When the Frick Collection announced its intention to shutter and renovate the venerable mansion housing its art and display some of its invaluable collection at the nearby Breuer building—longtime home of the Whitney Museum of American Art and most recently a satellite home of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s special exhibits—it seemed the opposite of what the Frick stands for: stunning art in a beautiful location to house it all.

 

Would that balance between what’s inside and the building itself be lost with the move to Frick Madison? Or would the new surroundings provide a chance to look at familiar artworks in a new way? The answer, unsurprisingly, is both. 

 

To start with the cavils: those gloriously pleasurable rooms in which the masterly series of paintings by Fragonard and Boucher reside are gone; although the dazzling Boucher quartet, The Four Seasons, remains together in the new digs, the same cannot be said for the 14 wondrous Fragonard paintings making up The Progress of Love. In the original Frick mansion, the four lovely large works and the ten smaller ones create a harmonious whole. Here, they are on the walls of two unrelated rooms, which lessens their impact.

 

Still, for every missed opportunity, other changes work nicely. The life-size Renoir portrait, La Promenade, always seemed out of reach in its original place, in an alcove under a set of stairs behind a rope barring visitors from getting near it. 

 

Here, it’s right in front of us, in all its radiant glory. That’s what’s best about the collection on view at the Breuer: several works are no longer in their usual places above or away from visitors and are now at eye level, easier to study and admire. 

 

 

Similarly, reorganizing the artworks was necessary, so now there’s a room containing only the Frick’s peerless trio of Vermeers, and another has four Goyas—three brilliant portraits and the astonishing The Forge—lined up together; the many Van Dycks and Rembrandts get rooms of their own. 

 

It’s useful to see one artist’s works in a single space, even if the sense of an art collector arranging his valuable works and furnishings where he wanted to place them is, regrettably, lost.

 

Lastly, it’s illuminating to see Holbein’s great portraits of Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell right in front of us, making it easier to discover subtleties in the brushstrokes; and—most memorably—the only room with a single painting: Bellini’s gorgeous St. Francis in the Desert, which was restored several years ago and now, taken down off the wall in Frick’s original living room, can be studied intensely as one marvels at such an imposing work of art that remains eminently graspable. 

 

This is where one must mention the lighting at the Breuer, which allows for better viewing of certain paintings than the original Frick mansion does.  

 

I don’t want the Frick Collection ensconced at the Breuer forever—it’s slated for a couple years—but this welcome diversion is a satisfying way to visit old, familiar friends.

VOD/Virtual Cinema/Streaming/In-Theater Releases of the Week 

(Film Movement) 

An often riotous blackly comic revenge picture for our social media age, Ivo van Aart’s deliriously demented look at how an online columnist deals with trolls and stalkers—many physically threatening her—manages the impressive feat of getting viewers to root for her style of vengeance.

 

 

Although it does go too far (she wouldn’t be able to pull off what she does without anyone catching on), Katja Herbers is perfect as the eponymous anti-heroine, and the director saves his best bit for a satisfyingly crazed ending. This is the movie that Promising Young Woman wanted to be (and that Herbers looks like Carey Mulligan is a wonderful coincidence).

 

 

 

 

 

Queen Marie 

It might just be a standard biopic, but Alexis Sweet Cahill’s study of how the queen of Romania went to Paris after World War I to try and convince, against huge odds, the leaders of the U.S., France, and Great Britain, that her country deserves a seat at the post-war table, is a sweeping entertainment in the best old-fashioned sense.

 

 

Roxana Lupu is exuberant as Marie, the backroom political chicanery is plausibly presented, and there just might be a history lesson hidden in the handsomely mounted film’s melodramatic excess.

 

 

 

 

 

Silo 

For those who don’t live on a farm, this tense drama might be an eye-opener: it shows how a silo accident can have lasting, even fatal, consequences. Director Marshall Josh Burnette smartly narrows his focus almost immediately and, in a fleet 76 minutes, he not only recounts the incident and its aftermath but brings individual characters to life in an area of the Midwest that’s quite religious; there’s no condescension, only sympathy for everyone—and with an added scary moment for me when the teen stuck in the silo cannot reach his asthma inhaler (my worst nightmare).

 

 

The movie might be too on the nose, but there’s no denying it’s accomplished filmmaking that also subtly rages against a loosely regulated industry.

 

 

 

 

 

Street Gang—How We Got to Sesame Street 

For more than 50 years, Sesame Street has been the gold standard of children’s television programming, but Marilyn Agrelo’s breezy and informative documentary displays how experimental, even risky, the show was when it first hit the airwaves in 1969.

 

 

Through interviews with many of the principals—creators, producers, directors, writers, performers (human and Muppet)—and a trove of archival footage from the show and behind the scenes, Street Gang celebrates one of the great American television success stories and is also a worthy memorial to the great Jim Henson, who died at age 53 in 1990.

