In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week 

In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s period drama set in 1940, a Japanese businessman sympathetic to American and British interests finds himself in a conundrum: does he expose the atrocities he witnessed in China, which would also implicate his wife, a famous actress?

 

 

 

 

 

 

This restrained, intelligent exploration of conscience and morality in an era of belligerence and nationalism masquerading as patriotism might be too low-key, but its pertinence and exceptional filmmaking—Kurosawa’s command of the camera, editing, set design and superb cast—make it a must-see.

 

 

 

 

 

Best Sellers 

Michael Caine as an irascible old git—check. Aubrey Plaza as an adorably clever young woman—check. That’s it, really: director Nina Roessler and writer Anthony Greico’s dramatic comedy about a forgotten author and desperate book publisher who try resuscitating their careers depends almost entirely on the actors’ chemistry, and it works—to a point.

 

 

There’s a reluctance to go beyond the obvious “Caine does something obnoxious and Aubrey hilariously reacts to it,” and if the movie turns unbearably sentimental as it goes where it was heading all along, the two stars do their level best to keep it watchable, even enjoyable at times.

 

 

 

 

 

The Capote Tapes 

The second Truman Capote documentary to surface this year—Truman and Tennessee—An Intimate Conversation, studied the relationship between two great American writers—provides another glimpse at this tantalizing personality, author, and bon vivant mainly through his own words.

 

 

Director Ebs Burnough effectively brings together Capote’s own voice alongside archival and new interviews with friends, enemies and colleagues like Lauren Bacall, Norman Mailer and Dick Cavett, and the result is a richly idiosyncratic portrait of a richly idiosyncratic man.

 

 

 

 

 

In Balanchine’s Classroom 

Connie Hochman’s loving look at dancers who learned their art under the tutelage of the greatest ballet master of the 20th century, George Balanchine (1904-83), gives viewers myriad opportunities to watch the master at work: vintage footage of him rehearsing the men and women who went on to glorious careers themselves as prima ballerinas, principal dancers and teachers, along with valuable glimpses at some of Balanchine’s many onstage achievements with the New York City Ballet, which he cofounded.

 

 

Hochman smartly prods her subjects to speak with a mixture of awe, emotion, and even nostalgia about the biggest influence in their professional lives.

 

 

 

 

 

Storm Lake 

One of the last small-town newspapers in America, rural Iowa’s Storm Lake Times has been publishing for decades but—as Beth Levison and Jerry Risius’ perceptive documentary shows—the family-owned/operated local source for 3000 loyal readers is in a fight for survival: regional papers are swallowing up small ones, the internet lets anyone read news from anywhere at anytime, and the pandemic made it even more difficult to stay afloat. Publisher-editor Art Cullen and his family have kept the paper running for years and seemed to weather the shutdown last year with help from GoFundMe, but their prognosis is still iffy.

 

 

 

Levison and Risius illuminatingly show how, in a tight-knit community, even conservatives read the local paper despite Art’s left-leaning editorials because they want to see what’s happening with their neighbors and friends. Maybe, just maybe, this bodes well for our future?

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Releases of the Week

Rarely has a Masterpiece Mystery series been as stupefying as this second-rate knockoff of Martin McDonough and the Coen brothers (neither of whom I’m a particular fan of): when two annoying brothers try to cover up their accidental drunken hit-and-run killing of an old man, everything spirals out of their control.

 

 

Too bad director Robert McKillop and creator-writer Neil Forsyth aren’t in control either: instead of a tidy 90-minute movie, they have conjured this nearly four-hour morass with none of the characters or their relationships even remotely plausible. It’s well-acted, to be sure, which just brings the ludicrousness at the core into greater focus. Extras comprise three making-of featurettes.

 

 

 

 

 

(CBS/Paramount)

This reboot of the ’80s Tom Selleck hit Magnum P.I. reconfigures its action for the new millennium, although the third season’s 16 episodes demonstrate that the seams are showing, however charismatic star Jay Hernandez is and how updated the little twists and turns are.

 

 

Similarly, the fourth season of the action-packed Seal Team—in which Delta Force roots out terrorists in the Middle East, Tunisia, Ecuador, the Mediterranean and other far-flung places—merely nods to its heroes’ family lives in order to destroy more things (and bad guys), despite the granite-jawed David Boreanz as the team leader. Both sets include making-of featurettes.

