In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Spanish director Victor Erice has only made four films in a career stretching back a half-century—his latest (and most likely last) finds the 84-year-old auteur spinning a yarn about an actor gone missing while making a movie decades earlier and the attempts by his colleagues, daughter and interested journalists to track him down.

 

 

It’s a not very subtle exploration of the power of cinematic images and of the past in our lives, although there’s some clever use of a film-within-a-film and the always haunting eyes of Ana Torrent, who plays the missing actor’s daughter and who was unforgettable as the little girl in Erice’s debut film, the overrated The Spirit of the Beehive. By the time, its ponderous 170-minute running time is finished, the film has played out as a sort of shaggy-dog story that’s both too literal and not literal enough, climaxing with an obvious and too casual visualization of its title.

 

 

 

The Falling Star 

In their latest absurdist feature, Belgian duo Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon spin an offbeat web ensnaring a bartender, his double, his ex, and a hitman—all of whom are at the daffy mercy of their creators.

 

 

Like Aki Kaurismaki and Quentin Dupieux, Abel and Gordon create deadpan, goofily improbable worlds that can only happen in the movies; but like Kaurismaki and Dupieux, Abel and Gordon often stuff their films full of precious, fey, even enervating material that mitigates any pleasure gotten from their unalloyed gems of visual or verbal humor. And—as here—when the entire film stops dead in its tracks so the cast can perform an incongruous happy dance, you’re in dire straits. 

 

 

 

The Wasp 

How two women who were friends as kids but fell out over bullying and abuse get together to kill one’s husband is the unlikely plot of an overwrought and progressively more irritating drama written by Morgan Lloyd Malcom, based on her own play. Guillem Morales’ film is basically a two-hander set mainly in one room, but opened up a bit and with others flitting by—including a nosy young neighbor who improbably peeks into windows at just the wrong times.

 

 

Viewer interest in the women’s plight depends on tolerance for contrivance and clumsy symbolism (even the title is literalized early on). Naomi Harris and Natalie Dormer, troopers both, give intense performances but are defeated by the heavyhanded material.

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Danish composer Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) is anything but a household name in music, yet his lone opera—despite never being produced in his lifetime—has gotten much attention over the decades, and this eye-opening 2023 Berlin State Opera staging shows off this fierce 1920s’ drama as an unsettling and staggering work of musical theater art. Ersan Mondtag’s colossally realized staging comprises his own brilliant sets and costumes (the latter with Annika Lu) transforming several singers into the demons that Langgaard calls for.

 

 

The cast is uniformly superb throughout, and the orchestra and chorus play vividly under conductor Stephan Zilias. There’s excellent hi-def video and audio; too bad there are no contextualizing extras or interviews about Langgaard’s work  and this production.

 

 

 

Mozart—Le nozze di Figaro 

One of the classic comic operas, Figaro contains some of Mozart’s most sublime music and beautiful arias, all at the service of Lorenzo da Ponte’s near-perfect libretto. This 2023 Salzburg Festival production, staged adroitly by Martin Kusej, is crammed with talented singing actors who give wonderfully funny but meaty portrayals of these cunningly conceived characters—Krzysztof Baczyk’s Figaro, Sabine Devieilhe’s Susanna and Lea Desandre’s Cherubino are the best of a superb cast.

 

 

Leading the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna State Opera Chorus with aplomb are Raphael Pinchon and Jorn Hinnerk Andresen, respectively; both hi-def video and audio are first-rate.

 

 

 

Ride 

As a father desperate to treat his young daughter’s rare form of cancer, C. Thomas Howell gives a formidable portrayal that’s the heart of writer-director-star Jake Allyn’s well-intentioned if cliched character study. Allyn himself plays Howell’s rootless son—his driving while drunk caused an accident that badly injured his sister, although her hospital stay led doctors to discover her cancer—a rodeo vet hoping to earn enough to pay for her treatment.

 

 

The always underrated Annabeth Gish is on hand as Howell’s ex-wife, Allyn’s mom, and the local sheriff, who’s investigating a theft and shooting that just might involve both of them. It’s all very soap-operaish, but the excellent acting and Allyn’s flavorful directing are major assets. The film’s hi-def transfer is crisp and clean; extras are actor interviews.

 

Ah, summer in the Berkshires—beautiful weather (usually!), bucolic landscapes, great museums, concerts and theater. It’s pretty much been an annual tradition for us for three decades. This summer, we saw the wonderful Mad magazine exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge and the Clark Art Institute’s revelatory exhibition of Caribbean artist Guillaume Lethière, along with a couple concerts at Tanglewood and a Rodgers & Hammerstein revival at the Berkshire Theatre Group.

 

 

Pipe Dream, one of R&H’s more bizarre items—based on John Steinbeck’s novels Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday—is set among the populace of seaside Monterey, California, and centers around Doc, a marine biologist, and Suzy, a new gal who becomes a prostitute in the local brothel. They fall in love, but take awhile to admit it. The show hasn’t been on Broadway since its disastrous 1955 premiere; it was last in New York in a beautifully sung 2012 Encores revival with Laura Osnes, Will Chase and Leslie Uggams that nevertheless could do nothing with the dramatically diffuse romance.

