’s that for keeping it in the family?) There are already rumblings that there will be a third chapter, and if they can make it sleeker and swifter (under two hours, please!), I’ll gladly partake. The film looks splendid on UHD.

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

In this historical opera by Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848), the real-life tale of England’s Queen Elizabeth I and her favorite, the Earl of Essex, has attractive music and fast-moving—if often fanciful—storytelling.

 

 

Stephen Langridge’s 2024 staging at Bergamo, Italy’s Donizetti Festival keeps the focus on the central relationship, and the performances of Jessica Pratt (Elisabetta) and John Osborn (Roberto Devereux) are musically and histrionically satisfying. The playing of the Orchestra Donizetti Opera under conductor Riccardo Frizza and singing of the Coro dell’Accademia Teatro alla Scala under chorus master Salvo Sgrò are equally fine. The hi-def video and audio are first-rate.

 

 

 

His Motorbike, Her Island 

Maverick Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi (1938-2020) made several films about ordinary young people on the margins of society, and his 1986 drama follows Koh, a biker who meets and falls for Miyoko, a young woman who also rides motorcycles.

 

 

Obayashi cleverly uses much visual and aural trickery to his advantage, and his leads, Riki Takeuchi and the beguiling Kiwako Harada, are thrillingly alive as the young lovers. The film looks quite good on Blu; extras comprise a commentary, two visual essays and an archival Obayashi interview. 

 

 

 

Rather 

The long and storied career of veteran CBS reporter and anchorman Dan Rather is recounted by director Frank Marshall in this breezily informative—but not hagiographic—documentary. Rather’s many highs (coverage of the JFK assassination, the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Vietnam War) are documented alongside lows like his antipathy for the Bush family that culminated in the sad spectacle of forged documents about Dubya’s national guard exploits that nearly derailed Rather’s career.

 

 

Rather himself, of course, is heard from, in archival footage and in a new interview, along with family members, colleagues and analysts like Margaret Sullivan of the Buffalo News. The sad truth is that the sort of journalism Rather practiced is sorely missing from today’s imbecile news cycle and will probably never come back.

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week

As the daughter-in-law of famed Russian composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov—whose elaborate operas never gained a foothold in the repertory but whose evocative orchestral piece Scheherazade did—you’d think Julia Weissberg Rimsky-Korsakov (1878-1942) would have had a higher prominence based on name alone. But that was the not the case: although her music was played in Russia and Germany, after her death she faded in obscurity, possibly because she didn’t use her famous father-in-law’s last name.

 

 

Now, thanks to the intrepid efforts of American soprano Sarah Moulton Faux, here’s a group of 15 of Weissberg’s songs that will likely be an impressive introduction for many listeners. These harmonically adventurous songs have fluid vocal lines that Faux sings beautifully; piano accompanist Konstantin Soukhovetski plays sensitively; and the disc makes us want to hear more from a mostly forgotten composing voice.

 

 

The romance of actors Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner is the stuff of showbiz legend. The beloved comedians, who met on the set of the 1982 flop Hanky Panky, had a relationship (and marriage) that ended prematurely in 1989 when Radner died of ovarian cancer. Now, the couple’s time together has been dramatized by playwright Cary Gitter as an accumulation of scenes that resemble both the sketches for which Radner was famous on Saturday Night Live and the alternately silly and memorable comic films Wilder starred in during his ’70s and ’80s heyday. 

 

Which isn't to say that Gene & Gilda is not entertaining. Gitter has done his homework, and his chronology of their passionate relationship provides moments that are genuinely amusing and, later, touching and tragic. His script also dutifully checks off allusions to—and recreations of—Radner’s beloved SNL characters Lisa Loopner, Candy Slice, Baba Wawa, Roseanne Roseannadanna and Emily Litella, along with bits from Wilder’s big-screen hits Young Frankenstein and The Producers. The downside is that those riffs on the couple’s greatest hits are ready made for nods and easy laughs of recognition, while the framing device of Wilder being interviewed by Dick Cavett breaks the play into bumpily sitcomish segments that are only partially resolved by director Joe Brancato.

 

Happily, Brancato has resourceful performers to help smooth over much of the rest. As Gene, Jonathan Randell Silver, although at times simply a superior impersonation rather than a characterization, does a good job of catching the almost offhand neuroticism in the actor’s demeanor. And Jordan Kai Burnett gives a beautifully three-dimensional portrait of Gilda, showing her comic brilliance alongside her endlessly charming innocence. Burnett also handles the various impressions of Gilda’s characters with comic aplomb, never getting hung up even during a whipsaw scene when she speeds through several of them in a crazy sort of conversation.

 

Silver and Burnett play off each other—and even dance together—well enough to provide an extra dimension to this fateful romance that Gitter’s play sometimes lacks.