4K/UHD Release of the Week 

Nearly sixty years on, the Beatles’ first film remains innovative, hilarious and gloriously tuneful—it’s a happy combination of Alun Owen’s clever script, Richard Lester’s gleefully absurdist direction, the Fab Four’s wittily distinctive personalities and several of their greatest 1964-era songs, from the title tune and “Can’t Buy Me Love” to “If I Fell” and “And I Love Her.”

 

 

Criterion’s 4K transfer makes the B&W images—the luminous photography is by Gilbert Taylor—literally pop off the TV screen and the audio (overseen by Beatles producer George Martin’s son Giles) is exceptional; there’s an audio commentary, and the accompanying Blu-ray disc has many other extras: archival interviews with and featurettes about the Beatles and Lester; Lester’s breakthrough 1960 short, The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film; and an interview with Beatles biographer Mark Lewisohn.

 

 

 

 

 

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week

In this entertainingly tall tale of the man who opened the first restaurant in France—coinciding with the French Revolution in 1789, naturally—writer-director Éric Besnard has smartly cast Grégory Gadebois as the chef and Isabelle Carré as the woman who starts out as his unlikely protégé, then becomes his confidante and second-in-command: their chemistry gives the film that extra sauce and spice it needs.

 

 

At times, it’s uncomfortably remindful of such Miramax awards bait as Chocolat, but the typically French intertwining of the political, personal and culinary makes this, well, delicious. 

 

 

 

 

 

Italian Studies 

As she showed in her Oscar-nominated performance in Pieces of a Woman and Emmy-nominated turn as Prince Margaret in The Crown, Vanessa Kirby is incapable of a false note as an actress, so writer-director Adam Leon is lucky her presence anchors his occasionally intriguing but mainly pretentious character study.

 

 

Unfortunately Kirby—as an amnesiac author who falls in with a group of teenagers—can’t save this 78-minute one-note drama that feels much longer than it is.

 

 

 

 

 

Who We Are—A Chronicle of Racism in America 

Turning a staged lecture into a stirring documentary worked for Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth; lawyer Jeffrey Robinson goes a similar route for his brutally honest and relevant discussion of how our country arrived at its current predicament: he calls out the obvious racism embedded in the founding fathers’ writings and documents and how difficult it’s been to escape that past because it’s still going on today.

 

 

Robinson has a chatty but commanding manner while sharing facts and insights onstage (it was shot at New York City’s Town Hall in 2018) and he dives further into our shared history of embarrassment in several location shots, including one of him discussing the myth of the Confederate flag with a stalwart defender of it in Virginia. 

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

Chilean director Pablo Larraín found some mainstream success with a couple of clunky middlebrow biopics, Diana and Spencer, both making unfortunate hash of the legacies of Jackie Kennedy and Lady Di; much better are the films he made in his native country, like Post Mortem, No and, now, Ema, a chillingly unblinking study of a young woman—an artistic free spirit—who responds to the collapse of her marriage and tragedy involving her son by, literally, burning down her own existence and the world around her.

 

 

The fresh and vibrant actress Mariana di Girolamo is magnificent as Ema, humanizing a primarily symbolic role, and Larraín visualizes her experiences with wit, sympathy and perceptiveness. The film looks great on Blu; extras are a commentary by the film’s choreographer, Jose Vidal, and music video directed by Larraín.

 

 

 

 

 

Expresso Bongo 

Val Guest’s 1959 rock-n-roll curio, even more of a time capsule than A Hard Day’s Night, chronicles the early, heady days of the pop music biz in the form of the sleazy local talent agent Johnny Jackson (Laurence Harvey), who discovers teen singer Bert Rudge (Cliff Richard) and proceeds to turn him into a sensation.

 

 

This musical-cum-romantic comedy-cum gritty slice of life comes off as mostly corny now, but it’s definitely a valuable glimpse at the so-called innocent days of the music biz, which don’t look all that much different than the billion-dollar industry it became. The B&W film has a gritty look in hi-def.

 

 

 

 

 

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy 

In this engrossing triptych of stories about women dealing with the shifting dynamics of relationships, Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi develops, with an almost casual mastery that’s far more accomplished than his forebear, Eric Rohmer (whom Hamaguchi nods to), the near-perfect form for alternatingly amusing and unsettling studies that shudder with palpable tension.

 

 

The film looks splendid on Blu; extras are a Hamaguchi interview and a short, The Chicken, by director Neo Sora.

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Releases of the Week

The ongoing war between U.S. attorney Chuck Rhoades and hedge-fund entrepreneur Bobby Axelrod reaches its deliriously absurd apogee in the latest season of Showtime’s alternately spellbinding and silly drama: Axelrod simply gets on a plane and flees to Switzerland in the finale.

