(Criterion Collection)

In John Cassavetes’ 1970 exploration of male midlife crisis, three lifelong Long Island friends go on a binge after the sudden death of another buddy that includes public drunkenness (oh the horror!) and a boys’ trip to London. Cassavetes’ worst tendencies come to the fore here—the 142-minute movie is excruciating to sit through, as scene after interminable scene plays out in real time, with scant insight—mitigating the forceful performances of Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk and Cassavetes as the eponymous characters.

Obviously director Cassavetes couldn’t leave these improvisations on the cutting-room floor, so we all have to suffer through them. Criterion’s hi-def transfer is splendid; extras include reviewer Marshall Fine’s commentary, archival interviews with the stars (like an embarrassingly self-indulgent appearance on Dick Cavett) and cinematographer Victor H. Kemper, and new interviews with producer Al Ruben and actress Jenny Runacre, who’s terrific in her scenes with Cassavetes.

Inside Daisy Clover 

(Warner Archive)

Based on a novel by Gavin Lambert (who also wrote the script), Robert Mulligan’s uneven 1965 film satirizes Hollywood through the exploits of a 15-year-old girl who lives in a shack on a Southern California boardwalk with her mother.

Though tackling—however gingerly—then-verboten topics like (closeted) homosexuality and statutory rape, the film’s more parodic than incisively satiric, but the performances of Natalie Wood (though too old for the lead role), Robert Redford, Christopher Plummer and Ruth Gordon keep interest high right up until the obvious but perfectly realized final image. The movie looks quite enticing on Blu; lone extra is a vintage Bugs Bunny cartoon (huh? nothing on the film itself?).

The Hunting Gun 

King Arthur 

(Naxos)

In Thomas Larcher’s often mesmerizing new opera, The Hunting Gun, Yasushi Inoue’s novel about a man, his wife, daughter and mistress is brought to life with brilliant immediacy and psychological complexity, thanks to the consistently surprising musical score and the fine 2018 world premiere Bengenz Festival production.

Henry Purcell’s 17th century theater-opera hybrid, King Arthur, staged in Berlin three years ago, has wondrous musical interludes but the spoken sections—especially when, as here, done in German—distract from the tale being told, despite notable contributions from the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin under René Jacobs, choir, singers, actors and dancers. Both operas look and sound terrific in hi-def; but unfortunately there are no extras, especially for the Larcher opera. 

VOD/Virtual Cinema Releases of the Week 

(Oscilloscope Laboratories)

Actress/writer Kelly O’Sullivan may be a double threat, but she has scripted herself an enervating character to play: aimless 34-year-old Bridget, who becomes a nanny while trying to keep her messy personal life from unraveling even further.

There is humor and the occasional insight in this portrait of a young woman looking for a true direction, but O’Sullivan and director Alex Thompson rely too much on contrivance, especially concerning young Frances, Bridget’s charge, and a superficial cutesiness, exemplified by Bridget going after Frances’ hot guitar teacher after having an abortion against her not-quite-boyfriend’s wishes. Such moments mute what should have been a more compellingly chaotic comedic character study.

Stage—The Culinary Internship 

(Cargo Film & Releasing)

In the Michelin-starred Mugaritz restaurant near San Sebastian, Spain, 30 aspiring chefs arrive for a nine-month intensive that can make or break their careers, and director Abby Ainsworth follows several of them around as they try and succeed in this fraught but dynamic environment.

Alongside the wannabes’ personal stories are their equally personal dishes—including such strangely compelling if not so edible-looking dishes like apple rot, which is apples with penicillin—all overseen by renowned chef Andoni Luis Aduriz, who runs this, one of the world’s most offbeat, even infamous eateries.

DVDs of the Week 

(IFC Films)

Rashaad Ernesto Green’s beguiling independent feature follows 17-year-old aspiring poet Ayanna, who falls for 20-ish music producer Isaiah and discovers that first love is serious and difficult—especially when she discovers she’s pregnant.

Green’s admirably frank, sexy portrait of a young woman finding herself has, in the winning actress Zora Howard (who co-wrote the script with Green) as Ayanna, the perfect embodiment of an intelligent, artistic and complex young woman who deserves the movie that’s been built around her. The lone extra is Green’s 2008 short, also starring Howard and also titled Premature.

Still a Revolutionary—Albert Einstein 

(First Run Features)

Showing that Albert Einstein wasn’t the cuddly, white-haired genius he’s been pigeonholed as, Julia Newman’s succinct 80-minute documentary, though a little rough around the edges, is as fascinating as its subject.

Through vintage footage, interviews with historians and biographers, and glimpses of Einstein’s wide-ranging opinions on everything from nuclear war and Nazism to civil rights and abortion rights, Still a Revolutionary provides a necessary corrective and brings Einstein into our own difficult century as our intellectual and moral lodestar.