 

 

 

 

 

CD Releases of the Week

The furthest thing from a dilettante, despite the fact that he also painted, wrote books and  by some, British composer Lord Berners (1883-1950) actually wrote music that was the last word in style and wit. One of his strongest scores is The Triumph of Neptune, a bracing and sophisticated work that was originally commissioned by Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev and first choreographed by none other than George Balanchine, in 1926.

 

 

Berners’ music is accessibly, endlessly inventive and tuneful, as the other three pieces on this disc—particularly the wonderfully charming puppet ballet, The Man with the Moustache—demonstrate in spades.

 

 

 

 

Igor Stravinsky—The Soldier’s Tale 

In the 50 years since his death, the works of Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) remain, in all their variedness and originality, at the forefront of 20th century music. The Soldier’s Tale, which grew out of the ashes of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, displays Stravinsky’s ease in adopting the colors of other musical eras; the frisky neo-classicism that emerged sounds like a hoot but, especially when played by violinist Isabelle Faust and a half-dozen superb musicians—the narrator, Dominique Horwitz, overdoes the English text at times—transforms into a resonant, disturbing tale of the devil, winning again.

 

 

Rounding out the disc are Faust’s lovely interpretations of two other Stravinsky jewels: the solo Elegie and the Duo concertant for violin and piano, where Faust is accompanied admirably by Alexander Melnikov.

4K/UHD Release of the Week 

A big, lumbering beast of a movie, Zach Snyder’s four-hour cut of the 2017 superhero epic—which he left while shooting because of his daughter’s suicide (this version is dedicated to her) and was replaced by cowriter Joss Whedon, who turned it into something completely different—is pretty much humorless, dark and dingy, but might work better at home in hour-long chunks: think of it as a four-part mini-series that doesn’t have to be binged.

 

 

The superheroes Batman, Wonderwoman, Aquaman, the Flash, Cyborg and even Superman (who’s been resurrected from the dead) are secondary to the super villains, and Snyder rarely nods to any plausible humanity throughout, even though parent-child relationships are front and center. Snyder also shot Justice League in the nearly-square 4x3 aspect ratio, which might have worked well on a huge IMAX screen, but even in ultra hi-def on a large TV, it looks impressive and incomplete. The lone extra is the featurette, Road to Justice League, with Snyder.

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Paul Guilfoyle’s 1955 low-budget crime drama pairs a frisky Angela Lansbury with a stolid Keith Andes in a Body Heat-type situation that (of course) soon unravels to the man’s disadvantage. Despite its brevity, this still seems stretched beyond what should have been an hour-long Perry Mason episode, but Lansbury and Claudia Barrett—as her virtuous sister—give it more than fleeting interest.

 

 

The B&W images look terrific in a restored hi-def transfer; extras are a commentary by film historian Jason A. Ney and a short featurette on actress/director Ida Lupino’s career making films for her own company, The Filmakers (sic).

 

 

 

 

 

Mathis der Maler 

German Paul Hindemith’s operatic masterpiece of stirring music and taut drama about the 16th-century Flemish painter Matthias Grunewald—whose extraordinary Isenheim Alterpiece is in the Unterlinden Museum in France—includes layers of humane, political, social and artistic themes.

 

 

Keith Warner’s 2012 Vienna production underscores Hindemith’s artistry in his starkly vivid staging, superbly conducted by Bertrand de Billy, played by the Vienna Philharmonic, sung by the Slovak Philharmonic Choir and embodied by a first-rate cast led by Wolfgang Koch as Mathis, in a performance of deep empathy. The hi-def video and audio look and sound impeccable.

 

 

 

 

 

One Crazy Summer 

This 1986 Cape Cod comedy by writer-director Savage Steve Holland is about as subtle as its creator’s name: that’s not to say it’s not entertaining—there are several moments of eye-popping inventiveness—but after the movie hits its stride about 30 minutes in, it goes on repeating itself while attempting to find more original avenues, turning it more enervating by the end.

 

 

Still, this diverting little film has attractive performances by John Cusack, Demi Moore and the winning Kimberly Foster, who for some reason disappeared in the early ’90s after a choppy career. There’s an excellent hi-def transfer; lone extra is a commentary by Holland and actors Bobcat Goldthwait (forgettable in an obvious role) and Curtis Armstrong.