 

 

It’s quite an anticlimax for a showdown that’s been promised for five seasons, and now that Damien Lewis will not return as Axelrod, having Rhoades battle Mike Prince (Corey Stoll) probably won’t have the same frisson. As always, this season had the usual exacting performances by Lewis, Paul Giamatti, Maggie Siff, David Costabile and Condola Rashad to keep us watching. 

 

 

 

 

 

Historical Drama Collection 

Corinth Films has put together somewhat of a grab bag with this quintet of films made in the last decade or so centering on historical events, from Russia (Marlene Gorris’ Within the Whirlwind), France (Volker Schlondorff’s Calm at Sea), Germany (Juraj Kerz’s Habermann), Latvia (Viesturs Kairiss’ The Chronicles of Melanie) and Poland (Anna Justice’s Remembrance).

 

 

Of the five, Gorris’ dramatization of the life of Soviet dissident Evgenia Ginzburg (powerfully played by Emily Watson) and Schlondorff’s recreation of the heroic deaths of French resistance fighters, including 17-year-old Guy Moquet (the expressive Léo Paul Salmain) are the most worthwhile entries.

 

 

 

 

 

The Last Tycoons 

Florence Strauss’ eight-part documentary profiling dozens of important French film producers might seem excessive in its length, but in reality it’s probably not enough time to give several of these men their proper due, as it was they who allowed such visionary directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Renoir, Luis Bunuel and Jean Eustache to make uncompromisingly personal features.

 

 

Crammed with a voluminous amount of archival interviews alongside scenes from classics like Breathless, Forbidden Games, The Mother and the Whore and Z, this might not be a series that many viewers would binge, but those who are really into French film will find it irresistible.

 

 

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week 

German composer Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012) was a modernist who loved writing operas on all subjects and in many styles: this opera, which he wrote in 1986 and revised a couple decades later, is based on Yukio Mishima’s haunting novella The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, which was made into a middling movie in 1976 with Kris Kristofferson and the mesmerizing Sarah Miles as a seaman and his widowed lover, both of whom are disturbed by her teenage son’s nocturnal activities. Henze’s arresting score, which combines dreamy but restless seascapes with gorgeous arias—especially for Fusako, the widow—and sturdy ensembles, remarkably dramatizes this strange, nearly surreal world of inhibition, sexuality, anarchy and murder.

 

 

This recording, from Vienna in 2020, is vivid and intense, brilliantly played by the Vienna State Opera Orchestra under conductor Simone Young, and extraordinarily sung by Bo Skovhus as the sailor, Ryuji, Josh Lovell as Fusako’s disturbed teenage son, Noboru, and Vera-Lotte Boecker, who gives a deeply affecting portrayal of Fusako. The only thing missing, in fact, are the visuals, which the CD packaging gives a tantalizing glimpse of: here’s hoping a Blu-ray of the actual production is soon to follow.

Music by Tom Kitt; lyrics by Michael Korie

Book by James Lapine

Directed by James Lapine; choreography by Michelle Dorrance

Closes January 16, 2022

Vivian Beaumont Theatre, 150 West 65th Street, NYC

lct.org

 

That Flying Over Sunset, the new musical by James Lapine, Tom Kitt and Michael Korie, is closing ahead of schedule (it was supposed to run through February 6 but it’s now shuttering this Sunday, January 16) is a sad commentary on the current state of theater. Not only because of COVID, even if that has a lot to do with it; but because of the uncommercial nature of the show itself. At the New Year’s Eve performance I attended, it was the smallest crowd I’ve seen at the Vivian Beaumont Theater since John Guare’s equally uncommercial Four Baboons Adoring the Sun 30 years ago. 

 

Some theatergoers are obviously not returning yet, especially during the holidays with omicron running rampant, and the musical itself—about LSD trips taken by Cary Grant, Clare Boothe Luce and Aldous Huxley in the 1950s, with no big stars—is not as obviously appealing to audiences as Hamilton, Company, The Lion King, etc. But that’s too bad: Lincoln Center Theater can afford to subsidize ambitious shows by big hits like South Pacific or The King and I, but when audiences don’t come, it might make the powers that be skittish about bankrolling another experiment that might not pan out commercially.