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

A double shot of British film noir, these B&W features are spiffily straightforward in their plotting, each following a killer just one step ahead of the authorities. In 1955’s Cast a Dark Shadow, curtly directed by Lewis Gilbert, Dirk Bogarde effectively plays a young man who kills his older wives for the money, but discovers too late that his latest diabolical plot has ensnared himself.

 

 

In 1946’s Wanted for Murder, directed gruffly by Lawrence Huntington, a strangler loose in London is right under the cops’ eyes, but they need more evidence to arrest him. Both of these by-the-numbers crime dramas at least look nice in new hi-def transfers.

 

 

 

 

 

Hemingway 

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s latest mega-documentary intelligently explores the life, career, artistry and legacy of one of America’s greatest—and most self-destructive—writers, Ernest Hemingway: his novels The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms are recognizable titles even to those who haven’t read his books, and he’s the last word in boozy, suicidal artists.

 

 

The six-hour series delves deeply into a troubled life filled with turbulence, much of it self-inflicted but also a lot of it most likely inherited. Although Jeff Daniels’s voice isn’t my idea of Hemingway’s, Peter Coyote is always a dependable narrator; there’s an excellent hi-def transfer but, disappointingly, no extra features.

 

 

 

 

 

Judas and the Black Messiah 

Daniel Kaluuya’s fiery, Oscar-winning portrayal of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton is the centerpiece of this occasionally clunky but engrossing docudrama about how the FBI infiltrated the Panthers in Illinois, leading to Hampton’s cold-blooded murder at age 21 in a 1969 raid.

 

 

As William O’Neal, the FBI informant, LaKeith Stanfield is nearly a match for Kaluuya’s passionate presence, but too much of the film is given over to the rote workings of the FBI, with Martin Sheen a caricatured J. Edgar Hoover. Director Shana King does get the atmosphere of paranoia amid the black power movement right. The film looks splendid on Blu-ray; extras are featurettes on Hampton and O’Neal.

 

 

 

 

 

The Little Things 

Although John Lee Hancock’s police procedural is unnecessarily convoluted—even by the standards of the genre—the director’s script does allow its three lead actors a chance to shine, individually and together.

 

 

As the main suspect, Jared Leto is appropriately creepy, while Denzel Washington and Remi Malek give the detective odd couple needed shading, with Washington’s seen-it-all worldweariness and Malek’s youthful swagger blending well enough to smooth over Hancock’s bumpy plotting and dialogue. There’s an excellent hi-def transfer; extras are featurettes on Washington’s cop roles and the give-and-take between Washington and Malek.

 

 

 

 

 

Quick Change 

In a long TV and film career, this 1990 caper comedy is Bill Murray’s lone directorial credit: he co-directed with Howard Franklin, from Franklin’s script, about a daring daylight bank robbery that goes perfectly—until the robbers’ trek to JFK airport goes spectacularly wrong.

 

 

As a jaundiced love-hate letter to New York City, Quick Change is often uproariously funny, although too often it pushes the absurdity to After Hours levels; luckily, Murray is his usual perfectly deadpan self, Geena Davis is delightful as his girlfriend and Randy Quaid amusingly nutty as their third-wheel sidekick. Best of all is Jason Robards as the police chief who won’t stop until he tracks down the gang who escaped the bank from under his nose, a typical Robards performance of equal parts boisterous bellowing and canny understatement. The New York locations look sublimely ratty on Blu-ray.

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Release of the Week

When luminaries from the pastry and dessert world, led by Israeli chef Yoham Ottolenghi,  converge on Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for an event celebrating the court of Versailles, the result is delectably eye-filling and mouth-watering, but what it took to get there—the mental stress, the long hours, the outside pressure—is recounted in director Laura Gabbert’s enjoyable documentary.

 

 

Although Ottolenghi is the star, he has surrounded himself with some of the best innovators in his culinary field, and the result is one scrumptious creation after another, all rendered beautifully by Gabbert’s camera.

VOD/Virtual Cinema/Streaming/In-Theater Releases of the Week 

How a newly-widowed dairy farmer overcomes her grief and stands up to a corrupt local co-op monopoly is the captivating subject of Icelandic director-writer Grímur Hákonarson’s droll drama, which rarely forces its pertinent points about injustice and community.

 

 

Of course, Hákonarson is greatly assisted by Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir’s remarkably unself-conscious portrayal of his heroine Inga, whose journey to independence is accompanied by an almost miraculous transformation, as she positively glows as her battle against a true Goliath reaches its climax.

 

 

 

 

 

Limbo 

In this comic misadventure about Omar, a Syrian refugee awaiting asylum while living on a remote Scottish island, writer-director Ben Sharrock’s deadpan style meshes well with the absurdity of Omar’s predicament—at least for a while.

