Blu-rays of the Week

In John Carney's belated follow-up to his overrated romance Once, Mark Ruffalo and Keira Knightley totally outclass their material as a washed-up music exec and jilted young singer who hit it off professionally during a song-filled Manhattan summer.

 

The indefatigable Ruffalo and ultra-charming Knightley (and tremendously affecting Hailee Steinfeld as Ruffalo's teenage daughter) partly compensate for a cutesy premise, Carney's cheesy melodramatics and lifeless Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine as a pop star who dumps Knightley. The authentic New York location shooting—the movie's most salient feature—looks splendid on Blu-ray; extras are a making-of featurette and music videos.

 

Death Comes to Pemberley 

The three-hour mini-series Death Comes to Pemberley is a slow-moving adaptation of P.D. James's clever mystery novel based on the characters in Pride and Prejudice; despite ravishing costumes and locations and a fine cast led by Matthew Rhys as Darcy and Anna Maxwell Martin as Elizabeth, Death unfortunately founders.

 

The first Blu-ray release of Miss Marple, an adaptation of Agatha Christie's sleuth, features four one-hour episodes that showcase Joan Hickson's low-key but witty performance as the no-nonsense detective. Both shows look OK on hi-def; Marple extras are a featurette and A Very British Murder, Part 1, the beginning of a three-part series about British interest in murder mysteries.

 

 

 

Moebius 

South Korean director Kim Ki-Duk's grandiosely yucky horror movie follows a family dragged into depravity and possible insanity after the actions of a philandering father and vengeful mother. In a movie with no dialogue, it becomes absurd after awhile that absolutely no one would be talking about what is going on, especially as it escalates further into outright lunacy.

 

Under the creepy circumstances, actress Lee Eun-Woo—who plays the grandmother, the mother and the father's and teenage son's lover—deserves some kind of medal for bravery. The Blu-ray transfer is top-notch; extras comprise interviews and a post-premiere Q&A.

 

George Sluizer's unnerving 1988 chiller is one of the scariest movies ever made, and that it's done with such an economy of means—nary a drop of blood is spilled, and the horrifying ending leaves one shaken for awhile afterward—is a testament to the director's artistry. (That his own misguided 1993 American remake had an absurdly happy ending tacked on, proves that.)

 

On Criterion's Blu-ray release, the film looks better than ever; extras comprise interviews with Sluizer (who recently died) and actress Johanna ter Steege, whose memorable—if necessarily brief—debut this was.

 

 

 

 

Whitey—United States of America vs. James J. Bulger 

In his latest revealing documentary, director Joe Berlinger recounts how the FBI made Boston mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger into an informant, in the process allowing him to kill or have killed whomever he wanted without any blowback: he always had cover thanks to his relationships with certain agents.

 

For decades, Bulger terrorized Boston neighborhoods, offing dozens of mostly innocent people, and Berlinger makes a compelling (and scary) case that the government is as guilty of his crimes as he is. The Blu-ray image looks fine; extras include deleted scenes and Sundance Film Festival interviews.

 

DVDs of the Week

In director Tim Garrick's raunchy misadaptation of Ric Browde's book While I'm Dead...Feed the Dog (written by Garrick and Scott Russell), teenager Rick Stevens must juggle dealing with an alcoholic mother, his best friend's horny mom, the hot classmate he wants to date and her angry ex-boyfriend, among others.

 

Although it's hit or miss all the way, parts of it are very funny, and there are finely tuned comic performances by Natt Wolff as Rick, Mary Louise Parker as his mom, a still gorgeous Elisabeth Shue as his friend's sexy mom and Selena Gomez as the girl of his dreams.  

 

 

 

 

Cannibal 

Do we really need a movie about a respected tailor named Carlos who kills unsuspecting women and eats them, only to find himself falling for Nina, sister of a woman whom he killed and ate earlier? The answer is not really, even if actors Antonio de la Torre (Carlos) and Olimpia Melinte (Nina) make their bizarre characters semi-believable.

 

The problem is that despite director Manuel Martin Cuenca keeping actual gore to a minimum, his premise itself is so grisly that no matter how well done—or, more likely, despite that—Cannibal can't shake a nagging feeling of an unholy alliance between elegant filmmaking and ugly plotting. Lone extra is Ogre, a French short.

 

Avant-garde French director Chris Marker (who died in 2012 at age 91) made Level Five in 1996, a typically playful but dense sci-fi film that both predates and anticipates the digital and virtual culture we've since become accustomed to.

 

Far more interesting, however, is On Strike!, a compilation of two documentaries, 1968's Be Seeing You, chronicling a French strike and factory takeover, and 1969's Class of Struggle, a portrait of a young woman at a watch factory and her own radicalization. The lone extra, La Charniere, is a 13-minute audio recording of a post-screening debate among the workers shown in Be Seeing You. 

