Streaming Release of the Week 

This true story of Jesse Brown, the U.S. Navy’s first Black fighter pilot during the Korean War, is turned into an earnest, well-made but overlong drama by director JD Dillard—in between some exciting aerial sequences, there’s an almost reverential treatment of Brown (and his family), which makes for heavy going over 135 minutes.

 

There are wonderful moments when Jonathan Majors (Jesse) and Glen Powell (wingman Tom) are shown bonding while training for their missions, and Christina Jackson as Jesse’s devoted wife does well with an underwritten part. But Devotion is content to be a straightforward biopic rather than a challenging one.

 

 

4K/UHD Release of the Week

This obscure 1953 sci-fi thriller directed by William Cameron Menzies, both low-key and low-budget, effectively tells the story of an alien invasion through the eyes of young David, who is initially disbelieved then helps mankind fight back after his parents are transformed by the malevolent visitors.

 

The effects are chintzy—the “Martians” are risibly bad—but the air of naiveté and innocence from David’s POV actually works. The film’s new 4K restoration is spectacular; extras include a featurette on Menzies, interview with actor Jimmy Hunt (David), a look at the restoration led by Scott MacQueen, and a documentary about the film’s legacy featuring directors Joe Dante and John Landis.

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

I’m no Jacques Rivette fan, but the French director did make two standout films in the early ’90s: 1991’s magnificent, four-hour chamber drama La belle noiseuse and the even longer but intimate two-part 1993 study of Joan of Arc, Joan the Maid. But this 1988 feature is what I’ve come to expect from Rivette: an overlong, meandering and superficial chronicle of a quartet of young actresses living in Paris and rehearsing a play by 18th century French playwright Marivaux.

 

Even at more than two and a half hours, Rivette never gives these women any plausible individuality, and he never makes the most obvious connections between reality and performance cohere. The film looks fine in a new hi-def restoration; the lone extra is an informative commentary by film scholar Richard Pena.

 

 

Memories of My Father 

Spanish director Fernando Trueba’s heartfelt 2020 drama about Héctor Abad Gómez, a doctor and human rights advocate in a war-ravaged part of Colombia in the ‘70s and ‘80s who was murdered in cold blood for taking on the regime and Catholic Church, is centered on a beautifully nuanced performance by Javier Cámara as Gómez.

 

Almost as good are Juan Pablo Urrego as his son Héctor as an adult and Nicolás Reyes Cano as Héctor as a child—the son’s book, Oblivion: A Memoir, was the basis for this emotional movie. Trueba loses his way near the end with melodramatic sequences surrounding the assassination, but that’s a small quibble. There’s a first-rate hi-def transfer; extras include interviews with Trueba and Cámara as well as five making-of featurettes.

 

 

DVD Release of the Week 

Made by Juliana Piccillo, an sex-worker advocate, this alternately enlightening and enraging  documentary dissects how movies have treated sex workers—often as victims, outcasts, killers, or simply easy punchlines—but rarely as real human beings. Piccillo interviews several people in the sex industry, including former porn actress Annie Sprinkle, and they engagingly discuss what Hollywood gets right and (mostly) wrong. (Piccillo herself has the most insightful things to say.)

 

The myriad clips on display demonstrate how over the map filmmakers have been when it comes to dramatizing a subject that’s a lot more nuanced than what’s seen onscreen: the movies range from Gone with the Wind, Pretty Baby and Taxi Driver to Risky Business, Trading Places and Pretty Woman.

4K/UHD Releases of the Week 

One of Terry Gilliam’s most extravagantly satisfying films, this 1989 fantasy adventure about the mythical teller of tall tales is the acme of the director’s prodigious visual imagination; indeed, there are set pieces here that have to be seen to be believed, like Robin Williams’ disembodied head as the king of the moon. John Neville is a perfectly bemused Baron, a young Sarah Polley was never more authentic than as his 8-year-old sidekick, and cameos from Eric idle, Sting, Valentina Cortese and Uma Thurman keep pace with the staggering sets, costumes, photography and Gilliam’s prodigious inventiveness. The UHD transfer is first-rate; extras include Gilliam and cowriter/actor Charles McKeon’s commentary; an hour-long documentary on the film’s making; deleted scenes with Gilliam commentary; storyboards; special effects footage narrated by Gilliam; a video essay on the history of Munchausen; an 1991 episode of The South Bank Show about Gilliam; and Flight, a 1974 animated short by Gilliam.

 

Black Adam 

As Black Adam—a character introduced to comic books in 1945—Dwayne Johnson dives into a strangely discomfiting character who is trying to rehabilitate his own reputation from its distant supervillain past. Although there’s a nagging tonal inconsistency between seriousness, hero worship and goofy comedy, Johnson acquits himself well and he’s surrounded by pros like Pierce Brosnan and Sarah Shahi. The film’s eye-popping visuals look spectacular in UHD; extras comprise several making-of featurettes.

 

 

 

Prey for the Devil 

This lackluster horror flick takes its cues from The Exorcist and, more recently, The Conjuring series, but doesn’t add anything original of its own; in fact, director Daniel Stamm is content with  jump scares and other cheap thrills obscure the fact that there’s little going on here. It’s too bad, because exploring possession in relation to mental illness (which is hinted at) might have yielded something more intense, especially with a fine performance by Jacqueline Byers as a young nun with a haunted backstory. The 4K/UHD image looks sharp; extras are Byers’ and Stamm’s commentary, nearly an hour’s worth of on-set featurettes and interviews, a Zoom script run-through by the cast and a discussion between a real exorcist and psychologist.