 

 

Would that Sharrock wasn’t content to simply run in circles: we get a stultifyingly inordinate amount of time at a culture awareness class (run by the effortlessly charming Sidse Babett Knudsen, who’s unfortunately wasted in the one-note teacher role) and a melancholy but near-happy ending blatantly underlined by the film frame opening up from a confined, square aspect ratio to spacious widescreen. Still, there’s much to admire, especially the stoically dignified Amir El-Masry as Omar. 

 

 

 

 

 

My Wonderful Wanda 

Breathing glorious and funny new life into such a well-worn trope as the haves vs. the half-nots, Swiss director Bettina Oberli hits the right emotional, dramatic and comic buttons in this delightfully skewered story about a poor Polish woman who, while working as a caretaker for the patriarch of a mega-rich family, contrives to insure that she receives a handsome payout.

 

 

Admittedly, Oberli’s solution for her heroine is the ultimate contrivance but it’s done artfully and drolly—as well as acted to a fare-thee-well by Agnieszka Grochowska as the eponymous heroine, André Jung as the patriarch, the redoubtable Marthe Keller as the matriarch and Birgit Minichmayr and Jacob Matschenzas their adult children, all ludicrous but also very real.

 

 

 

 

 

Paris Calligrammes 

In this magnum opus, German avant-gardist Ulrike Ottinger remembers the beginnings of her long and varied artistic career through the prism of the city that beckoned to her, whose juxtaposition of art and politics helped inform and transform her own artistic inclinations for the next half-century.

 

 

Narrated in English by Jenny Agutter—there’s a French version is narrated by Fanny Ardant and Ottinger herself narrates the German version—Paris Calligrammes is a wonderfully vital journey even for those barely aware (or fully unaware) of the filmmaker, whose biggest arthouse title, 1989’s Joan of Arc of Mongolia, is barely remembered.

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

The classic Irving Berlin musical about sharpshooter Annie Oakley was a huge Broadway hit in 1946, followed four years later by George Sidney’s colorful if bumpy film adaptation.

 

 

Betty Hutton is an indefatigable Annie, Howard Keel a perfect romantic foil and Louis Calhern a boisterous Bill Cody, but even with timeless Berlin tunes “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and “Doin’ What Comes Naturally,” the movie is too static; Robert Alton stages the musical numbers effectively, although “I Am an Indian, Too” will undoubtedly raise ire today, despite Hutton’s energetic performance. The film looks smashing in hi-def; extras include a 2000 DVD intro by Susan Lucci and several musical number outtakes, both video and audio-only.

 

 

 

 

 

Hercules and the Captive Women 

This exceedingly cheesy entry in the Hercules canon was released in Italy in 1961, then re-edited and released in the U.S. two years later. For those who are in the mood, it’s certainly entertaining enough, but with wooden acting and less-than-special special effects, it most likely won’t gain new adherents.

 

 

There’s a very good hi-def transfer; extras are the 1992 Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) airing, an intro by MST3K writer and co-star Frank Conniff, critic/screenwriter Tim Lucas commentary; and featurette Hercules and the Conquest of Cinema.

 

 

 

 

 

Masculin Feminin 

One of Jean-Luc Godard’s most revolutionary films (a famous title card refers to “The children of Marx and Coca-Cola”), this 1966 cinematic essay is now quaint, dated and only occasionally compelling. Jean-Pierre Leaud is as dislikable as ever and the adorable Chantal Goya has little screen presence, which makes their onscreen travails—as well as Godard’s usual visual/verbal asides and nonsense refrains—less than beguiling, as serious events are treated trivially and mundane things are blown up to larger than life.

 

 

Still, it paved the way to the following year’s masterpieces, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (when is that coming out on Blu-ray?) and Weekend. The B&W photography of Willy Kurant looks luminous in hi-def; extras comprise interviews with Goya, Kurant and Godard collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin, footage of Godard from Swedish TV, and discussion of the film by two French critics.

 

 

 

 

These two beautifully programmed recital discs showcase the splendid artistry and radiant vocals of two of the best sopranos around today, both accompanied by the sensitive pianist, Joseph Middleton. Louise Alder’s beguiling French disc, Chere nuit, mixes several familiar melodies with a handful that are equally fine but less well-known; although I miss obvious classics like those of Faure and Chausson, Alder’s voice sounds so bright and elegant on everything from Ravel’s Sheherazade and Messiaen’s Trois Melodies to lovely miniatures by two female composers, Pauline Viardot and Cecile Chaminade; it’s a nice bonus to hear her tackle obscure songs by 20th century masters Poulenc and Satie.

 

Carolyn Sampson explores the music of Robert and Clara Schumann on Album fur die frau, setting up a dialogue between the husband-and-wife composers, with Robert’s masterly Frauenliebe und -leben as the jumping-off point for a give-and-take between the couple that’s missing from the original. The conceit works effectively, at times luminously, and becomes quite affecting by its end, thanks to Sampson’s emotional readings of such highly personal songs.