 

Mona Lisa Is Missing 

When Vincenzo Peruggia stole the "Mona Lisa" from the Louvre in 1911, he kept it hidden in plain sight for over two years before it was finally seized when he attempted to sell it to Italian authorities hoping to return it to what he thought was its homeland, as director Joe Medeiros shows in his highly entertaining, often lighthearted look at the theft and its aftermath.

 

A surprising amount of extras include 12 featurettes, deleted scenes, outtakes, an alternate ending and a director's commentary that's as fun as the movie itself.

 

 

 

 

The Wild Geese 

This uneven 1978 action flick stars Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Roger Moore and Hardy Kruger as semi-retired mercenaries who get back together to train a band of commandos to go into an unnamed African country to spring a corrupt leader from jail. Director Andrew V. McLaglen does the bare minimum, falling back on lazy scriptwriting (by Reginald Rose) and acting that could charitably be called competent.

 

There's occasional bloody fun (in both senses), but two-plus hours is far too long for such meager dramatics. Extras include audio commentary with Moore, McLaglen interview and featurettes.

Blu-rays of the Week

For the British hard rockers' 2011 outdoor concert at a gorgeous ancient Roman amphitheater in Verona, Italy, the group—comprising original members Ian Paice (drums), Ian Gillan (vocals) and Roger Glover (bass), with guitarist Steve Morse and keyboardist Don Airey—is abetted by the Neue Philharmonie Frankfurt orchestra, led by conductor Stephen Bentley-Klein, which brings a welcome and heavy richness to such Purple tunes as the opening "Highway Star" and "Woman from Tokyo."

 

But the undoubted audience favorites are all-time classics "Perfect Strangers," "Hush" and, of course, "Smoke on the Water." The band is in fine form, and even if Gillan can't hit all the notes, there's still a strength to his singing. The Blu-ray looks and sounds great. Bonuses are encore tracks (why not just have the full concert uninterrupted?).

 

The Following—Complete 2nd Season 

A year after closing the gruesome case of serial killer Joe Carroll, ex-FBI agent Ryan Hardy finds himself once again ensnared in a bizarre and murderous cult of Carroll followers—and could the serial killer himself still be alive?

 

Throughout its 15 high-wire-drama episodes, this dramatic series ratches up the psychological tension, although the implausibilities in plot and characterizations keep this from being better; the cast, by an appropriately stern-faced Kevin Bacon as Hardy, does the best it can. The Blu-ray transfer is first-rate; extras comprise deleted scenes, featurettes and an alternate ending to the season finale.

 

 

 

 

 

Snowpiercer 

South Korean director Bong Joon Ho's first English language film is a stylishly empty post-apocalyptic dystopia about a future Ice Age where a speeding train holds humanity's survivors, and where a class war is brewing between the haves and have-nots on board. There's not much tautness or excitement in this two-hour adventure, and the direction often allows the pace to slacken, which doesn't help.

 

Also unhelpful are performances that are either wooden (Chris Evans' hero) or hopelessly overwrought (Ed Harris, John Hurt, Alison Pill, a mercilessly mugging Tilda Swinton). On Blu-ray, the movie looks appropriately icy; extras comprise a critics' roundtable commentary, with a second disc of featurettes and interviews.

 

Supermensch 

Shep Gordon, the title mensch, took Alice Cooper's career into the stratosphere in the early '70s, then went on to manage stars as diverse as Teddy Pendergrass, Ann Murray and Emeril Lagasse.

 

For director (and good friend) Mike Myers, Shep is one of the friendliest, most honorable people in the world, as multi-millionaires go: his admittedly varied and interesting life encompasses the pop music scene of the '70s and '80s, and tidbits like how he got a wheelchair-bound Pendergrass to perform at Live Aid are the juiciest kind of morsels. The hi-def image looks good; no extras.

 

 

 

 

 

Tasting Menu 

This lightweight but amiable lark spends 85 minutes in a Catalan restaurant on the night it's shuttering its doors, and the special diners comprise VIPs and ordinary people who get entangled—in an out-of-left-field twist—in an attempt to rescue survivors of a sunken boat that containing the restaurant's musicians and dessert!

 

Director/co-writer Roger Gual and writer Javier Calvo cleverly intertwine the various characters, and the actors from Stephen Rea and Fonanula Flannagan to Claudia Bassols and Marta Torne give it all, making this delicious if ultimately not very filling. The Blu-ray image looks superb; no extras.

 

DVDs of the Week

Terrance McNally's play Corpus Christi—about a gay Jesus and apostles—premiered in New York in 1998 with metal detectors and a police presence, so to say it's controversial is an understatement. Nick Arnzen and James Brandon's effective documentary shows how a recent production of the play affects its cast, director, creator and protesters (who of course haven't seen it), giving it life beyond the stage.

 

The play itself is honest and heartfelt, as are the people who discuss its importance in their lives. Extras comprise scenes from the play, deleted scenes and additional interviews.

