Theater/VOD/Virtual Cinema Releases of the Week 

Sadly, Kate Winslet and Saiorse Ronan strike few sparks in this 19th-century love story that has to labor in the shadow of the much better French feature Portrait of a Lady on Fire, despite writer/director Francis Lee basing her drama on real-life paleontologist Mary Anning’s intense relationship with neglected wife Charlotte Murchison, shown in the film built on intellect as much as attraction.

 

 

Lee shows the physical nature of her protagonists’ relationship fairly explicitly—including their first encounter, which ends with an eye-rolling cut from Winslet going down on Ronan to the fossil they discovered—and the two game actresses go for broke…along with their body doubles. But it all adds up to very little, unfortunately.

 

 

 

 

 

Ikarie XB 1 

Czech director Jindřich Polák made this 1963 sci-fi drama, and if it’s a product of its genre and its era—low-budget special effects and a Fantastic Planet/Lost in Space-type robot, for example—its intelligence and seriousness anticipate, in broad strokes, Kubrick’s masterly 2001: A Space Odyssey five years later.

 

 

At a compact 87 minutes, Polák’s dazzling drama tidily depicts a futuristic journey to “the white planet,” and his imaginative direction never relies on clichés or standard sci-fi tropes.

 

 

 

 

 

Love, Weddings & Other Disasters 

In this cutesy rom-com that gets increasingly desperate as it goes along, various people meet cutely and either get together or don’t by the climactic wedding, which is as lazily put together as nearly everything elsem. Dennis Dugan directs unpersuasively, while his script is seemingly slapped together from every available cliché.

 

 

With the exception of Diane Keaton (as a blind woman) and Jeremy Irons, the cast is defeated by the mediocre material. Maggie Grace, despite her natural likability, plays a slightly annoying character, while Andrew Bachelor, playing the least believable character onscreen, can’t overcome his silly story arc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4K Release of the Week

Why director Peter Jackson turned Tolkien’s middle earth novel—a straightforward, unpretentious prequel to the more expansive Lord of the Rings trilogy—into a multi-part, lengthy film adaptation is a mystery.

 

 

There’s much to enjoy (notably the elaborate physical production), but the plot is dragged out beyond endurance and the characters aren’t satisfyingly fleshed out despite the nearly eight-hour running time (nine hours total in the extended editions). Whatever the reasons, it all looks fantastic in 4K, although none of the Blu-ray releases’ extras has been included.

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

In the Hammer Studios’ stab at the infamous Mary Shelley story, Peter Cushing plays the eponymous doctor who brings inanimate material to life, only to see his creation go on a killing spree. This colorful 1957 adaptation has its moments—particularly in the scenes with Christopher Lee as the monster—but director Terence Fisher doesn’t do enough with such material for this to be a complete success.

 

 

Warner Archive’s two-disc edition presents three versions of the film in different aspect ratios: 1.85, 1.66 and—in the way many people first saw it on TV—1.33; extras are an audio commentary and five new interviews/featurettes about different aspects of the film.

 

 

 

 

 

Holiday Affair 

Janet Leigh and Robert Mitchum are a nicely matched couple of sorts in this Christmas-set 1949 romance that hasn’t earned much status as a holiday classic—I personally had never seen it before—but it’s a heartwarming concoction all the same.

 

 

Too bad the cute kid playing Leigh’s young son, Gordon Gebert, is no actor; but there’s a refreshing realism to Don Hartman’s direction, despite his movie hinging on something as innocuous as a toy train set. There’s a splendid new hi-def transfer; lone extra is a 1950 radio version of the story with Mitchum and Laraine Day.

 

 

 

 

 

Raining in the Mountain 

A heist movie set in a monastery? Why not, says director King Hu, whose stylish 1979 adventure explores the machinations of a group of monks over an ancient and important scroll.

 

 

Imaginatively directed with astonishing visuals that take full advantage of the widescreen frame, Raining is a far superior precursor to such martial-arts hits as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, with its action sequences developed more organically, and bolstered by the presence of such stars as Hsu Feng (also memorable in Hu’s A Touch of Zen). The film looks spectacular on Blu; extras are a video essay on the film and an audio commentary.

 

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Release of the Week

This successful reboot of the classic detective series starring Jack Lord as McGarrett and James MacArthur as his partner Danno—and which showed the then new state as a crime-infested paradise—lasted ten seasons (the original lasted a dozen, from 1968 to 1980), with a younger, spirited cast led Alex O’Laughlin and Scott Caan.

 

 

This complete set comprises the show’s 240 episodes sprint all over the islands as the good guys earn their pay. Extras include two episodes of the original series and crossover episodes of NCIS: Los Angeles and the Magnum P.I. remake.

