In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week 

Japanese guitarist Akio Sakurai —aka Mr. Jimmy—has pretty much turned his whole persona into a copy of Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, from his guitars and musical tone to the costumes Page wore performing in concert.

 

 

Director Peter Michael Dowd introduces Mr. Jimmy as a serious musician who respects and loves the music he plays to the point where he makes it difficult for his bandmates in Zep tribute bands to perform to his exacting specifications. But Jimmy remains sympathetic throughout, offbeat but charming, with a real talent for music making—even if it’s someone else’s music. 

 

 

 

Portrait of the Queen 

Do we need another documentary about recently deceased Queen Elizabeth II? Italian director Fabrizio Ferri thinks so, and he brings an artistic eye and subtle insight to this glimpse of her majesty through the eyes of the many photographers who were chosen to take official pictures of her over the decades.

 

 

There’s also fawning testimony from random people in pubs and parks along with the likes of Susan Sarandon, who contributes an amusing anecdote about meeting the queen. There’s even reverent narration by an onscreen Charles Dance, but the focus is rightly on the camera users, who discuss aspects of the queen’s “private” countenance even as they posed her for others’ consumption.

 

 

 

4K/UHD Release of the Week 

Andy Muschietti’s entry into the increasingly crowded superhero genre is a convoluted, occasionally fun but mostly enervating account of how the Flash deals with the murder of his beloved mother: he time-travels to meet his younger self and try and change past events by preventing her death—which then unleashes some unintended consequences.

 

 

Ezra Miller plays both Flashes, nicely modulated as the older but annoyingly herky-jerky as the younger; the great Spanish actress Maribel Verdu satisfies in a small role as his mom and Michael Keaton is slyly knowing as “alternative” Batman. But there’s too much clutter, both visual and narrative, to make this 144-minute slog consistently enjoyable. The film looks spectacular in 4K; extras are several featurettes, behind the scenes footage and deleted scenes.

 

 

 

Blu-ray Release of the Week

Irish filmmaker Mark Cousins does the seemingly impossible, creating a comprehensive history of the art of movies in a (relatively) brief 18-1/2 hours that is a treasure trove of information, witty commentary, brilliant use of film clips, location shots and interviews that make this a must-watch for anyone at all interested in the world’s most lucrative and widespread artistic medium.

 

 

Spread out over four discs are both of Cousins’ magnificent films on film: 2011's The Story of Film—An Odyssey and 2021's The Story of Film—A New Generation, the former divided into 18 chapters and the latter into two parts, covering eras from the silent and early talkies to the innovative filmmakers of Europe and Asia to Hollywood’s infamous blacklist and the digital transformation of the 21st century. Cousins finds engaging and provocative ways of tying several strands together thematically, historically, and artistically, although he’s not above criticism himself—his love for the technically proficient but shallow Baz Luhrmann, Christopher Nolan and Lars von Trier (for example) is, in my view, substantially misplaced. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.

 

 

 

DVD Release of the Week 

Natalia Almada, a Mexican-American filmmaker, is rarely discussed outside of festival circles, but perhaps this illuminating five-disc set of several documentaries and one fiction feature will change that. For the past 20 years, she has been making singularly challenging documentaries, starting with her emotionally devastating 2011 short, All Water Has a Perfect Memory—about the drowning death of her sister at a young age—and continuing with To the Other Side (2005), El General (2009), The Night Watchman (2011), and Users (2021), the latter faltering a bit in bemoaning technology while using it to create stunning images.

 

 

Almada’s lone fiction feature, the observational Everything Else (2016), is also included, Almada makes personal films that are political (or vice versa), as the set’s title states, and her humanity and empathy shine through in all of her films. Brief featurettes and a three-minute director interview are the lone extras; too bad Almada doesn’t give more of her contextualizing voice to these often mesmerizing films.

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Liam Neeson is back but he’s not better than ever: this routine remake of a Spanish thriller about a financial guru who is trapped with his children in his car with bombs under their seats has moments of tension and excitement, but mostly it’s Neeson barking at his kids, soon-to-be ex-wife, the bomber, and the cops as he tries to find a way to survive.

 

 

Nimród Antal directs with a sledgehammer, and the final twist unmasking the villain is patently ridiculous. While Embeth Davidtz is wasted as Neeson’s wife, their teenage kids are enacted persuasively by Jack Champion and Lilly Aspell.

 

 

 

Blue Box 

In Michal Weits’ authoritative documentary, the director matter-of-factly rattles the skeletons in her country’s—and family’s—closet by revealing the painful truths behind the actions of her great-grandfather Yosef Weitz, one of the leaders of the Jewish National Fund, which bought up much Palestinian land that led to Arab resistance and his own prescient prediction that Jews and Arabs would not be able to live together.

 

 

Using a treasure trove of Weitz’ diaries and letters to bolster the factual evidence she presents, Weits also weaves in several tense interviews with family members that are fraught with uncomfortable conversations underlining the divide between those who believe the “official” history and those who are more skeptical.

 

 

 

Piaffe 

In Israeli director Ann Oren’s convoluted but mildly diverting psychological study, a young woman named Eva takes over sound recording on an ad shoot after her sibling Zara suffers a nervous breakdown. Eva starts growing a horse tail after observing one and the previous naïve woman begins a hedonistic sexual relationship with a local botanist.

