In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week 

Rarely has tennis—or any sport, for that matter—been so vividly dramatized in its psychological, emotional and physical turmoil as in Quentin Reynaud’s illuminating and compelling drama, which follows Thomas, a 37-year-old former teen prodigy trying to remain relevant on the court even as he is worn down by his body, mind and personal life.

 

 

His wife Eve, a former player, wants him home to help raise their young son instead of playing in tournaments around the world, while his eternally disappointed mother, Judith, continuously and passive-aggressively berates his talent and choices. Reynaud relies a bit too heavily on the climactic French Open match, which is excitingly done but drawn out; yet his fantastic cast—Alex Lutz (Thomas), Ana Girardot (Eve) and Kristen Scott-Thomas (Judith) are all masterly—hits repeated aces throughout.

 

 

 

 

 

The Big Scary S Word 

Yes, the big scary is S word is “socialism,” which the right has bludgeoned the left with like a trowel for decades—but it wasn’t always so, and it doesn’t have to be in the future, according to director Yael Bridge’s perceptive account of the history of socialism in America—and American politics.

 

 

In an engagingly informative way, Bridge lets many talking heads—like authors John Nichols and Naomi Klein to historians Cornel West and Eric Foner, among many others—explain how socialism has been beneficial to our country, and she also introduces the new socialists. Along with rock stars like Bernie and AOC, there’s a Virginia state rep and an Oklahoma mom and schoolteacher unafraid to take on the big scary “S” tag and use it to affect positive change.

 

 

 

 

 

The Deceivers 

This soggy noodle of an adventure, directed in 1988 by Nicholas Meyer, takes an undeniably fascinating historical subject—a marauding band of local Thuggees, also called “deceivers,” killing and robbing in 1825 India—and makes it as urgent and exciting as watching water boil.

 

 

Pierce Brosnan is the British officer who goes undercover to infiltrate the gang, but Meyer’s directing, Michael Hirst’s script and Brosnan’s performance drag down this two-hour drama, despite shooting on actual locations and being produced by the eminent Ismail Merchant.

 

 

 

 

 

The Outsider

Steven Rosenbaum and Pamela Yoder’s strangely attenuated documentary about creating the Sept. 11 Museum at Ground Zero focuses on Michael Shulan, the eponymous outsider who was creative director, then left on the museum’s opening day.

 

 

At first, the filmmakers concentrate on Shulan’s iffy background, although they cover others equally important in the genesis of the museum, so it’s odd that the film is titled The Outsider. He does give good sound bites, but so do people like the museum’s head, Alice Greenwald—so why single Shulan out? It’s too bad, because the film is a decent overview of cultural institution that has had controversy baked into its DNA.

 

 

 

 

 

Rare Beasts 

(Brainstorm Media) 

Billie Piper, a vital and buoyant performer, takes on too much in her triple-threat debut feature: the writer-director plays Mandy, who’s at the center of a personal but scattershot and superficial look at the ups and downs of the most indispensable relationships: with parents, children and significant others.

 

 

Piper bleakly teases out the insanity lurking around our everyday lives, and there are sequences here that are dazzlingly, daringly original. Too often, though, however clever the dialogue, excellent the acting and eye-popping the visuals, Rare Beasts is that not-so-rare beast: a nice try that doesn’t quite succeed.

 

 

 

 

 

Riders of Justice 

Usually I have little use for half-crazed, blackly comic explosions of violence like Anders Thomas Jensen’s revenge drama; but if it owes too much by half to Sam Peckinpah’s violent orgies from the ‘60s and ‘70s, its unique point of view is supported by characters worth watching and worrying about.

 

 

Mads Mikkelsen, indomitable as ever, plays an Afghan vet out to avenge his beloved wife’s death—which he believes might be murder—and allows himself to be taken in by a trio of brilliant outcasts with a plausible (maybe) theory; meanwhile, his teenage daughter, who was with her mom when she died, is navigating new terrain: her heretofore absent dad is also she has left. It’s all slightly ludicrous but done so persuasively, wittily and even touchingly that it somehow works.

