Mathieu Amalric has been one of France’s most respected actors over the past quarter-century, not only giving impressive performances in films directed by Arnaud Despleschin (My Sex Life… and A Christmas Tale), Roman Polanski (Venus in Fur), Alain Resnais (Wild Grass) and Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), but also making a successful transition to Hollywood blockbusters, notably in Steven Spielberg’s Munich and playing the villain in the 007 film Quantum of Solace.

 

But Amalric has also quietly become one of France’s most accomplished filmmakers over the past decade, culminating in his superb recent features: the tense, nail-biting thriller The Blue Room and the intimate biopic Barbara, starring Amalric’s ex-wife, Jeanne Balibar.

 

Amalric’s latest directorial effort, Hold Me Tight, is his own adaptation of a play by Claudine Galea. He does not appear onscreen, instead leaving the heavy lifting almost entirely to Vicky Krieps, the immensely talented Luxembourgian actress who plays the lead. Although she isn’t onscreen for every scene, it seems like she is. 

 

The story of Clarisse, a wife and mother who wakes up early one morning, gets in her car and drives away, leaving behind her befuddled husband, Marc, and their two young children, Lucie and Paul, is dominated by Clarisse’s depressed mindset: is she merely fantasizing about what her family might be doing without her or is Amalric crosscutting between Clarisse and the family she left behind?

 

On a basic level, Hold Me Tight is a tale of a grief-stricken mother who has trouble coming to terms with her decision to leave her home, but never returns. The children grow up—Lucie becomes a talented pianist—sans mother but with their sometimes bumbling but well-meaning father.

 

On a deeper level, however, the movie is something else entirely, which is unsurprising coming from Amalric, who displayed the same artistry and daring in The Blue Room, a film about adultery and death in which he starred as a cheating husband whose wife and whose lover’s husband both die suspiciously. That film’s fractured narrative pointedly entered its protagonist’s confused mind: is he culpable in the killings or was he duped by his lover? 

 

The answer, which arrives definitively late in the film, might be labeled a gimmick, but Amalric does sprinkle in clues from the very opening scene, when Clarisse angrily throws down polaroids she’s been looking at that show her happy family. As Clarisse, Krieps gives a magisterial, totally committed performance. 

 

Rarely has a performer conveyed painful sorrow in such a restrained but forceful manner: like the luminous actresses in Ingmar Bergman’s great chamber dramas focused on the female psyche, Krieps’ unflinching, total immersion in her character brims with real life as it is lived, however bewildering and difficult that may be.

 

Amalric’s assured directing, which underlines Krieps’ towering performance, astutely uses nondiegetic sound to keep us off-kilter, as what we hear and what we see don’t always line up perfectly, mirroring Clarissa’s own mindset. This holds especially true when Clarisse’s voiceover provides a haunting effect, as in the scenes of Marc and the children that have Clarisse speaking to them but they do not hear her. 

 

There’s also Amalric’s expressive use of music, which he also displayed in his previous two films. The Blue Room brilliantly used a brittle chamber-orchestra score by Gregoire Hetzel that adroitly gave way, at the chilling ending, to a perfectly chosen Bach-Busoni piano piece. Barbara, about an actress playing the popular French chanteuse, was awash in songs. Hold Me Tight, in which daughter Lucie plays the piano, has music woven right into the fabric of the story.

 

Legendary pianist Martha Argerich (who also performs on the soundtrack) figures in the film as someone Lucie aspires to—the teenager even dyes her hair silver to match the Argentine performer’s look—and Amalric has composed his entire film to the checks and balances of the often intense and propulsive keyboard works he has chosen. 

 

Take the startling moment when Lucie tries out her brand new piano after telling her dad that she’s going to audition for the Paris Conservatory: she plays the first movement of Hungarian master György Ligeti’s fiendishly difficult piano work, Musica ricercata, the second movement of which has become infamous as the unnerving, piano-pounding musical theme of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. 

 

Amalric’s consummate artistry also shows in a key moment late in the film, as he finally uncovers the reason for Clarisse’s loneliness and separation from her family, scoring it to the final movement of Olivier Messiaen’s exquisite Quartet for the End of Time, which was written by its religious composer as a graceful ascent to the Divine. 

 

This moment of rare delicacy underlines Hold Me Tight as a remarkable, singular character study of a woman trapped between the life that she once had and the life that she doesn’t want.

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

The profoundly sad story of Brian Brown-Easley, a forgotten veteran at the end of his rope who decides to rob a bank one day in 2017 when he realizes the VA withholding his benefits might make him homeless, is recounted in Abi Damaris Corbin’s straightforward drama, which unfortunately too often feels rote and predictable, despite the messiness of Brown-Easley’s life.

