Their Finest Hour—5 British WWII Classics 

(Naxos)

J.S. Bach—St. Matthew Passion 

Blu-rays of the Week 

(Universal)

Although Sam Mendes’ WWI epic is impeccably made—Roger Deakins’ Oscar-winning photography blends seamlessly with extensive CGI work—it’s still one of the most gimmicky and dishonest movies I’ve ever seen.

Mendes’ film may be a tribute to his grandfather, a Great War veteran, but 1917 plays out like a remote video game, as soldiers find themselves in increasingly contrived situations that become quite risible—I was surprised when, after the hero falls into water, a shark didn’t attack him. The film looks impressive in hi-def; extras comprise Mendes’ and Deakins’ commentaries, making-of featurettes and interviews.

Come to Daddy 

(Lionsgate)

This meretricious movie intends to be shocking with its sudden and protracted outbursts of violence, but director Ant Timpson merely piles ridiculous plot twists on his ludicrous characters’ backs, thereby creating an incoherent mess.

Unfortunately, none of this is enlivened by the presence of Elijah Wood and Martin Donovan, who do their best with what’s essentially an impossible situation. There’s a fine hi-def transfer.

The Grudge 

Taking off from the original Japanese horror flick and the American remake, this gratuitous reboot is heavy on the gore but sorely lacking in any ideas or originality, which is surprising considering that director Nicolas Pesce’s debut The Eyes of My Mother showed flashes of brilliance.

Here, however, Pesce settles for jump-scares and “yuck” moments, which does the movie and its game cast no favors. The hi-def transfer is excellent; extras include 30 minutes (!) of alternate and extended scenes as well as short featurettes.

Shooting the Mafia 

(Cohen Media)

The irrepressible Letizia Battaglia, 84 years young when director Kim Longinotto interviewed her for this enlightening documentary, is the center of a tale that is violent, sad, angry, regretful, but ultimately—unbelievably—hopeful. Photographer Battaglia’s lens caught all the inhumanity and horridness of a fraught period in Italian (and, more specifically, Sicilian) history, when the mob made mincemeat of the idea of justice with shocking killings of judges.

This film could stand as a pendant to Marco Bellocchio’s electrifying The Traitor, which covers the same ground, but Longinotto has someone Bellocchio doesn’t: Battaglia, wisely world-weary but upbeat. There’s a superior hi-def transfer; lone extra is a Longinotto interview.

Die Walküre 

The most popular of Richard Wagner’s four Ring operas, with four hours of music, is notoriously punishing on its performers, but in Keith Warner’s unaffecting 2018 production from London’s Royal Opera, the lead roles are assayed by a formidable cast: Emily Magee (Sieglinde), Stuart Skelton (Siegmund), Ain Anger (Hunding), John Lundgren (Wotan), Sarah Connolly (Fricka) and Nina Stemme (Brünnhilde).

Antonio Pappano ably conducts the superb Royal Opera orchestra, with stand-out sequences like “The Ride of the Valkyries” and “Magic Fire Music” beautifully played if too abstractedly staged by Warner. Hi-def video and audio are top-notch.

DVDs of the Week

Back to the Fatherland 

(First Run Features)

Kat Rohrer and Gil Levanon’s intermittently illuminating documentary follows several Israelis with German ancestry who have decided to return to their European homeland despite its obvious anti-Semitic history.

Rohrer and Levanon (she’s Austrian and is the granddaughter of a Nazi officer; he’s Israeli and the grandson of a Holocaust survivor) interview these young people and their grandparents, who are understandably perplexed over their decision, even though some of them agree to return to Europe for a visit, which triggers difficult but necessary recollections. 

I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians 

Romanian director Radu Jude’s films relentlessly dissect his country’s checkered history, like this latest 140-minute meditation on the massacre of Jews in Odessa by Romanian troops during WWII. 

Barbarians often seems more like a master’s thesis than a film; the director’s stand-in, a young woman planning a re-creation of the massacre, has intense discussions about guilt, responsibility, ethnic cleansing and even Steven Spielberg with a scholarly skeptic. Luckily for Jude, actress Ioana Iacob’s perspicacious and winning presence allows this dense material about inhumanity and memory to come across with clarity and power. 

CDs of the Week

Aspects of America—Pulitzer Edition 

(Pentatone)

This valuable disc collects three American composers’ works which won the Pulitzer Prize in music over the span of a half-century: Howard Hanson’s moody Symphony No. 4—appropriately subtitled “Requiem”—was the 1944 winner; Walter Piston’s exuberant Symphony No. 7 was the 1961 winner; and Morton Gould’s evocative suite for string orchestra, Stringmusic, was the 1995 winner.

This latest volume in the Aspects of America series is another winner, with Carlos Kalmar deftly conducting the Oregon Symphony.

Edvard Grieg—Violin Sonatas

(BIS)

Norwegian master Edvard Grieg is best known for his orchestral works, particularly his piano concerto and his incidental music to August Strindberg’s play Peer Gynt; so this disc, comprising his three violin sonatas, is most welcome.

Spanning two decades in his composing life, Grieg’s sonatas move from youthful buoyance to mature elegance, and Norwegian violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing performs them sensitively and with keen feeling, as does her pianist, Simon Trpčeski. Hemsing also contributes an attractive short solo piece based on a local folk tune.   