 

 

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week 

Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) is best known for his shimmering vocal work, Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, but in no way does that make him a one-hit wonder. In fact, he has made substantial contributions in genres from string quartets (he composed 17 of them) and concertos (he wrote pieces for piano, cello, violin, guitar, harp, and harmonica) to symphonies, of which he wrote 11. (They’re numbered from 1 to 12, but number 5 is missing, and may never have been composed.)

 

 

This valuable boxed set brings together an imposing cycle performed and recorded over several years by the Sao Paolo Symphony Orchestra under the steady baton of conductor Isaac Karabtchevsky: their intelligently performed survey moves from his early romantic-era symphonies 1 and 2 to his more Brazilian-inflected symphonies 3, 4 and 6 to his later masterworks, No. 10, an epic choral work, and the surging, exciting No. 12, a capstone on the composer's brilliant musical career.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

Martin Scorsese mines familiar territory in his latest crime drama, a leisurely study of organized crime through the eyes of Frank Sheeran, who became a confidant to Mafia bigwigs and—or so he says in his autobiography, I Heard You Paint Houses (which is also the onscreen title of the film)—was responsible for the disappearance of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa.

 

 

With unsurprisingly rich and varied performances by Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino, The Irishman is never dull even if it runs for nearly three and a half hours; the iffiest element is the special effects that de-age the leading men so they can play scenes taking places decades earlier: it doesn’t look bad, exactly, but it doesn’t look seamlessly believable either. Criterion’s edition includes a fine hi-def transfer and an extra disc of bonus features, including interviews with Scorsese, Pesci, Pacino and DeNiro; a featurette about the de-aging effects and a making-of documentary; and archival interview excerpts with the real Sheeran and Hoffa.

 

 

 

 

 

Frühlingsstürme

Two musical rarities—one from the 20th century and one from the 17th—are given exemplary productions that might help securing future revivals. Frühlingsstürme (Spring Storms), by Czech composer Jaromir Weinberger, premiered in 1933 but was soon banned by the Nazis; this sprightly operetta may go on far too long but provides delectable roles for its performers, embodied at Berlin’s Komische Opera by the excellent singer-actors Alma Sade, Stefan Kurt, Vera-Lotte Boecker and Tansel Akzeybek.

 

 

Italian composer Pietro Antonio Cesti premiered La Dori in Venice in 1663, and this staging from last year in Innsbruck, Austria, provides its dramatic and musical due. Both discs have first-rate video and audio.

 

 

 

 

 

Sleepless Beauty 

Pavel Khvaleev’s slickly made but gimmicky horror flick might be the last word in torture porn: a kidnaped young woman is forced to stay alive by participating in gruesome killings at the same time as she is subjected to her captors’ demented demands like locking her in a box with several rats.

 

 

Though gleefully sadistic, after the first few bloodlettings and hide-your-eyes moments, the movie becomes routine and even monotonous, notwithstanding the sheer will power of Polina Davydova’s impressively physical performance. There’s an excellent hi-def transfer; extras comprise deleted and alternate scenes and an on-set featurette.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Still Life 

Chinese director Jia Zhang Ke reached the heights of cinematic brilliance in his best films, 2000’s Platform and 2004’s The World, but this 2006 exploration of the denizens of an old city, Fengjie,  that’s being flooded to make way for the massive Three Gorges Dam also has its moments of vibrancy, incisiveness and insight.

 

 

Following two people who are each searching for an absent spouse, Jia records their quotidian lives and relationships with great compassion. There’s a decent but not superb hi-def transfer; there are also no extras: too bad Jia’s related 2006 documentary, Dong, wasn’t included.

 

 

 

 

 

4K Release of the Week 

Peter Jackson’s towering trilogy of epic adventures based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic Lord of the Rings novels—The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King—finally makes it to ultra-HD in all its visual splendor, especially the loving Middle Earth recreation of Jackson and his army of collaborators.

 

 

The clarity of the images is breathtaking throughout, and both the original theatrical versions and Jackson’s extended cuts—which add an additional 50-60 minutes to each of the three films—are included, although there are no extras. (A larger boxed set including the special features will be released in 2021.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

VOD/Virtual Cinema Releases of the Week

Federico Fellini’s 1987 auto-hommage is as entertaining and playful as anything this irrepressibly self-indulgent filmmaker ever made. For his ostensible tribute to the glorious Cinecitta, the studio where he made so many of his classics, the great Italian director—unsurprisingly—drags in everything but the kitchen sink (elephants, attack dogs, even Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastrioanni, who watch, teary-eyed, their memorable scenes from La Dolce Vita) to elevate this wonderful memory piece.

 

 

Crammed with the usual indelible Felliniesque faces, Intervista is hilarious but also poignant, as its lovely, bittersweet freeze-frame at the end demonstrates.