 

 

 

 

 

Who You Think I Am 

The always luminous Juliette Binoche stars in director-writer Safy Nebbou’s banal twist on the rom-com, which does little with its intriguing premise of ghosting (in the technical sense).

 

 

Unfortunately, despite her usual elegance, Binoche is unable to enliven the character of Claire, a middle-aged professor who—after being unceremoniously dumped by her younger boyfriend—decides to makes a fake Facebook account to spy on him and, of course, ends up destroying his innocent roommate’s existence. An occasional scene works handily and suggests what the film might have been, but it returns too often to a torpid study of uninteresting people.

 

 

 

 

 

Wildland 

In director Jeanette Nordahl’s messy but explosive study of dysfunctional family ties, the great Sidse Babett Knudsen plays the matriarch of a family of three sons who takes in her teenage niece after the girl’s troubled mother is killed in an accident. The niece tries to ingratiate herself with her older male cousins, and they tolerate her up to a point—then a death occurs and she must decide if she’ll talk or keep quiet.

 

 

Knudsen is terrific, as always, and Sandra Guldberg Kampp is her equal as the niece: she must navigate treacherous emotional and physical terrain in a drama that dramatically demonstrates the devastation wrought in such situations.

 

 

 

 

Pre-Hamilton, Lin Manuel Miranda created and starred in this energetic musical that hit Broadway in 2008; Miranda was surrounded by such equally talented performers as Mandy Gonzalez and Karen Olivo, who gave gravitas to Miranda’s concept. Onscreen, director Jon M. Chu catches a lot of the atmosphere of this slice of upper Manhattan—Washington Heights, for those who don’t know—but expands other parts into something that approaches Lawrence of Arabia-sized spectaculars: “86,000,” a charming enough song onstage, becomes a cast of thousands.

 

 

It almost swallows up the individuals at the heart of the story, but the charming and gifted Melissa Barrera is nearly Olivo’s equal, which is saying a lot. The movie is a nice enough approximation of Miranda’s musical but pales next to the original. The UHD image is first-rate; the accompanying Blu-ray disc includes several on-set featurettes.

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

In the final, shattering film in his classic WWII trilogy that began his career—A Generation (1954) and Kanal (1956) preceded it—Polish master Andrzej Wajda explores the emotionally intense final days of the Polish Resistance against the Nazis. Wajda may have made better films in a storied career that lasted nearly six decades (he died in 2016 at age 90), but rarely did he create such a drama of gripping immediacy.

 

 

Lead actor Zbigniew Cybulski’s charismatic presence was lost far too soon when he was run over by a train at age 39 in 1967. Criterion’s new hi-def transfer is full of crisp and vivid detail: here’s hoping A Generation and Kanal—and many more Wajda features—will follow. Extras are a 2004 commentary and new video segment by film scholar Annette Insdorf, along with archival Wajda interviews from the film’s release and from 2005.

 

 

 

 

 

The Gang/Three Men to Kill 

French director Jacques Deray (1929-2003) is enjoying a posthumous renaissance of sorts: following Criterion’s release of 1969’s La Piscine, a pair of crime dramas also with heartthrob Alain Delon are out.

 

 

1977’s The Gang follows a group of crooks in post-WWII France, based on a true story; 1980’s Three Men to Kill is a twisty “policier” about corporate malfeasance and and hired killers. These effective contraptions include a couple of jaw-dropping action sequences, like the breathless car chase in Three Men that culminates with an exploded car where Delon himself is too close to the action for comfort. Both films look good and grainy on Blu. 

 

 

 

 

 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 

Choreographer John Neumeier’s COVID-era staging of the classic ballet based on Shakespeare uses some of Felix Mendelssohn’s immortal score but throws in atonal György Ligeti organ music and traditional barrel organ tunes that throw the fantastical elements of the forest-set scenes into sharp and vivid relief.

 

 

Neumeier’s dancers are superb actors and even better movers, and the entire show is alternatively entrancing and terrifying which, in these times, might be the right approach. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio; lone extra is a 30-minute Neumeier interview.