 

The tunes are there, of course, but several sound like outtakes or discarded versions of other, better-known R&H tunes, like Suzy’s first number, “Everybody’s Got a Home But Me,” which is similar to “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” And a large ensemble—there are more than a dozen singing roles—dilutes any emotional or dramatic impact, since we keep bouncing around among Monterey’s many outcasts, male and female.

 

Since the Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge is a tiny jewel box, director Kat Yen and choreographer Isadora Wolfe seem hamstrung about what they can accomplish. Jimmy Stubbs’ movable sets help, although a pivotal scene between Doc and Suzy in an abandoned boiler is nearly impossible to see from all the seats. 

 

The six-piece ensemble, led by pianist and music director Jacob Kerzner, acquits itself well, although we lose the sumptuous orchestral sound Rodgers’ tunes need. Noa Luz Barenblat’s Suzy, though a bit standoffish, has a gleaming singing voice (although the incandescent Laura Osnes at Encores was pitch perfect in the role). The rest of the accomplished cast is led by Joe Joseph’s Doc and Sharone Sayregh’s madam Fauna. Too bad it might be a pipe dream to hope for a perfect Pipe Dream production.

 

 

Tanglewood has been the go-to summer destination for outdoor classical performances for decades; the Boston Symphony Orchestra has made its summer home there since 1936. Spending a day on the grounds is to immerse oneself in the history of outdoor music making, even if our first performance was indoors, in the Linde Center for Music and Learning, which opened in 2019, and where several Tanglewood Music Center Fellows—students who come from around the world every summer to perform and study—played a lovely chamber recital.

 

Music by Debussy (sonata for flute, viola and harp) and Ravel (piano trio) bookended Jessie Montgomery’s new Concerto Grosso, which the composer—who spoke before the performance—described as “a contemporary take on the baroque dynamic of solo against ripeno” in a program note. The Fellows played with enthusiasm and precision, bringing out Debussy’s elegance, Montgomery’s spontaneity and Ravel’s ravishment.

 

Our Tanglewood evening culminated with a marvelous BSO concert in the venerable Koussevitzky Music Shed. Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska led an adventurous summer program, opening with fellow Finn Jean Sibelius’ Canzonetta, in an arrangement by Igor Stravinsky for clarinets, horns, harp and double bass. Then came Stravinsky’s own Violin Concerto, a rare enough appearance on any program, which was played with exuberance by the brilliant Leila Josefowicz, who didn't need a score: she was so focused that she nearly bumped into the BSO violinists behind her—they pulled their music stand back to give her more room.

 

After intermission, Stasevska corralled her forces for a nimble reading of Sibelius’ brooding Symphony No. 5, whose rousing finale left the audience sated.

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week 

The border crisis—a political hot potato not only in the U.S. but Europe as well—is the subject of Agnieszka Holland’s incendiary film, which forcefully wears its anger on its sleeve. Never sugarcoating her stance, Holland climbs onto her metaphorical soapbox to bemoan the treatment of migrants by gaslighting politicians and intolerant police/border guards but even well-intentioned activists who are less effective than they hope to be. The film takes place in 2021 on the border between Poland and Belarus, a heavily forested area. Opening with a drone shot over the dense cluster of deep green foliage (hence the evocative title), Holland cuts to the sharp, stark B&W photography of Tomasz Naumiuk for the rest of the film’s 150 minutes.

 

 

Holland and cowriters Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko are unafraid to be unsubtle, repeatedly showing that inhumanity and dehumanization are baked into the process of dealing with so many refugees. Then there are moments of shared humanity: African refugees and the children of the family in a safe house, or the tow truck driver who volunteers to help transport refugees. Alongside professional actors as border guards, police and activists, Holland adroitly assembled amateurs to play refugees, and their authentic, lived-in appearance greatly contributes to Green Border’s verisimilitude.

 

 

 

Caligula—The Ultimate Cut 

When it was originally released in 1980, director Tinto Brass and writer Gore Vidal disowned the film they had worked on, ostensibly because producer and Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione gratuitously added hardcore inserts to a movie that was already an explicit chronicle of ancient Rome’s debauchery during Caligula’s reign. It’s considered one of the worst films ever made—it’s not, just a humorless mess—and has gained a cult following.

 

 

But producer Thomas Negovan decided, when pristine footage was found, to create an entirely new version, pointedly without  Guccione’s X-rated scenes. At nearly three hours, “the ultimate cut” wallows in the same repetitious depravity as the earlier version, but perhaps even more ponderously—maybe Guccione was right adding porn to alleviate the rest. Yes, Malcolm McDowell’s entertainingly hammy Caligula gets to breathe a little more, and Brass’ eye for composition and design is more fully discernable. While it’s no lost masterpiece, Caligula is a fuzzy but watchable mess.

 

 

 

The Good Half 

When aspiring writer Renn returns to his hometown of Cleveland for his mother Lily’s funeral, he must deal with his sister Leigh, father Darren, and his stepfather Rick along with Zoe, the therapist he met on the plane and his own memories of his relationship with Lily—the good and bad, hence the title—in Robert Schwartzman’s alternately wise and wobbly character study.