 

Still, for all its flaws, Flying Over Sunset is the kind of intelligent, original show we need more of, with characters and a storyline that can’t be summed up in a single sentence. Aldous Huxley, Clare Boothe Luce and Cary Grant encompass a world in which the arts, media, politics and popular entertainment intersected far removed from today’s social-media cacophony. The show itself, as Lapine’s musicals with Stephen Sondheim did, avoids standard musical clichés, like Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods. They also followed a similar trajectory, their first acts a sort of conventional storytelling (George Seurat painting La Grande Jatte and fairytale characters acting out familiar stories) and the second acts exploding that (Seurat's great-grandson is introduced and Brothers Grimm narratives become grim realities. 

 

Sunset, too—as always with Lapine—is ingeniously mapped out. The first act introduces Clare Boothe Luce, U.S. ambassador/author/conservative married to Life magazine mogul Henry Luce; British writer/philosopher Aldous Huxley; and movie matinee idol Cary Grant, who announces his retirement from films. The three celebrities are each in a creative or personal funk and the LSD they take—Boothe Luce and Huxley through their good (and gay) friend Gerald, Grant through his wife’s analyst—provides an opening into another, perhaps fuller consciousness. 

 

After the trio meets and agrees to a shared trip, overseen by Gerald, the second act of Flying Over Sunset cleverly dramatizes their varied responses, but to increasingly diminished returns thanks to Kitt and Lorie’s songs, which don’t reach the ambitiously high bar of Lapine’s scenario. Although never tuneless, they are too often similar and saccharine; a happy exception is the lovely title sung.
 

On the plus side, Lapine has perfected his blocking (think of the characters moving into their correct places in the Seurat canvas in Sunday in the Park with George) with the sweeping movements of the cast, especially in the curtain-raiser, “The Music Plays On,” where Beowulf Buritt’s sleek but simple set design, Bradley King’s cannily evocative lighting, Toni-Leslie James’ spot-on costumes and Michelle Dorrance’s fresh and inventive choreography coalesce to create a truly mesmerizing opening.

 

Throughout the show, Dorrance’s choreography comprises thrilling but not bombastic movements that marry the musical’s “reality” and “acid trip” states, displaying a happy facility for never letting the show flag. The obvious instance is during Grant’s first LSD intake at the doctor’s office; he’s visited by his preteen self, Archie Leach, and proceeds to have a real rip-roaring tap-dance duet. Joel Yazbeck (Grant) and young Atticus Ware (Archie) tear it up, Yazbeck especially, and even though it’s show-offy, there’s so much exuberance in Dorrance’s moves and Yazbeck and Ware’s delight in performing it that the dance itself should go down in Broadway annals as a masterpiece of tap.

 

Yazbeck, Carmen Cusack (Boothe Luce) and Harry Hadden-Paton (Huxley) are all superb as the leads, singing and acting persuasively, but only Cusack gets the chance to really break loose vocally in the sentimental “final trip” moment when Clare meets both her deceased mother and daughter, culminating with Cusack meltingly singing “How?” Robert Sella holds his own as Gerald, but Lapine at times doesn’t know what to do with him: there’s an embarrassing “human centipede” moment when Gerald falls face first into Grant’s butt cheeks (don’t ask).

 

But if Flying Over Sunset doesn’t always live up to its dazzling moments, there’s much to admire, even enjoy, in a show that doesn’t want to be merely pleasant Broadway fodder.

Miklós Jancsó's Electra, My Love

Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó, who died in 2014 at age 92, was a true original, and his six films that

The Red and the White

make up this January series at the Metrograph in Manhattan (and online, at metrograph.com, through January 31)—The Roundup (1966), The Red and the White (1967), The Confrontation (1969), Winter Wind (1969), Red Psalm (1971), and Electra, My Love (1974)—provide a case study in intelligent, uncompromising filmmaking,  a real instance of “they don’t make them like this any more.” Jancsó uses elaborate camera choreography to dynamic psychological and dramatic effect throughout these visually and aurally remarkable films, which tackle events from Hungarian history, both remote and recent, with an uncanny sense of movement that most other directors couldn’t hope to approach. 

 

The exception, Electra, My Love, is a highly stylized interpretation of the ancient myth that transposes the locale from Greece to a Hungarian field that’s a master class in cutting within the camera shot—the entire film comprises 12 distinct shots. (All of Jancsó’s films have far fewer shots than any director would dare nowadays.) What’s amazing about Jancsó’s long career is that his last half-dozen films were as carefree and playful as these half-dozen were exacting and serious—but they all should, ideally, be seen on the largest screen one can find, especially in these superlative new restorations by the National Film Institute Hungary—Film Archive.

 

 

 

 

 

Diary of the Grizzly Man 

The story of legendary bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell—whose life (and that of his girlfriend) ended horrifically in the wilds of Alaska in 2003—was told sympathetically in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, and this three-part series dives even deeper into Treadwell’s own daring (many would say reckless) study of bears while living among them in Katmai National Park.