 

 

 

 

 

Prodigal Son—Complete 2nd Season 

The second season of this high-concept series ups the ante even more than it did originally, as the profiler working with the NYPD to track down murderers discovers that there’s a lot of ambiguity to his relationship with his father—a serial killer of a couple dozen victims who’s currently in jail—whom he relies on to crack cases involving equally fiendish criminal minds.

 

 

the drama is even more over-the-top, the performers gleefully dive into their roles: Tom Payne as our anti-hero criminologist, Bellamy Young as his glamorous mother and Michael Sheen as dangerous dad who’s crazy like a fox. There’s a first-rate hi-def transfer; extras are two making-of featurettes.

 

 

 

 

As one of the most successful franchises on network TV, the NCIS umbrella encompasses three series: the original, set in Washington D.C.; the first spinoff, set in Los Angeles; and the most recent, in New Orleans, which is also the first to sign off, after seven seasons. Each series shrewdly uses its city’s locations as the rigorous investigators solve their increasingly dramatic cases.

 

 

All of the series’ casts—which are led by Mark Harmon and Maria Bello (D.C.), LL Cool J and Chris O’Donnell (Los Angeles), and Scott Bakula and CCH Pounder (New Orleans)—often mustovercome the intermittently stale writing and clichéd directing to make these entertaining watches. All three sets contain the entire current seasons (number of episodes: 16 for D.C. and New Orleans and 18 for L.A.); extras include commentaries, featurettes and deleted/extended scenes.

 

 

 

 

 

Three works by Argentine tango master Astor Piazzolla (1921-92)—hence the album title—are dispatched with élan and vigor by violinist Karen Gomyo, who also conducts the string players in an enticing account of Piazzolla’s masterly Vivaldi-inspired The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires.

 

 

Gomyo shows off her own—as well as Piazzolla’s—virtuosity in three of his Tango Etudes, and she teams with guitarist Stephanie Jones for an exuberant run-through of Histoire de Tango, in which Piazzolla presents the evolution of the tango in an irresistible musical form.

 

 

 

 

 

Songs for New Life and Love 

For British soprano Ruby Hughes, this superbly programmed recital is the result of a personal connection to Helen Grime’s 2017 song cycle Bright Travellers, an emotional reaction to the joys and difficulties of pregnancy and motherhood—Hughes gave birth to her son before performing Grime’s work for the first time.

 

 

For this recording, Hughes intelligently pairs Travellers with songs that sensitively evoke childhood—two Mahler cycles, including the sorrowful Kindertotenlieder, a handful of Charles Ives songs and, finally (and equally personally), a traditional Welsh lullaby that Hughes sang to her son as an infant. Hughes caresses these tunes as only a mother can, and pianist Joseph Middleton offers sterling accompaniment.

In-Theater/Streaming Release of the Week 

Oren Jacoby’s valentine to the Great White Way and how it keeps reinventing itself is only 85 minutes, so it crams too much information and history that could have been presented with more nuance and complexity at a greater length. That Jacoby was only able to get backstage and rehearsal footage from The Nap, a middling British play from the 2018-19 season, doesn’t help, since aside from trans performer Alexandra Billings’ personal story, it isn’t very interesting.

 

 

But vintage footage of Sondheim’s classic Company (see below), A Chorus Line, the destruction of historic theaters so the behemoth Marriott Marquis Hotel could be built, Cats, Rent and Hamilton, along with new interviews of a cross-section of Broadway talent, producers and columnists, from Tommy Tune to Alec Baldwin and Christine Baranski, make this a must-see for theater buffs.

 

 

 

 

 

4K/UHD Release of the Week

Based on a supposed true story of a young boy’s exorcism, the latest in The Conjuring series metes out more of the same cheap frights, occasional subtlety—thanks to leads Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as the brave supernatural battlers—and the promise of another sequel.

 

 

Director Michael Chaves follows the formula perfected by director-turned-producer James Wan, which might sate its fans but otherwise seems like diminishing returns. The UHD image looks spectacular; the included Blu-ray disc has short featurettes of interviews and onset footage.

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

For anyone who saw The Hitman’s Bodyguard—and I know you’re out there—this sequel is about as clever as its title: once again, Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson engage in a battle of retorts and one-liners, with the added bonus of Salma Hayek’s perpetually foul-mouth rants (even more so than her hubby Jackson).