 

In-Theater Releases of the Week

In his latest courageous provocation—provocative at least in the eyes of Iranian authorities, who imprisoned him after he finished the film—director Jafar Panahi has made a typically playful and intelligent dissection of just what the role of cinema is in Iran’s unyielding theocracy. Panahi plays a version of himself trying to make a movie remotely—he can’t leave Iran and is seen on a laptop directing his cast and crew in a different location—and he also finds himself in political hot water with local authorities after he loans his camera for a local couple’s pre-marriage ceremony and takes a couple of snapshots himself. Panahi has an uncanny ability to make everything seem inevitable and every line of dialogue sound natural and improvised, but the rigorousness of his technique is seen in the devastating—but typically low-key—ending, as the director questions his own ability to create something lasting, something that can affect people’s lives for the better. 

 

The Super 8 Years 

Looking back at the home movies shot between the years 1972 and 1981, writer Annie Ernaux (who won the Nobel Prize for literature last year) narrates this elegaic documentary she and her son, David Ernaux-Briot, made, succinctly exploring how their family life—for Ernaux, her then-husband Philippe and her sons—ended up butting heads with the artistic, political and social atmosphere she and Philippe were then part of. The film conjures up the messiness of memory, which the graininess of these often stunning 8mm film images visually underline.

 

Turn Every Page 

Two of the most important literary figures of the past 50 years—author Robert Caro and editor Robert Gottlieb—are profiled in this first-rate documentary by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb, who intelligently tells the story of their relationship through the books they’ve collaborated on (Caro’s groundbreaking Robert Moses biography and massive five-volume LBJ bio, which has seen only four so far). Director Gottlieb had to convince both men—especially the notoriously reticent Caro—to let her talk to them on camera, where they both come across as brilliantly intuitive subjects. Even though this runs less than two hours, much of more of both men—in the form of a multi-hour bingeable series—would make for further illuminating viewing.

 

Blu-ray Release of the Week 

Finnish soprano Camilla Nylund puts her own stamp on classic American songs from Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Kurt Weill and others in this beautifully intimate performance—that includes members of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop—of these famous tunes in stylish arrangements. Although Nylund sounds wonderful throughout, her renditions of Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” and Weill’s “September Song” are perfection, along with the musicians’ backing. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.

 

DVD Release of the Week

Based on the real-life trial at which Michael Peterson was convicted of murdering his wife Kathleen in 2001 (she was found in a bloody mess at the bottom of a staircase—he said she fell and he found her), this engrossing multipart miniseries is aided greatly by topnotch performances. Colin Firth finds subtle shadings in Michael’s façade, Toni Collette is a sympathetic Kathleen and Michael Stuhlberg is believably blustery as Michael’s lawyer. Although eight-plus hours is a bit much, a lot works splendidly, including the various stories about how Kathleen might have died. Extras include several “behind the episode” featurettes.

 

With their opaque plots, absurdist situations and flowery language, Sarah Ruhl’s plays hint at significance but—with the glorious exception of her lone Broadway outing, the focused and superb In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play—rarely deliver. 

 

Her latest, Becky Nurse of Salem, begins tantalizingly by introducing its eponymous heroine, a descendant of an accused woman during the infamous 17th-century Salem witch trials. A tour guide at the local history museum, Becky is held in contempt by her boss Shelby for providing visitors with unauthorized, often crudely expressed versions of famous local events, like her observation that, despite what Arthur Miller wrote in his play The Crucible (which Ruhl uses as a crutch throughout), the accuser Abigail was only 11, not 17, when she was seduced (raped?) by John Proctor.

 

A mess at middle age, Becky is still mourning her daughter’s opioid overdose death and pops pain pills herself (as well as downing a lot of booze) while trying to care for teenage granddaughter Gail, whose new boyfriend took the hotel job that Becky was hoping to get; and, desperate for a new direction, she visits an actual witch who gives her potions to spice up her love life with a bartender named Bob, with whom she was involved way back in high school and whose own marriage is breaking up.

 

As written, Becky may not have true inner logic—another unfortunate Ruhl staple—but, like Marisa Tomei, Mary Louise Parker and Laura Benanti before her as offbeat Ruhl heroines, Deirdre O’Connell delivers an impressive display of sparkling comic energy and touching vulnerability, even putting across the clunky nightmares that Ruhl heavyhandedly uses to equates Becky’s travails with the deadly difficulties of her ancestor—replete with chants of “lock her up!” that not only end the first act but begin the second—that they nearly seem substantive and meaningful.

 

But Ruhl falters, as she often does, by confusing absurdism with absurdity. After setting up the strands of Becky’s problematic existence, Ruhl spins her wheels until simply tying up narrative loose ends with little dramatic or psychological coherence. Such leaden dramaturgy, which robs her heroine of real complexity, shows snippets of Becky’s various relationships and interactions without giving her an interesting character arc.

 

Rebecca Taichman’s diffuse staging doesn’t help the writing or characterizations cohere; Riccardo Hernandez’s fragmented set, Barbara Samuels’ astute lighting and Palmer Hefferan’s inventive sound design threaten to swallow up, rather than complement, Becky’s story. Good performers like Tina Benko, Thomas Jay Ryan, Candy Buckley and Bernard White get lost in the onstage flailing, and O’Connell is unable to provide a safe landing after an exceedingly bumpy ride.