 

 

What prevents it from becoming routine are intense performances by Michael Kenneth Williams (in his last role before his untimely death last year) as hostage negotiator, Olivia Washington as Brown-Easley’s ex-wife and John Boyega as Brian Brown-Easley. Boyega, in fact, gives a master class in subtle acting, his understated presence all the more powerful for the rage he keeps bottled up after the many frustrations and disappointments he’s forced to deal with.

 

 

 

 

 

La Guerre Est Finie/The War Is Over 

French master Alain Resnais (1922-2014) made several classics, including Hiroshima Mon Amour, Muriel, Love Unto Death and Private Fears in Public Places. This 1966 drama, recently restored and showing at Film Forum in Manhattan, was written by Jorge Semprún and follows Diego, an anti-Francoist entering middle age who feels the bombings and threats of yesteryear are no longer effective  while confronting a younger generation that disagrees, including Nadine, the daughter of a man whose identity he’s borrowed.

 

 

Yves Montand is commanding as Diego, Genevieve Bujold irresistible as Nadine and Ingrid Thulin equally good as his lover, Marianne—and Resnais memorably juggles Diego’s memories and realities, including love scenes with both women. Sacha Vierny’s splendid B&W photography and Eric Pluet and Ziva Postec’s adroit editing pull the viewer further into this absorbing exercise in politics as an abstract and a concrete reality.

 

 

 

 

 

4K Release of the Week 

Paul Schrader’s bloated 1982 remake of the 1942 classic movie turns the gore, tastelessness and crudity up to 11 as Nastassja Kinski wanders around in various states of undress while Malcolm McDowell, playing her brother, makes incestuous passes at her. Meanwhile, killings and maulings keep occurring; could it be the feline-like siblings?

 

 

Schrader makes it all as urgent and compelling as a trip to the dentist, although there are beautiful-looking sequences and an intriguing electronic Giorgio Moroder score (featuring David Bowie’s title tune, which sounds better on his subsequent album, Let’s Dance). The visuals look eye-poppingly good in 4K, which also includes a Schrader commentary; the accompanying Blu-ray disc also includes several new and vintage interviews with director, cast and crew.

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

The first wave of Czech composer Leoš Janáček’s great operas centered on tragic heroines: together with Káťa Kabanová and The Makropulos Case, which followed it, Jenůfa is a triumphant and insightful music drama, as Oliver Mears’ 2021 staging at London’s Royal Opera House shows.

 

 

Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian plays the demanding title role sensitively and intelligently, the great Finnish soprano Karita Matilla is just as powerful as Kostelnicka, her stepmother, and conductor Henrik Nánási leads the orchestra and chorus in a gripping account of Janáček’s intense score. The hi-def video and audio are first-rate.

 

 

 

 

 

Symphony for a Massacre 

In Jacques Deray’s electrifying 1963 crime drama, the double and triple crossings happen so numerously that at times one might not keep up with who’s betraying whom—the title perfectly describes the plot, shrewdly without giving anything away.

 

 

There’s gritty B&W cinematography by Claude Renoir, a finely tuned musical score by Michel Magne and a terrific cast comprising Jean Rochefort, Charles Vanel, Michel Auclair and Jose Giovanni (who co-wrote the script with Deray and Claude Sautet). Some of Cohen’s French finds are less than stellar, but this one is worth seeing. There’s an excellent Blu-ray transfer; lone extra is a 28-minute appreciation of the film.

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Releases of the Week

In this, the most recent season of the surprisingly long-running police drama (it’s just been renewed for a 13th season) that explores the family of NYC police commissioner Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck)—whose sons are NYPD detectives, daughter an assistant DA and father a retired commissioner—a cold case and an infant’s killing are among the many investigations.

 

 

Throughout this season’s 20 episodes, the always reassuring stoic presence of Selleck is balanced by the more interesting Bridget Moynihan (daughter) and Len Cariou (father), to carry this derivative but well-paced procedural. Extras include deleted scenes, featurettes and a gag reel.

 

 

 

 

 

Donbass 

In Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s 2018 antiwar drama set during the 2014 conflict in his home country, the insanity of fighting among neighbors and—most excruciatingly—taking horrific advantage of whatever humanity is left is displayed truthfully and unflinchingly through a series of interrelated vignettes.

 

 

They range from the brutally shocking to the blackly comic, but Loznitsa is in supreme control throughout, daringly ending his film with a heinous massacre followed by an interminably long static shot that keeps us on edge right through the final credits.