 

 

As in most comedic action thrillers, director Patrick Hughes has no sense of style or pacing; instead, whenever it all starts start to drag—and the banter among the stars begins to pall—he blows up more things and mows down more bad guys to perk up the audience. It might work for awhile, but not for the full 99 minutes. There’s an excellent Blu-ray transfer; extras are featurettes and a gag reel.

 

 

 

 

 

Original Cast Album—Company 

One of the Holy Grails for theater buffs, D.A. Pennebaker’s fly-on-the-wall documentary about the all-night recording session of producer Harold Prince and composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim’s breakthrough Broadway musical in 1970, has finally arrived on Blu-ray; although a mere 51 minutes, its laser focus on the show’s great songs sung by the original performers, all with Sondheim watching intently—and sometimes unimpressedly—is fascinating to watch.

 

 

As producer Thomas Z. Shepard presides over the marathon session, we see and hear performances of the astonishing patter song “Getting Married Today” or—in an uneasily difficult moment—Elaine Stritch bulldozing her way through her signature “The Ladies Who Lunch” at 4 in the morning. There’s a nice amount of grain in Criterion’s hi-def transfer; extras include Sondheim’s invaluable new commentary; a 2001 commentary by Pennebaker, Prince and Stritch; new interviews with Sondheim and orchestrator Jonathan Tunick; vintage audio interviews with Stritch and Prince; and—for some inexplicable reason—a Documentary Now! parody and a discussion by the parodists. 

 

 

 

 

 

Till Death 

If viewers ignore the hypocrisy and the many howlers in the dialogue, in the plotting and of plain common sense, S.K. Dale’s brittle chiller about a harried wife who is (literally) chained to her husband while the bad guys invade their remote hideaway is certainly an effective contraption.

 

 

That the glamorous Megan Fox, of all people, plays the wife with her usual self-assurance—always looking like a supermodel no matter how much blood has splattered or how long she spends in the snow and the ice in her bare feet—makes this even more of a guilty pleasure. The film’s wintry, icy locales look sharply stark in hi-def.

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Release of the Week

In Grégory Magne’s precisely calibrated character study, Emmanuelle Devos is a perfumer with an exquisite nose for scents but no people or relationship skills whatsoever—until a gruff but affable chauffeur (Grégory Montel)—who needs to keep his job if he has a chance at getting custody of his adorable 10-year-old daughter—begins working for her.

 

 

Despite the contrived plotting, Magne and his two leads are able to make something honest and even touching out of how these two opposites eventually find common ground professionally and personally.

 

 

 

 

 

CD Releases of the Week 

Although Samuel Barber (1910-81) composed his lyrical B-minor string quartet in 1936, it was only the second movement—the famously yearning Molto adagio—that became famous after Barber orchestrated it as Adagio for Strings and it was transformed into the go-to piece for times of national mourning or emotional moments in movies like The Elephant Man and Platoon. The Escher String Quartet’s superb rendition of the full three-movement work returns the Adagio to its rightful place; for good measure, the foursome also plays Barber’s lesser but still interesting original final movement.

 

 

Charles Ives (1874-1954) composed two quartets of great vitality and musical variety, although the succession of melodic fragments—from American folk tunes and hymns to Brahms and Beethoven—continually threaten to throw them out of whack. But the Escher Quartet’s precise playing keeps them from ultimately running off the rails.   

 

 

 

 

 

Jean Francaix—Chamber Music 

A wonderfully eclectic but underrated French composer, Jean Francaix (1912-97) excelled in many genres but was especially good at chamber music, which this disc—recorded between 1993 and 1995, when Francaix was still alive—demonstrates.

 

 

Indeed, the composer himself plays piano on a sprightly rendition of his Divertimento, accompanying the excellent flutist Thies Roorda, who also performs the attractie Le Colloque des deux Perruches with another flute player, Rien de Reede. The other two works—a lovely string trio and a short but stirring vocal piece, Cantate de Mephisto—are nicely dispatched, with baritone Romain Bischoff taking center stage on the latter.