 

 

 

 

 

The Walrus and the Whistleblower 

Marineland, a popular Canadian tourist attraction near Niagara Falls (I visited several times while growing up in Buffalo), is called out by Phil Demers, who was a trainer there and who quit after blowing the whistle on the animal abuse he witnessed.

 

 

Nathalie Bibeau’s compelling documentary follows Demers as he tries to get a bill passed in Canada’s House of Commons to end the practice of keeping marine mammals in pools while, at the same time, Marineland is suing him for allegedly plotting to kidnap a beloved walrus from the facility. Demers’ love of and forceful advocacy for these splendid creatures is heartwarming, and that there’s a happy ending of sorts is a bonus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week

Austrian Egon Wellesz (1885-1974) composed this hybrid stage work in 1926: subtitled a “cult drama for dancers, soloists and chorus,” Die Opferung is a curious but often powerful mix of set arias, recitatives and choral sections that are interspersed with alternately beguiling and harsh-sounding dance interludes.

 

 

Despite nearly going off the rails, it holds together dramatically in this superlative 1995 performance led by conductor Fredrich Cerha; the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Concert Choir and five vocal soloists are unimpeachable. The only drawback of this audio-only recording is that the dancers, so important to the overall structure, are missing; here’s hoping that there will be a new staging at some point that be filmed.

VOD/Virtual Cinema Releases of the Week 

Tania Cypriano’s engrossing documentary introduces Dr. Jess Ting of Mount Sinai’s Transgender Medicine and Surgery, which takes the needs of patients seriously and provide options for those undergoing the final affirmation of their gender.

 

 

Ting and his overworked Manhattan staff explain procedures to patients, mollify them when questions are raised and—in the specific case of one patient, who tries to kill herself after completing the procedures and was seemingly content—wonder if they can do enough to alleviate all of their difficulties. Cypriano shows Ting as the living embodiment of doing good for others, even at the cost of his own physical and emotional well-being, which he mitigates by playing the double bass, his beloved musical instrument.

 

 

 

 

 

Divine Love 

Set in Brazil in 2027—now a theocratic state in which couples are expected to stay together and where women’s fertility is publicly tracked—writer-director Gabriel Mascaro’s audacious allegory centers on a middle-aged woman who is part of the Party of Supreme Love, where sexual hypocrisy runs rampant and throws a wrench into her own childless marriage.

 

 

Anchored by a fearless performance by Dira Paes—who’s unafraid to bare herself both emotionally and physically—Divine Love makes trenchant observations about how the current right-wing Brazilian government could lead to this enervating outcome, marred only by a too-literal ending of biblical proportions.

 

 

 

 

 

Girl 

Bella Thorne always seems like she could be a formidable actress if not for the vehicles she keeps finding or putting herself in (she’s producing now): just this year, there are Infamous, a stillborn update of Natural Born Killers, and Girl, a forgettable slice of small-town nastiness directed without much distinction by Chad Faust.

 

 

Thorne gives as good as she gets to a now bloated and almost unrecognizable Mickey Rourke (as the local sheriff, of all things) and Faust himself, who gives himself a juicy role that he does little with. But it’s mostly for naught.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Soros 

The wingnut right’s ultimate boogeyman, Hungarian financier George Soros is the exact opposite of what they’ve accused him of being: he’s Jewish and was a teenager during World War II, so he wasn’t a Nazi; and he donates much of his billions to democratic causes, but he doesn’t underwrite every socialist or anti-fascist protest worldwide.

 

 

Jesse Dylan’s breezy portrait might be a bit too superficial—it only has 85 minutes, after all, to take the measure of a 90-year-old man—but it homes in on Soros’ movingly humane life story as it destroys the fact-free conspiracy theories that are as unhinged as your basic trump supporter. 

 

 

 

 

 

Truth Is the Only Client 

Did Oswald kill Kennedy alone? The Warren Commission twisted itself into a pretzel to say yes, and even though there have been hundreds of books written and dozens of movies made (most infamously Oliver Stone’s JFK) that assert otherwise, evidence of a real conspiracy has been tantalizingly scant.

 

 

In Todd Kwait and Rob Stegman’s stolid but straightforward overview, several of the commission’s members and assistants—including Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer—discuss the inner workings of the commission, like collecting and analyzing the evidence, although the “single bullet” theory still seems a one-off, like the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

The largely forgotten early 20th-century labor movement is the focus of Bill Duke’s powerful 1986 made-for-PBS drama that brilliantly marries reportage, historical accuracy and marvelous acting to become one of its era’s hidden gems.

 

 

Damien Leake as a southerner who travels north to Chicago to find work and Alfre Woodard as his loyal wife are pitch-perfect, while the supporting cast—including Moses Gunn, Dennis Farina and John Mahoney—add to the dramatic intensity and authenticity. The film looks excellent in hi-def; extras include interviews with Duke, Leake and writer/producer Elsa Rassbach. 