 

 

Some intimate moments (between Renn and the three women in his life) ring true, while others (a confrontation between Renn and Rick, a late-night break-in of Rick and Lily’s home) decidedly don’t. There’s a fine cast—Nick Jonas (Renn), Brittany Snow (Leigh), Matt Walsh (Darren), David Arquette (Rick) and Alexandra Shipp (Zoe)—that’s led by a gracious, winning turn as Lily by Elisabeth Shue.

 

 

 

4K/UHD Releases of the Week

In Jeff Nichols’ fact-based drama, a group of motorcycle riders forms a club in the Chicago area in the 1960s, and we watch its growth and demise—and the irretrievable damage to those involved—through the eyes of Kathy (a game but misdirected Jodie Comer), wife of biker Benny. Based on Nichols’ conventional treatment, this subject doesn’t cry out for dramatization; a documentary might have been a better alternative.

 

 

The disjointed and episodic approach—an interviewer talks to Kathy years later—lacks narrative propulsion; even the bike-riding sequences are desultory. Tom Hardy (Johnny, the club’s founder) and Austin Butler (Benny) inhabit their roles persuasively, but a little of this goes a long way; Nichols doesn’t personalize these characters’ stories enough to make them individuals worth watching. There’s a fine UHD transfer; extras comprise Nichols’ commentary and cast and crew interviews.

 

 

 

Furiosa—A Mad Max Saga 

The last Mad Max sequel, 2015’s Fury Road with Charlize Theron, had the usual breathtaking stuntwork and razor-sharp filmmaking, but there’s something distancing about watching a bunch of survivors vying for supremacy amid the industrial and desert wastelands that populate the series’ post-apocalyptic setting. The latest, Furiosa, is more of the same—even an emotive, appealing performer like Anya Taylor-Joy gets lost in the endless chase sequences.

 

 

Of course, George Miller is a superior hand at this sort of thing, but for all the technical proficiency, I prefer the bygone days of the first Mad Max films, where the stunts and visual imaginativeness were actually in front of the camera and not so much CGI. The film does look spectacular in 4K; extras include several interviews and featurettes.

 

 

 

Blu-ray Release of the Week

Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959), an underrated 20th century giant whose estimable musical career ran the stylistic gamut from chamber music to stage works, created this powerful opera from a novel by Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis, which is set in a small village during the Passion Play that recreates the days before Jesus’ crucifixion.

 

 

Simon Stone’s uncluttered 2023 production—the first time the Salzburg Festival staged a Martinů work—makes a crucial change from Martinů’s libretto: the Turkish refugees arriving in the village have a much bigger role, an obvious allusion to Europe’s current refugee crisis. Although it adds an interesting aspect to the story, it detracts from the small-scale drama at hand. It is a musically riveting account as Maxime Pascal leads the Vienna Philharmonic in a perceptive run through Martinů’s arresting score, while a fine singing cast is led by Sebastian Kohlhepp, Sara Jakubiak and Christina Gansch.

 

 

 

DVD Releases of the Week 

This excruciatingly slow, blackly comic 2023 exploration of Croatia’s seedy underbelly, the final film of director Lukas Nola before dying of cancer at age 58, in 2022, has unsavory characters exploiting, double crossing, harassing, and blackmailing one another, as 40-year-old businessman Miro—after having sex and sharing cocaine with her—discovers dead escort Maja in his hotel bathroom, and things unsurprisingly spiral from there.

 

 

Nola made a heavily satiric drama about his country’s cynicism and corruption, but since everyone is appalling it’s simply loads of thickly laded-on dramatic irony alongside metaphorical shots of birds and animals. Lena Medar as Maja and Hrvojka Begović as Miro’s wife Darija on enliven the proceedings in their brief appearances. 

 

 

 

Marguerite’s Theorem 

Co-writer-director Anna Novion has created pulse-pounding suspense out of the seemingly mundane subject of math: a grad school whiz, Marguerite (a superlative and complex turn by Belgian actress Ella Rumpf), sees her academic life fall apart when it’s discovered that the theorem she has worked on for years has a fatal error.

 

 

Novion’s brilliantly observed character study follows a young woman who slowly realizes that her life can be far more than mere numbers and proofs on a blackboard; Novion and Rumpf make Marguerite a truly compelling character, and it’s easy to share in her triumphs (her first orgasm is particularly wittily shot) and to cheer for her ultimate redemption.

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week 

Finnish master Einojuhani Rautavaara—who died in 2016 at age 87—and his contemporary, Kalevi Aho (b. 1949), are the focus of this excellent disc of unaccompanied choral works; although the four Rautavaara works take up two-thirds of the recording, it’s Aho’s shimmering Joy and Asymmetry that the release is titled after.

 

 

Still, Rautavaara’s varied musicality is matchless: his opener, The First Elegy, based on a Rilke poem, is beautifully realized, while the final work, A Book of Life, puts the listener on a thoughtful musical journey. Throughout, the Helsinki Chamber Choir and several mesmerizing solo voices bring these lovely works to vivid life; Nils Schweckendiek conducts sensitively.