CDs of the Week 

(Mercury)

The classic Canadian prog trio’s commercial 1980 breakthrough showed that the band could move into shorter song forms without sacrificing the epic structures and instrumental chops that characterized its earlier records. From the opening “The Spirit of Radio”—which became one of the few popular Rush anthems—to the closing multi-part suite “Natural Science,” the album split the difference between musical complexity (“Jacob’s Ladder”) and lyrical simplicity (“Entre Nous,” “Different Strings”), with the straight-ahead rocker “Free Will” thrown in for good measure.

This welcome two-disc set includes the superb-sounding remastered album and 11 electric live tracks from the group’s 1980 tour, featuring most of the then-new record along with earlier gems “Xanadu” and  “Cygnus X-1”—both Book I and Book II!

Arnold Schoenberg—Pelleas und Melisande/Erwartung 

(Chandos)

The break in Arnold Schoenberg’s career—from full-blown Romanticism to the 12-tone system—is heard in this excellent recording of one of his most ravishing scores—the tone poem Pelleas und Melisande, based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s drama that Claude Debussy turned into his operatic masterpiece—as well as his haunting monodrama Erwartung, composed six years after Pelleas and comprising the kind of resolutely “difficult” music for which he was renowned (and reviled).

Edward Gardner conducts the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra in a passionate Pelleas, while chamber forces most ably accompany the dazzling American soprano Sara Jakubiak in Erwartung’s solo vocal tour de force.

VOD/Virtual Cinema Releases of the Week 

(IFC Films)

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon return for their fourth go-round touring Europe and eating superb meals along the way, and if this entry is pretty much more of the same—amazing scenery, delectable dinners, and good-natured banter and dueling impressions—the stars have such great chemistry that the formula still works.

Michael Winterbottom directs with his usual light hand, and even obvious running gags like Greece the country vs. Grease the movie find laughs; and if the eventual plot divergence of comedy (Brydon) and tragedy (Coogan) is hackneyed, it doesn’t ruin an otherwise pleasurable journey.

Incitement 

(Greenwich Entertainment)

Yaron Zilberman’s provocative drama recounts the movements of Yigal Amir, assassin of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, from his thinking up the plot until carrying it out. Dazzlingly mixing in archival footage, Zilberman painstakingly and thoughtfully details how Amir, incensed by Rabin’s and Arafat’s Oslo peace talks, found passages in the Torah and interpretations by conservative rabbis to give him permission to act.

Yehuda Nahari Halevi, onscreen in nearly every shot, makes a persuasively confused killer; fine support comes from the actresses playing the women in his life: Daniella Kertesz (familiar from World War Z) and Sivan Mast.

Joan of Arc 

French director Bruno Dumont has, aside from his best films (Le Vie de Jesus, Humanite, Hadewijch), made duds like his 2017 Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, a misconceived heavy-metal musical biopic. Now Dumont has made a sequel, once again starring the intense but miscast (and now 10-year-old) Lise Leplat Prudhomme in the title role.

Shot in the medieval cathedral in Amiens, France, Joan of Arc records her merciless questioning by unsympathetic church investigators with dull literalness. Even the usually excellent Francois Luchini as a church elder grilling the young girl can’t make a dramatic dent.

Nomad—In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin 

(Music Box Films)

Werner Herzog’s new documentary is a tribute to his friend, the adventurer and writer Bruce Chatwin, who died in 1989 of AIDS. Following Chatwin’s writings and visiting several of the far-flung places he reported on and lived in, Herzog talks with Chatwin’s widow and several friends and writers to paint a vivid if occasionally hazy portrait of a true original who also played a part in the creation of Herzog’s own film Cobra Verde, which was based on a Chatwin novel.

Herzog puts himself front and center, unsurprisingly, but his career has been entwined with Chatwin’s so it’s forgivable. 

A Towering Task—The Story of the Peace Corps 

One of America’s most important exports of the past 60 years, the Peace Corps was created by JFK and, despite missteps and other political shenanigans, is still going relatively strong even during the pandemic that is the tRump administration.

Alana DeJoseph’s engrossing documentary, narrated by Annette Bening, recounts its origins, history and ideals, as everyone (including volunteers who became leaders in and out of government) illustrate the notion that American exceptionalism can still work in the fulfillment of a just cause.

Blu-rays of the Week

The Man Standing Next 

(MPI)

This fast-paced, exciting political thriller dramatizes the events leading to the 1979 assassination of South Korea’s president amidst the U.S. congressional scandal known as Koreagate. Director Woo Min-ho’s confident, stylish drama compellingly juggles several storylines which coalesce in a bloody conspiratorial climax.

The performances are excellent top to bottom, and the film’s quasi-documentary look gives it the weight of history, the context of which most Americans will surely be unaware of. The film looks sensationally good in hi-def.