4K of the Week 

(BBC Earth)

The latest indelible BBC exploration of our amazing natural world is this seven-part series—each episode covering one of the continents—narrated by the indefatigable David Attenborough, which displays the myriad ways that current cinematographers and directors can drop us in the middle of such eye-popping scenes as cheetahs running down topis (African antelopes) or miniscule frogs feeding their even more microscopic tadpoles.

Drone photography has been perfected to such a great degree that image after unforgettable image jumps off the screen, sometimes literally. Needless to say, in hi-def, all seven hours look simply breathtaking; extras are short on-set featurettes.

Blu-rays of the Week

Bamboozled 

(Criterion)

Spike Lee’s most incendiary post-Do the Right Thing movie, this 2000 joint takes on the entertainment industry’s institutional racism, as a desperate TV creator (Marlon Wayans) hits on the idea of a new minstrel show—complete with black performers in blackface—which becomes an unexpected hit. As usual with Lee, powerful moments sit next to trite, tone-deaf sequences; also, as usual, the movie goes on too long, making its points repeatedly but to considerably less effect.

But this might be Lee’s best-cast film: Wayans, Savion Glover, Tommy Davidson, Michael Rappaport, Mos Def and Jada Pinkett give firsr-rate performances. Criterion’s packed edition has a decent hi-def transfer (the film was shot digitally) and a plethora of extras, including Lee’s commentary, deleted scenes, music videos, parody commercials, vintage making-of documentary, and new interviews with Lee, Glover, Davidson and costume designer Ruth E. Carter.

Beau Brummell 

The legendary dandy—whose picaresque adventures have long been a mainstay on both the stage and screen—is played by the dashing Stewart Granger in Curtis Bernhardt’s 1954 production, which also features a dazzling young Elizabeth Taylor as his love interest and the great Peter Ustinov as his foil, King George.

Although dramatically saggy, the movie does earn points for its sumptuous costume design and color photography (the latter by Oswald Morris) and the fine score by Miklos Rosza and Richard Addinsell. There’s an excellent hi-def transfer.

La bella dormente nel bosco 

(Naxos)

Ottorino Respighi—famed for his richly-scored orchestral works The Pines of Rome and The Fountains of Rome—also wrote several operas of melodic richness and stageworthy drama, such as this version of Sleeping Beauty originally created as a marionette opera, then revised and reorchestrated for the opera house.

Director Leo Muscato’s 2017 production at the opera house in the city of Cagliari (on the Italian island of Sardinia) is a delightful frolic, nicely played by the musicians and appealingly sung by the cast. The hi-def video and audio are top-notch.

DVDs of the Week 

(KimStim)

In 2007, legendary designer Yves Saint-Laurent had his final fashion show in New York, and Olivier Meyrou’s fly-on-the-wall documentary presents many backstage scenes and more intimate moments that drew the ire of Saint-Laurent’s partner Pierre Bergé—who figures prominently in the film—and he blocked its release. 

But after Bergé's death in 2017 (Saint-Laurent died in 2008), it's finally been released. Shot in appropriately grainy black and white—with occasional bursts of color—which makes it seem all the more like a clandestinely shot exposé, Celebration (certainly an ironic title) is a warts-and-all portrait of the designer as a frail, old man.

Cunningham 

(Magnolia)

Alla Kovgan’s documentary about the great Merce Cunningham—who died in 2009—manages to pack an astonishing amount about Cunningham’s storied dancing and choreographing career into 93 minutes, from his groundbreaking collaborations with composer John Cage to his international celebrity and enormous influence in subsequent decades.

We hear Cunningham’s own words as we watch his dances, both in archival footage and in new performances by current dancers in his company. The lone quibble: this stunning-looking film was shot in 3D, but not only is it not being released on 3D Blu-ray, it’s only available on DVD, so a lot of the visual brilliance is lost. What a missed chance! The lone extra is a short featurette by Kovgan explaining one of the sequences.

CDs of the Week 

(Deutsche Grammophon)

Violinist Daniel Hope’s latest recording is two discs’ worth of the most representative music of the by-gone Belle Epoque era, which flourished in Europe—and particularly in Paris—in the early years of the 20th century.

The first disc comprises orchestral music, starting with Chausson’s extraordinary Concerto in D major, which Hope dispatches with elegance. Works by Debussy, Massenet, Strauss, Schoenberg and Elgar (a pair) round out this lovely disc. The quirky but fun chamber-music disc consists mainly of miniatures by the likes of Faure, Berg, Webern, Zemlinsky, Ravel, Enescu, Bridge and Hahn, all played beautifully by Hope and his musical partners.

Ellen Reid—prism 

(Decca Gold)

Winner of last year’s Pulitzer Prize in music, Ellen Reid’s emotionally shattering opera (with an articulate and often blunt libretto by Roxie Perkins) explores the aftereffects of sexual assault in a non-linear and kaleidoscopic work that, based on this otherwise excellent recording, would probably be even more powerful onstage. But, as this faultless performance shows, the chamber orchestra is handled brilliantly and with endless displays of resourcefulness by Reid, especially in the pounding percussion segments, astringent sounds that sit side-by-side with her gorgeous melodies.

Julian Wachner ably conducts the NOVUS NY ensemble and the choir of Trinity Wall Street, and Anna Schubert and Rebecca Jo Lamb give performances of fierce intensity. A bonus track is violist Nadia Sirota’s haunting rendition of “Lumee’s Dream,” an excerpt from prism.