 

 

Oren tosses in bits of Greenaway, Breillat, and even Bunuel, but despite the secondhand imagery and ideas and complete lack of humor, the thought-provoking film is anchored by a formidable performance by the striking actress Simone Bucio as Eva.

 

 

 

4K/UHD Release of the Week

It’s not surprising that this relentlessly scattershot horror parody was originally a short, since, at 95 minutes, obvious comic moments become numbing after awhile: some viewers might even miss a couple of good jokes during the end credits.

 

 

The cast is game—even though the hilarious Jay Pharoah is offed far too early—but defeated by material that’s been done to, um, death, and director Tim Story and writers Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins (who also stars) never bring their A game. The film looks sharp in ultra hi-def; extras include a commentary, deleted scenes, outtakes and several making-of featurettes.

 

 

 

Blu-ray Release of the Week 

This opera by German composer Engelbert Humperdinck (1854-1921) is filled with complicated relationships and lovely vocal sections that come across beautifully in director Christof Loy’s clarifying 2022 production at Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam.

 

 

Of course, excellent lead performances by Olga Kulchynska, Daniel Behle, Josef Wagner and Doris Soffel greatly help, as does the music making by the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, Chorus of Dutch National Opera and a children’s chorus, all under the direction of conductor Marc Albrecht. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Acerbic, authentic and endlessly antagonistic, Bella Abzug was a thorn in the side of establishment politicians and a way forward for women in politics, and her always fascinating life—she served in the House but lost elections for the Senate and the Mayor of New York—is colorfully recounted in Jeff L. Lieberman’s flattering yet not fawning documentary.

 

 

Abzug’s influence and impact as a feminist leader is seen by the many successful women who agreed to sit down and discuss the woman they stood by, revered but maybe clashed with, from Hillary Clinton and Barbra Streisand to Shirley MacLaine and Gloria Steinem. The result is a gruff, tart biopic that mirrors the pugnacious personality of such a singular—and quintessentially New York—character.

 

 

 

Golda 

Dramatizing a few tense weeks during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Guy Nattiv’s biopic follows fearless Israeli leader Golda Meir during a vulnerable time for the nation—can it again defeat numerically superior Arab forces, as it did in 1967?—as well as for herself, since she was battling the cancer that would kill her five years later.

 

 

Nicholas Martin’s script is no-nonsense if rather routine, unfortunately. But Helen Mirren throws herself into the role of Golda with an aplomb that is contagious; and when she plays off the equally fine Live Schreiber as Henry Kissinger—he has the voice down pat without succumbing to caricature—it gives Golda a gravitas it often lacks.

 

 

 

The Owners 

In a Prague apartment building, co-op owners assemble for their monthly meeting, which quickly becomes chaotic as competing interests of the members come to a head while they attempt to finalize a seemingly routine sale. Director Jiří Havelka, who adapted his own play for the screen, sets his darkly satiric film almost exclusively in a single room; although the dialogue is alternately lacerating and humorous, nasty and snappy, it often bogs down in visual and verbal repetition.

 

 

It’s all enacted expressively by the cast, particularly the sneeringly by-the-books parliamentarian played by Klára Melíšková. Based on the box office returns in its home country, The Owners plays out as an inside joke which most foreign audiences will only “get” in the broadest sense.

 

 

 

Simone—Woman of the Century 

The astonishingly rich and tragic life of Simone Veil—a French Holocaust survivor who became a politician and progressive activist that was too much for even supposedly liberal France—is dramatized with conviction if a bit schematically by director Olivier Dahan, who also did the same for chanteuse Edith Piaf in 2007’s La Vie en Rose, which earned Marion Cotillard an Oscar for her fiercely intelligent performance. Here Dahan has two such imposing portrayals of Veil: the magnificent Rebecca Marder (young Simone) and the slyly subtle Elsa Zylberstein (older Simone).

 

 

Together they give Veil the humanity she deserves, as does the brilliant and too little-seen Élodie Bouchez playing Simone’s beloved mother. It’s too bad, though, that Dahan’s predictable crosscutting to and from concentration-camp flashbacks nearly throws the film out of whack. 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

Standup Sebastian Maniscalco’s leading man debut doesn’t stretch him at all—he basically plays a fictionalized version of himself in this dopey but agreeable comedy about a man skittish about introducing his ethnic Italian working-class father to his gorgeous artist fiancée’s WASPy family—especially her parents, a U.S. senator and head of a hotel conglomerate.

 

 

Maniscalco doesn’t embarrass himself, but he’s outclassed by Leslie Bibb (fiancée), David Rasche (her dad), Kim Cattrall (her mom) and especially Robert DeNiro as his dad, who gives a garrulously funny performance that hints at a more complicated movie than Maniscalco and director Laura Terruso have made. The film looks good on Blu; extras are three making-of featurettes.

 

 

 

Káťa Kabanová 

Czech composer Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) wrote extremely realistic and compelling character studies without grandstanding arias or other showboating, which still hold the stage thanks to their subtlety and complexity. Among his greatest creations, Káťa examines relationships in a small village rocked by adultery and suicide with music that is restrained but many-shaded.

 

 

This 2022 Salzburg production is beautifully performed by by conductor Jakub Hrůša, the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna State Opera Choir. Director Barrie Kosky’s smart staging is centered by American soprano Corinne Winters’s elegant and heartbreaking portrayal of one of Janáček’s most tragic heroines. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.