 

 

 

 

 

The Other Side of Madness 

The 1969 Manson murders have been exhaustively covered in several TV and theatrical films over the decades but director Frank Howard’s 1970 curio—which was shot in the aftermath of the killings—is a strangely compelling fantasia that actually has some cleverness to its exploitativeness.

 

 

Manson’s own routine pop songs as a soundtrack is more a novelty than anything else, but this demented drama is an unsettling time capsule of sorts. There’s a very good new hi-def transfer; extras are two interviews with producer Wade Williams and a CD of Manson’s songs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Summerland 

In playwright Jessica Swale’s writing/directing debut, a reclusive author reluctantly takes in a young boy during the London blitz, triggering memories of her earlier relationship with an equally free-spirited woman. Swale’s contrived melodrama hinges so much on implausible relationships and plot twists that one wonders about the value of her plays.

 

 

But director Swale elicits beautifully nuanced work from Gemma Arterton (author) and Lucas Bond (boy), along with sensitive support by Tom Courtenay, Penelope Wilton and—in the pivotal role—Gugu Mbatha-Raw. The lovely landscapes and seascapes take on an added luster in hi-def; extras are a behind-the-scenes featurette and interviews with Swale, Arterton, Mbatha-Raw, several other actors and crew members.

 

 

 

 

 

Tennessee Johnson 

Van Heflin plays Andrew Johnson, the Southern senator turned VP turned president after Lincoln’s assassination, in this sympathetic 1942 biopic that gets some details right while also pushing the fiction that Johnson was a worthy successor to Lincoln and would have healed the rift between North and South if he hadn’t been impeached.

 

 

William Dieterle’s drama smartly makes the impeachment trial the focus of the movie’s second half, but when Johnson defends himself with an impassioned speech and escapes being convicted in the Senate by one vote, we get a feel-good ending that’s anything but factual. It’s a flawed but weirdly fascinating alternate history, its crisp B&W compositions looking terrific in a new hi-def transfer. Extras comprise a 1943 radio broadcast of the story with Gary Cooper and vintage cartoon Baby Puss and short Heavenly Music.

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Releases of the Week

In the final explosive season of this twisty secret-intel TV drama, heroine Jane Doe—the unknown tattooed woman whose discovery at an NYC bus locker was the catalyst for the entire series—and her cohorts are in the most danger they’ve ever been…will they survive?

 

 

These 11 episodes of a COVID-shortened season include many hair-raising moments, but the excellent cast, led by Jaimie Alexander (heroine) and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (evil genius), is what saves this ultimately contrived setup. 

 

 

 

 

 

Conviction 

With the always excellent Marina Fois at its center as a juror convinced of a father’s innocence in his wife’s disappearance who cajoles a reluctant lawyer to take up the case in a retrial, Antoine Raimbault’s courtroom drama is an often exciting and tense experience.

 

 

While Raimbault sometimes allows contrivance—a convenient car accident, for instance—to propel the plot, Fois’ intensity (whether advocating for the defendant or dealing with her young son and boyfriend who feel ignored by her) intelligently grounds the film.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Girl Missing 

In Japanese director Koji Fukada’s slowly evolving drama, Mariko Tsutsui gives a performance of admirable restraint as a woman tangentially connected to a young man who abducts a young woman (herself related to our protagonist’s employer).

 

 

Fukada makes several pungent observations about media hysteria but allows his film to spiral to a messy and inelegant conclusion; much of the time, the drama is diverting and, at times, spellbinding. Extras are a 40-minute making-of featurette and a short, Love Comes Later, by Indian director Sonejuhi Sinha.

 

 

 

 

 

CD Releases of the Week 

I’m always partial to any recital disc that programs exclusively French composers, and this release from Israeli-born cellist Matt Haimovitz and Japanese-born pianist Mari Kodama certainly fills the bill.

 

 

Two major cello works—the opener, Francis Poulenc's exquisite sonata; and Claude Debussy's own, equally enchanting sonata—are played with graceful intimacy, while shorter pieces by Fauré (two of them!), Milhaud, Ravel and the sisters Lili and Nadia Boulanger are given equally committed readings by these perfectly paired artists.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Florent Schmitt—La Tragédie de Salomé

French composer Florent Schmitt (1870-1958) was a pupil of the great Gabriel Fauré, and it shows in his elegantly-crafted music, which JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic return to for their latest superb disc comprising Schmitt’s varied orchestral works, from his best-known composition, La Tragédie de Salomé (highlighting the excellent Women’s Choir of Buffalo), to the ravishing ballet score, Oriane et le Prince d’Amour. 

 

 

Rounding out this valuable recording are the radiant Musique sur l’eau (with the fine mezzo Susan Platts) and the premiere recording of a violin-led Légende, with the BPO’s concertmaster Nikki Chooi essaying the lovely solo part.