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week 

French director Anne Fontaine’s fiendishly clever updating of Snow White reveals its intentions slowly but memorably as it parses out a story that starts as a fairy tale but soon traverses territory that keeps redefining itself—as well as its heroine, a young woman whose beauty and apparent innocence soon has seven (get it?) men pining for her.

 

 

Although Isabelle Huppert gets top billing and is her usual amusing self as the wicked stepmother, Lou de Laâge steals this satisfying feminist take on self-empowerment as Claire with a smart, sassy performance—and Fontaine’s camera loves her.

 

 

 

 

 

The Faithful 

Director Annie Berman fastidiously lays out the reasons why certain individuals—in this case, Pope John Paul II, Elvis Presley and Lady Di—become not only icons while alive but are venerated beyond reason after their death.

 

 

In some ways amusing—Berman shows off the tchotchkes, trinkets and other memorabilia that have become all the rage with their likenesses on them—the film is also a sobering study of how people are always looking for a deity to worship, whether it’s a pope, pop star or royal princess, and Berman does not whitewash her own complicity, since she has imposing collections related to these individuals herself.

 

 

 

 

 

The Lost Leonardo 

When a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi, sold at auction for nearly half a billion dollars to an ultra-rich sheik, the insanity of the art world was brought into sharp focus, and Andreas Koefoed’s absorbing documentary follows the story from the artwork’s “discovery” at a Louisiana estate sale to the business of sellers, restorers and self-styled experts, which turned the painting from a badly damaged artifact into one of the most important works ever created.

 

 

Is Salvator Mundi a real Leonardo? It depends on whom you ask—although it seems doubtful—but Koefoed isn’t interested in a definitive answer while laying bare the insular world of art where “authenticity” has more to do with money and publicity than actual authenticity. 

 

 

 

 

 

The Macaluso Sisters 

Based on her own play, director-writer Emma Dante’s intimate drama about how tragedy affects the lives of five orphaned sisters has a chamber quality that perfectly mirrors the claustrophobia in these decades-long complicated relationships. What Dante charts is often moving as her script puzzles out what happened one summer day and how the surviving sisters deal with it; Dante pulls together memories by visualizing them succinctly, even startlingly.

 

 

Even her overuse of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie No. 1” becomes a stroke of genius when it’s heard one last time in a different form from earlier cues. The actresses, who are led by a force of nature, Donatella Finocchiaro, make an unforgettable ensemble…or, rather, three ensembles.

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

This cheesy Hanna-Barbara animated series, which aired from 1967 to 1969, has all the hallmarks of early TV animation in its crude drawings, even cruder plots and vivid primary colors.

 

 

It’s now a cult item with a bizarre mixture of sci-fi and fantasy—the title creatures help a lone family trio protect their planet from assorted fantastical villains—that’s out-there enough to seem original. The series’ 18 episodes (which have been returned to their original state, unlike the previous DVD release) look good on Blu; lone extra is a retrospective featurette. 

 

 

 

 

 

Die Tote Stadt 

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), best known for his lush movie music, did the same onstage in several operas, the most famous and lasting this potent but downbeat drama about a man whose memories of his dead lover are destroying his life, leading him toward madness and maybe murder.

 

 

Korngold conjures intense dramatics out of soap opera characters through his luminous score, which sounds even more luscious played by the Bavarian State Orchestra under conductor Kirill Petrenko. And Simon Stone’s modernized 2019 staging couldn’t have better antagonists than German tenor Jonas Kaufmann and German soprano Marlis Petersen, who invest the leads with the naked emotion that makes Korngold’s fever dream a powerful experience. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.

 

 

 

 

 

Die Walküre 

The second part of Richard Wagner’s classic Ring tetralogy is the most performed, thanks to its intense brother-sister dynamic and the popular “Ride of the Valkyries,” which sounds completely different heard in the context of an exhilarating four-hour music drama.

 

 

As part of the new Ring cycle in Sofia, Romania, Plamen Kartaloff’s production is certainly of a piece, sacrificing the Tolkien-like trappings of conventional stagings for a broader approach that’s well-sung by its cast and well-played by the orchestra. Although not earthshattering, it does look and sound great in hi-def.

 

 

 

 

 

CD Releases of the Week