The Mystery of the Wax Museum 

Michael Curtiz’s 1933 pre-code horror flick stars King Kong’s Fay Wray as the friend of an intrepid reporter who enters the crosshairs of a deranged wax museum owner who thinks she looks like the Marie Antoinette replica lost in a fire a dozen years earlier.

This fairly ridiculous little item at least doesn’t waste time getting from A to B (it’s 80 minutes long), even if the stilted acting and cheap sets don’t help matters. Warner Archive’s first-rate restoration gives the two-color Technicolor visuals a satisfying onscreen pop; extras are two commentaries and a featurette about Wray with an interview with her daughter.

The Way Back 

(Warner Brothers)

Ben Affleck gives a strong and vulnerable performance as a high school basketball star whose life has hit a dead-end (nights getting drunk at a local dive) so he agrees to return to his alma mater to coach a raw group of players.

Although director Patrick O’Connor unearths every cliché of the cinematic sports-redemption story (from Hoosiers to Rudy to Miracle), hitting all the usual bases until his hero is literally lying face-first in the street blotto, there’s an earnestness to the narrative and to Affleck’s presence that makes this overly formulaic drama watchable. The film looks good on Blu; extras comprise two making-of featurettes.

DVDs of the Week 

(IFC Films)

It’s too bad director Jeremy Teicher was allowed to film in the Olympic Village at PyeongChang, South Korea, during the 2018 Winter Olympics, since all he came up with was this familiar semi-romance between a cross-country skier and a volunteer dentist.

Alexi Pappas and Nick Kroll (who were given co-script credit for their seemingly improvised dialogue) provide a few tenderly awkward moments as their characters dance around a possible relationship, but it all adds up to much ado about nothing. A documentary about the actual athletes living in the village would have been more interesting than this.

The Venerable W. 

(Icarus Films)

Veteran French director Barbet Schroeder’s truly disturbing documentary introduces one of the greatest threats to peace and security in the southeast Asian country of Myanmar: Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk whose racially-charged sermons have contributed to the anti-Muslim violence that has overtaken the region in the past decade.

It’s shocking but not surprising when he confidently says that the U.S. can only have its own peace and security under Donald tRump. Schroeder records this man’s quiet ravings with bemusement, simultaneously providing facts as a necessary historical corrective to show how dangerous such deluded hatred can become.

CD of the Week 

(SWR Music)

Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) composed seven symphonies that ran the gamut from the early, playful “Classical” symphony to the weighty Fifth, his symphonic masterpiece.

The two works on this disc—played solidly if with only intermittent passion by the Deutsche Radio Symphonie under conductor Pietari Inkinen—are among the composer’s most intense: the Third Symphony recycles musical themes and episodes from his complex opera The Fiery Angel (which failed at its premiere) to astonishing effect; and the staggering Sixth Symphony, an affecting study of the Russian psyche following the Second World War.

Blu-rays of the Week 

(Warner Bros)

Unsurprisingly, Margot Robbie is a blast to watch as Harley Quinn, the hyperactive anti-heroine who destroys troublemakers with the help of her fellow “birds of prey” sisters in this often frenzied and at times even desperate DC Comics actioner by director Cathy Yan and writer Christina Hodson.

Despite the forced cutesiness, Robbie’s star turn glows, and there’s amusing support by Rosie Perez, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell and Ella Jay Basco; too bad Ewan MacGregor has negligible villainous presence. There’s an eye-popping hi-def transfer; extras include featurettes and a gag reel.

Gretel & Hansel 

(Warner Bros)

Director Osgood Perkins’ version of the Grimms’ fairy tale is unsubtly subtitled “A Grim Fairy Tale,” and though it looks stylish (with evocative photography, sets and costumes), its 87 minutes are diminished by a willfully draggy pace and even, at times, repetitiveness garnering diminishing dramatic returns.

Although Sophia Lillis is a most persuasive Gretel, Sam Leakey is a mostly wooden Hansel and Alice Krige hams it up mightily as the witch. The film looks exceptional in hi-def; lone extra is a storyboard featurette.

LA Phil 100 

Last fall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s centennial concert brought together three of its best-known music directors—Zubin Mehta, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the current head of the orchestra, Gustavo Dudamel—for a satisfying 90-minute exploration of music from Wagner, Ravel and Stravinsky to the great Polish modernist Witold Lutosławski’s Symphony No. 4 and a new work by Daniel Bjarnason, From Space I Saw Earth, conducted by all three maestros.

Hi-def audio and video are first-rate; lone extra is The Tradition of the New, a 52-minute documentary about the orchestra’s history.

Sweet Bird of Youth 

(Warner Archive)

Although Tennessee Williams’ play about a gigolo who returns to his hometown after failing in Hollywood has been bowdlerized by self-imposed film censorship in 1962, writer-director Richard Brooks’ adaptation still makes a strong impression thanks to its impeccable cast.

Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Shirley Knight, Rip Torn and Ed Begley (who won an Oscar) have these characters in their very bones, and they nearly overcome the loss of Williams’ potent dramaturgy about hysterectomy and castration, unfortunately replaced by abortion and a broken nose. Milton Krasner’s sharp color photography looks especially vivid on Blu-ray; extras include a vintage featurette and Page and Torn’s screen test.

Tea with the Dames 

This beguiling documentary about the grand dames of British acting—Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith—records them as they engagingly, hilariously and even touchingly discuss their long careers and friendships as well as mortality.

Director Roger Michell smartly allows the dames feel free enough to let fly with a curse word here or an extra slug of champagne there; inserting vintage clips of the quartet as actresses in prime form—from ’50s Shakespeare to 21st century films—is an added nice touch. One quibble is brevity: 83 minutes are not nearly long enough to do these women justice. So it’s too bad that there are no deleted scenes as a Blu-ray bonus; the film does look very good in hi-def.

Vivarium 

(Lionsgate)

When a couple visits a real-estate development, they are unable to leave and are soon forced to raise a young boy by what seem unseen alien forces—and things only get worse from there. Director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Garret Shanley’s visually striking but thematically muddled sci-fi/horror flick piles on unpleasantness and obviousness (the opening shows cuckoos taking over other birds’ nests to survive) and ends up as an inferior Twilight Zone episode stretched to 95 minutes.

The movie hammers home its one-note metaphor with a relentlessness that’s ultimately enervating, wastes Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots as the couple and has a botched ending that makes scant sense even in its nefariously unreal world. The film looks splendid in hi-def.

VOD/Virtual Cinema Releases of the Week 

(Kino Lorber)

Based on the best-selling book by French economic theorist Thomas Piketty—who also has a prominent onscreen role—Justin Pemberton’s engaging documentary presents Piketty’s theories on capitalism’s role in our current lopsided economic, social and political climate in a thoughtful way for mainstream audiences.

Supporting Piketty’s viewpoint are commentators who delve into the history of capitalism from Adam Smith to today—showing that the economic inequality that has only worsened in the past century is not entirely irreversible, but that time may be running out. (KinoMarquee.com)

The Infiltrators 

(Oscilloscope)

This fascinating hybrid of documentary and fictional reenactment tells a harrowing story—how prisoners in immigrant detention centers are assisted by those who get themselves detained to better facilitate their release—as a contrived balancing act that’s necessitated by the fact that what happened behind the centers’ walls was not filmable.

Despite their film not being as pointed as it should be, directors Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera provide a vivid snapshot of an America that’s at a crossroads—but one in which desperate and daring activists like those detailed in their film will do what it takes to make things right. 

DVD of the Week 

(Film Movement)

Bertrand Bonello’s different kind of zombie movie tackles history and agency by being set in 1962 Haiti and present-day Paris, where the descendant of a zombie attends a girls’ boarding school.

Too bad that, by avoiding flesh-eating gore, Bonello ends up with a moderately interesting film of unusual locations whose lack of hysteria leads to stretches of deathly dullness: talk about Rhianna (also a product of the Caribbean) and white teenage girls taking a page from the colonized to rid themselves of evil spirits are not dramatic subjects in Bonello’s hands. Extras comprise Bonello’s commentary and Philip Montgomery’s short film, Child of the Sky.

CDs of the Week

Magnus Lindberg—Accused/Two Episodes 

(Ondine)

2015’s sensationally gripping Accused (subtitled “Three Interrogations for Soprano and Orchestra”), Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg’s first work for the London Symphony Orchestra as composer in residence, takes as its theme the loss of freedom of speech through a trio of episodes (French Revolution, Communist East Germany, Obama’s America) that give powerful voice to women questioned under duress.

Soprano Anu Komsi rivets throughout this challenging dramatic showcase that runs nearly 40 minutes. Lindberg’s Two Episodes, inspired by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, is an attractive ensemble piece that highlights the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under conductor Hannu Lintu, both of which also provide strong support in Accused.

Gabriel Prokofiev—Concerto for Turntables No. 1/Cello Concerto 

A mash-up of the dance club and concert hall, Gabriel Prokofiev’s 2006 Concerto for Turntables No. 1 balances, with humorous bombast, the scratchy sounds of the DJ’s turntable (the soloist is British-born Mr. Switch, aka Anthony Culverwell) with a hypnotically dissonant orchestral part.

Prokofiev’s Cello Concerto is less forward-looking, hearkening back to such modernist masterpieces as his grandfather Sergei’s masterly Symphony-Concerto, among others. Boris Andrianov is the estimable cello soloist; the Ural Philharmonic under the direction of conductor Alexey Bogorad provides vivid accompaniment in both works.