 

 

 

 

For a Woman 

Diane Kurys—who hasn't been represented stateside since 1999's Children of the Century—wrote and directed this engrossing story of two sisters who find, after their mother's death, what she, their father and his brother did as Russian Jews in Paris during the volatile post-WWII era. Kurys finds a fresh way to tell a familiar story, and her actors, led by Benoit Magimel, Micholas Duvauchelle and Melaine Thierry as a dangerous love triangle, give trenchant performances.

 

A bit of soap opera prevents it being truly first-rate, but it's heartening to see that Kurys still makes interesting and mature films after nearly 40 years. Lone extra is a short French film.

 

Swedish director Jan Troell—whose most recent masterpiece was Everlasting Moments—usually makes films about real people with a love and understanding of the complications in even the most ordinary of lives. His protagonist in his new film is Torgny Segerstedt, a Swedish journalist who was unafraid to mock Hitler and the Nazis, which placed his reputation and his country's neutrality in jeopardy.

 

Troell films it with his customary intelligence and probing camera (shot in evocative B&W); too bad his cast (which features well-known actors like Pernilla August) isn't quite up to the task. Still, it's a serious, sober film whose message resonantes across the decades. The lone extra is an extraordinary making-of documentary, the 44-minute A Close Scrutiny, by Troell's daughter, actress Yohanna Troell.

 

 

 

Nuclear Nation 

Atsushi Funahashi's Nuclear Nation devastatingly recounts the aftermath of the tsunami which crippled the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, and how it not only displaced an entire town—Futaba, where the plant is located—but destroyed the psyche of its people. Suzan Beraza's Uranium Drive-In unblinkingly looks at how the promise of a new mining plant in a depressed part of Colorado is a boon for some desperate people and a bane for others.

 

Finally, Hilan Warshaw's Wagner's Jews delves into the anti-Semitic ravings of the great German composer, who literally used many Jewish artists to keep his music front and center even as he belittled their race. Most thought-provoking are the comments by several scholars who discuss whether Wagner should be performed in Israel. Extras include interviews and deleted scenes.

 

Violette 

Martin Provost, who made a compelling biopic about French painter Seraphine Louis a few years ago, returns with another provocative, encompassing biography: this time of French writer Violette Le Duc, an unsung member of the mid-20th century literary set that included Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet.

 

Le Duc's violent life and art are vividly reenacted by Provost and his superb actresses: Emmanuelle Devos as Violette and Sandrine Kilberlein as Simone give the kind of effortless but intensely focused portrayals that uncover psychological truths about both of these fascinating women. 

 

The Country House sounds as generic as its title: this is a play about actors who converge on the Berkshires each summer to perform at the Williamstown Theater Festival. The central character, matriarch Anna Patterson, is the grand dame of Williamstown, and holds forth in the house, which she and her late husband have owned for decades, for the first time since the death of her beloved daughter Kathy. (The play is dedicated to actress Dana Reeve, who died in 2006 of lung cancer.)

 

Staying with Anna are her granddaughter, level-headed college student Susie; her son, perennially auditioning actor and budding playwright Eliot; Susie's father (and Kathy's widower), famous movie director Walter Keegan, who arrives with his new (much younger) girlfriend Nell; and superstar hunk (and beloved TV doctor) Michael Astor, in town to return to his stage roots for the summer, and invited by Anna—who met him at the local supermarket—to crash at their house while his own sublet is being fumigated.

 

So Margulies sets up a tragicomic Chekhovian journey, with readily identifiable characters sketched in short of outright caricature. That Anna is played by the luminous Blythe Danner—herself a big Williamstown presence for many years—is one of the play's many in-jokes. But Margulies also piles up contrivances more than is warranted for a playwright of his stature, even if it must be admitted that the gimmicky situations and relationships are so well written scene to scene that they never fatally compromise the play, only make it teeter on a weakened foundation.

 

It's no surprise that we discover that Nell had a short fling with Eliot years before, and that he still pines for her; or that Eliot has written a nakedly autobiographical play that the households reads through; or that Anna all but ignored her son Eliot while putting her darling daughter Kathy on a pedestal; or that Susie's had a crush on family friend Michael since she was a toddler; or that Nell and Michael are intensely attracted to each other. That last leads to the play's biggest contrivance, which makes for a pre-intermission surprise: but it's so well prepared for by Margulies' crafty writing, the cast's excellent acting and Daniel Sullivan's artful direction that it works, at least at that very moment. Just don't think about it too much.

 

The Country House works like a perfectly oiled machine, which is the problem. As resourceful a writer as Margulies is; as forceful and funny as his jabs at theater, movies and TV are; as dexterously knitted together as is the superb cast of six—with special mention to David Rasche for his blustery but droll Walter, a once-hailed director reduced to making movies for 15 year old boys; as well-paced as Daniel Sullivan's direction is on John Lee Beatty's meticulously detailed set, The Country House is ultimately less than the sum of its many proficient parts.

 

The Country House

Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY

manhattantheatreclub.org