 

 

A voluminous amount of Treadwell’s own video and audio tapes as well as notebooks create a compelling if uneasy portrait of someone who was doing what he loved to do, even though it also led him directly to his untimely death at age 46.

 

 

 

 

 

4K/UHD Release of the Week 

Frank Herbert’s colossal sci-fi epic novel hasn’t been well-served in the movies: David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation was fatally flawed by then-newcomer Kyle McLachlan’s vapid presence in the lead role of youthful savior Paul Artreides; in Denis Villenueve’s new stab at adapting the book, Timothee Chalamet fares better but is still a cipher. Otherwise, Villeneuve’s visual sense is more conventional than Lynch’s, but with more improved technology at his disposal, it looks like a staggeringly imaginative visual achievement.

 

 

Unfortunately, much of the drama fizzles out early on, and the movie staggers to its non-conclusion that paves the way for (or threatens, depending on your appreciation) more sequels. The 4K transfer looks simply beautiful; the accompanying Blu-ray disc includes an hour of extras, mainly on-set featurettes and cast, crew and director interviews.

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Best known for her appearances in the softcore Emmanuelle films that made her an international sensation in the mid-’70s, Dutch actress Sylvia Kristel was usually cast as the willing young woman, even into the ’80s in such vehicles as Private Lessons and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She never seemed able to show off her talent as well as her attractiveness, although the four movies in this boxed set give glimpses of her acting ability along with her body. Only 1974’s Julia, in which Kristel plays a nymphet who is seduced by her boyfriend’s father, relies almost exclusively on her erotic charms. 

 

 

 

 

 

The other films are a grab bag for Kristel fans. Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Playing with Fire (1975) stars the appealing French actress Anicée Alvina alongside Jean-Louis Trintignant and Phillipe Noiret, with Kristel in a brief appearance. She has a bit more to do in the WWII Dutch resistance drama Pastorale 1943 (1978) and the Knut Hamsun adaptation Mysteries (1978), the latter moodily shot by cinematographer Robby Muller and starring Rudger Hauer, whose character falls for Kristel’s elegant wife. All four films have fine hi-def transfers; extras include archival interviews with Kristel (who died in 2012), new and archival interviews of cast and crew, and audio commentaries on all four films.

 

 

 

 

 

Only the Animals 

In Frederik Moll’s cynically unpleasant crime drama, the death of a woman named Evelyn leads to glimpses of the lives of five people she’s—for the most part peripherally—connected to, from young Marion, whom Evelyn has a brief affair with, to farmer Michel, who thinks he’s been flirting with Marion online, to Michel’s wife Alice, who’s carrying on an affair with another man, Joseph, who finds Evelyn’s body.

 

 

Moll adroitly moves among these people, but the utter contrivance of their relationships—I don’t know how much is in the underlying novel—makes the film risible from the get-to, despite its self-seriousness and extremely capable acting, especially by Nadia Tereszkiewicz (Marion) and Laure Calamy (Alice). The film looks excellent on Blu.

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Release of the Week 

In their study of a passionate young American ballet dancer, the first non-Russian to graduate from the Bolshoi Theatre’s training program, directors Dina Burlis and Sergey Gavrilov get up close and personal with an artist following her own path despite the skepticism of others that she’ll be able to dance “like a Russian.”

 

 

Womack’s story never unfolds as she hopes or expects—her marriage to a Russian dancer, partly one of convenience, ends, as does her association with the Bolshoi—but Burlis and Gavrilov’s intimate documentary takes its leave of Womack in the midst of a burgeoning career. Extras include additional interviews with Womack and other dancers as well as a behind the scenes featurette.

 

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week

After releasing a vintage recording of his three-act opera Nelson just last summer, the enterprising Lyrita label now sets its sights on the trio of marvelous one-act operas British composer Lennox Berkeley (1903-89) wrote in the ’50s and ’60s: the light comedy A Dinner Engagement (1954), the ravishing Biblical drama Ruth (1956) and the darkly comic Castaway (1967), the latter of which is heard during its premiere run at Benjamin Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival.

 

 

As good as Castaway is, the other one-acts are even better, especially as heard in BBC broadcasts from 1966 (Engagement) and 1968 (Ruth). A Dinner Engagement’s brilliant ensemble writing is Berkeley at his wittiest, while the gorgeous arias of Ruth—especially those sung by Alfreda Hodgson in the title role and the great Peter Pears—display Berkeley’s facility for memorably melodic writing.