 

 

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week

Although he’s definitely not a household name like other Germanic conductors of the postwar era such as Herbert von Karajan and Karl Bohm, Austrian Hans Rosbaud gained considerable critical success leading orchestras across Europe, and SWR Classic has already released several boxed sets of him conducting everyone from Mozart and Beethoven to Wagner, Mahler and Sibelius.

 

 

This worthwhile set, which includes superb performances by the Sudwestfunk-Orchester Baden-Baden, not only covers the best French composers like Debussy and Ravel but also others who might not be as well-known but whose music is as vital, including Albert Roussel (whose third symphony is a highlight), Switzerland’s Arthur Honegger (ditto his expressive third symphony), Romania’s Marcel Mihalovici (whose second symphony and toccata for piano and orchestra are revelations) and Olivier Messiaen (whose complex Chronochrome received its world premiere recording from Rosbaud in 1960).

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

French director Marcel Carné was unparalleled when it came to creating memorable, thoroughly original slices of poetic realism onscreen: his 1938 masterpiece was made after his first mature film, 1937’s Port of Shadows, and before 1939’s lovely Le jour se leve, both written with his greatest collaborator, poet Jacques Prevert, who also wrote the director’s supreme classic, 1945’s Children of Paradise. 

 

 

These films share many of the same characteristics: effervescent, romantic, lively, loving looks at the relationships among several interlocking characters, here played by, among others, the great French stars Annabella, Arletty and Louis Jouvet. Criterion’s usual superb release includes a spectacular-looking new hi-def transfer, which brings to the fore Louis Née and Armand Thirard’s extraordinary B&W photography; extras comprise a 1994 documentary about Carné, a 1972 TV program about the film’s making, and a new interview with Amélie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet about Carné’s influence.

 

 

 

 

 

The Burned Barns 

This routine 1973 French policier was directed by Jean Chapot, a competent veteran who brings little originality or wit to this would-be tense murder mystery, as magistrate Alain Delon arrives in a small farm village to investigate the strange death of a young woman.

 

 

Both Delon and Simone Signoret (as the mother of a prime suspect) use their considerable charisma to overcome a turgid script and unconvincing direction; only Sacha Vierny’s gritty photography makes much of an impression. There’s a superior hi-def transfer; extras are interviews with crew members.

 

 

 

 

 

Naked Over the Fence 

Before becoming an international sensation in the erotic classic Emmanuelle the following year, Dutch actress Sylvia Kristel starred as a pop singer who gets involved with making a stag movie in this silly 1973 crime drama by director Frans Weisz. Kristel’s effortless charm is on display throughout, even though the movie is nothing special. Still, the actress brightens things up whenever she appears.

 

 

The film looks decent on Blu; extras include behind the scenes footage, an audio commentary, audio interviews with Weisz and composer Ruud Bos, and a limited edition CD of Bos’ soundtrack.

 

 

 

 

 

In-Theater Release of the Week

A short home movie discovered decades after it was shot is the lynchpin of director Bianca Stigter’s illuminating and poignant documentary, which uses that bit of 16mm film showing people going about their lives in a neighborhood of Nasielsk, Poland, in 1938, to examine how such fleeting images caught by a camera can answer myriad questions, from quotidian details to more pressing queries of whether any of these people survived the coming Holocaust.

 

 

In addition to being a quite moving (in both senses) historical research project, the film is also the ultimate in cinematic study, as it continuously zooms in on, slows down, pauses and rewinds the footage to glean as much information as possible, to try and resurrect and immortalize these long lost faces.

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Release of the Week 

In the most recent season of the NCIS franchise’s first and most successful spinoff, the latest of the group’s investigations include several of those ripped from today’s headlines, including lethally deadly trolls on the web, omnipresent white nationalist groups and the ever-shadowy Chinese intelligence.

 

 

Chris O’Donnell and LL Cool J continue to lead an energetic cast of dedicated professionals in a series of entertaining inquiries. This 5-disc set includes all of the season’s 22 episodes; the extras comprise several featurettes, a gag reel and deleted/extended scenes.

 

 

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week

Italian composer Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), best known for his Roman trilogy of tone poems, was also an accomplished—and, often, inspired—creator of ravishing vocal music, including several wonderful operas and a body of songs to rival that of anyone else in the 20th century.

 

 

This well-curated recital, beautifully performed by tenor Timothy Fallon and pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz, provides a bracing overview of Respighi’s song output, including some of his finest groups like the Four Scottish Songs (Quattro arie scozzesi), set in English to poets like Robert Burns, but with the same melodic freedom and musical color that distinguish his brilliant orchestral works.