4K Release of the Week 

Director Baz Luhrmann has said this is NOT a biopic of Elvis Presley—instead, it’s a glimpse at American pop culture of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. Well, if that’s true, why title the film Elvis? Why not something else, like Colonel Parker? After all, it’s Elvis’ conniving manger and mastermind (played disastrously by a ridiculously hammy Tom Hanks) who is the main character in this flashy, gaudy, empty spectacle.

 

 

That’s not to say that Austin Butler isn’t a bad Elvis—in fact, he’s quite good: personable, charismatic and not just a big impression of the King—but Butler is secondary to Luhrmann’s frantic style, which buries, for the most part, any humanity or sympathy. The film looks great in 4K; the accompanying Blu-ray also includes several making-of featurettes.

 

 

 

 

 

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week

As Lóri, a grade-school teacher in her early 40s who enjoys unattached sexual relationships with men and women, Simone Spoladore gives a ferocious performance that’s simultaneously sexy and sorrowful, intelligent and intoxicating.

 

 

Director Marcela Lordy demonstrates a real gift for personalizing Lóri in this alternately amusing and dramatic character study, and the sex scenes—including one that climaxes the film with an exclamation point—are among the least gratuitous in any film in awhile. But it’s Spoladore who makes Lóri—and the film itself—utterly and humanly real.

 

 

 

 

 

Loving Highsmith 

Author Patricia Highsmith—best known for her haunting mystery novels that were made into films as disparate as Strangers on a Train, The American Friend and The Talented Mr. Ripley—had mainly love affairs with women, which are recounted and analyzed in Eva Vitija’s interesting if thin documentary.

 

 

Only 80 minutes—and crammed with clips from the film versions of her books—Vitjia’s documentary doesn’t have enough material for its worthwhile subject, although interviews with family members, friends and past lovers (along with archival footage of the writer herself) suggest some of the complexities in Highsmith’s personal life and work.

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Joanne Woodward’s expressively subtle performance as a school marm living with her mother in a small New England town whose sexual awakening and pregnancy scare make her reevaluate her life is the main reason to see this 1968 drama, the first feature directed by Woodward’s husband, Paul Newman.

 

 

Newman’s direction is often impressive but sometimes serves up visual and narrative clichés: but with Woodward’s fiery portrayal at its center—and good supporting turns by Kate Harrington as her mom, James Olson as her first beau and Donald Moffat, seen in flashbacks, as her father—it’s a substantive character study. The film gets a nice-looking hi-def transfer yet looks a little soft; extras are silent promo footage and a trailer.

 

 

 

 

 

Sniper—The White Raven 

Set in the Donbass region of Ukraine during the 2014 conflict with Russia, Marian Bushan’s violent war movie follows a Ukrainian schoolteacher who, after his house is burned to the ground and his pregnant wife is shot dead by enemy invaders, joins the military and, after training, becomes a first-rate sniper.

 

 

This gives him the chance to take revenge on those who destroyed his life and also track down and eliminate the Russians’ greatest sniper. There’s no denying the skill that went into making the film, and there are some hair-raisingly exciting moments along the way. There’s a superior hi-def transfer.

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Releases of the Week

In the latest spinoff of the vastly successful CBS drama franchise, NCIS: Hawai'i, Vanessa Lachey plays Jane Tennet, who becomes the first woman to be special agent in charge at the NCIS outpost in Pearl Harbor, where she and her cohorts investigate crimes of a sensitive nature throughout all 22 first-season episodes.

 

 

In the fifth season of Seal Team, David Boreanaz and Max Thieriot lead the Bravo Team in their exceedingly dangerous missions over 14 episodes, including tracking down terrorists close to home and in foreign lands. NCIS extras include a crossover episode, extended/deleted scenes, featurettes and a gag reel; Seal Team extras are featurettes, deleted scenes and a gag reel. 

 

 

 

 

 

The White Lotus—Complete 1st Season 

Pretentious and highly contrived, Mike White’s multipart series about a group of Americans—a family, newlywed couple, a lonely woman grieving her mom’s death—visiting a Hawaiian resort run by an arrogant Aussie too often stretches itself and its characters thin as it blatantly and obviously moves the sundry subplots from A to B.

 

 

Yet, even at an unnecessary six hours, it’s entertaining, thanks to standout acting by Connie Britton (mom), Alexandra Daddario (new wife), Murray Bartlett (manager) and Natasha Rothwell, as the spa manager who gets unexpectedly close to the grieving woman (overplayed by Jennifer Coolidge). Extras are on-set interviews.

 

 

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week

Both Felix Mendelssohn and his older sister Fanny—who would go by Fanny Hensel when she got married—were childhood prodigies, as this first-rate recording of some of their piano-based chamber works attests. Felix is represented by his sextet for the unwieldy combination of piano, violin, viola, two cellos and a double bass, which he composed as a mere lad of 16. It’s one of his most dazzling works—full of youthful energy, obviously, but also with a canny sense of structure that makes it sound more like an orchestral concerto than a chamber piece for six players.

 

 

Fanny, meanwhile, wrote her own miraculous piano quartet when she was 17 and her final masterpiece, a piano trio, the same year she and her brother died, in 1847—both works ravishingly bookend a formidable career that was rarely acknowledged during her lifetime. All three pieces are exquisitely performed by members of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective.

 

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).