 

 

 

 

 

Wagner/Bruckner/Salzburg Concert 

This summer 2020 Salzburg Festival concert unites one of the great voices of our time, Latvian mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča, with Richard Wagner’s wonderful Wesendonck Lieder, heard in an orchestration by Felix Mottl; Garanča caresses the melodies with loveliness and tact, and Christian Thielemann leads the orchestra’s sensitive musical accompaniment.

 

 

I’m no fan of Anton Bruckner’s gargantuan statement symphonies, but Thielemann and the orchestra provide quite a workout performing the Austrian’s fourth symphony, which amid its overwrought structure has some beautiful passages. There’s first-rate hi-def audio and video.

 

 

 

 

 

CD Releases of the Week

Polish composer Kryzsztof Penderecki (who died last year at age 87) was a master of many forms, including chamber music for strings, as this brilliantly performed disc by the Tippett Quartet excitingly shows.

 

 

Penderecki’s four quartets display the arc of his career in masterly fashion: the avant-garde sounds of No. 1 (1960) give way to the more structured dissonance of No. 2 (1968), while the personal and reflective ambience of No. 3, Leaves from an Unwritten Diary (2008), leads to the alternately autumnal and abrasive No. 4 (2016). Rounding out the recording are the brief, memorable one-movement Der unterbrochene Gedanke (1988) and Penderecki’s lone string trio (1990), a propulsive two-movement work. 

 

 

 

 

Jean Sibelius—Orchestral Works 

As Finland’s greatest composer, Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) has an exalted reputation that rests on orchestral works like his seven towering symphonies and lustrous violin concerto. This disc features lesser-known orchestral works, both instrumental and vocal, with Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen’s lovely voice centering the moody Luonnotar and a movement of Sibelius’ Pelleas och Melisande suite, which puts a Nordic spin on the tale that two Frenchmen—Gabriel Faure and, most famously, Claude Debussy—spun gossamer webs around.

 

 

The other highlight is the tone poem Tapiola: conductor Edward Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra really show themselves as worthy interpreters of Sibelius’ music. 

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week 

Rarely has tennis—or any sport, for that matter—been so vividly dramatized in its psychological, emotional and physical turmoil as in Quentin Reynaud’s illuminating and compelling drama, which follows Thomas, a 37-year-old former teen prodigy trying to remain relevant on the court even as he is worn down by his body, mind and personal life.

 

 

His wife Eve, a former player, wants him home to help raise their young son instead of playing in tournaments around the world, while his eternally disappointed mother, Judith, continuously and passive-aggressively berates his talent and choices. Reynaud relies a bit too heavily on the climactic French Open match, which is excitingly done but drawn out; yet his fantastic cast—Alex Lutz (Thomas), Ana Girardot (Eve) and Kristen Scott-Thomas (Judith) are all masterly—hits repeated aces throughout.

 

 

 

 

 

The Big Scary S Word 

Yes, the big scary is S word is “socialism,” which the right has bludgeoned the left with like a trowel for decades—but it wasn’t always so, and it doesn’t have to be in the future, according to director Yael Bridge’s perceptive account of the history of socialism in America—and American politics.

 

 

In an engagingly informative way, Bridge lets many talking heads—like authors John Nichols and Naomi Klein to historians Cornel West and Eric Foner, among many others—explain how socialism has been beneficial to our country, and she also introduces the new socialists. Along with rock stars like Bernie and AOC, there’s a Virginia state rep and an Oklahoma mom and schoolteacher unafraid to take on the big scary “S” tag and use it to affect positive change.

 

 

 

 

 

The Deceivers 

This soggy noodle of an adventure, directed in 1988 by Nicholas Meyer, takes an undeniably fascinating historical subject—a marauding band of local Thuggees, also called “deceivers,” killing and robbing in 1825 India—and makes it as urgent and exciting as watching water boil.

 

 

Pierce Brosnan is the British officer who goes undercover to infiltrate the gang, but Meyer’s directing, Michael Hirst’s script and Brosnan’s performance drag down this two-hour drama, despite shooting on actual locations and being produced by the eminent Ismail Merchant.

 

 

 

 

 

The Outsider

Steven Rosenbaum and Pamela Yoder’s strangely attenuated documentary about creating the Sept. 11 Museum at Ground Zero focuses on Michael Shulan, the eponymous outsider who was creative director, then left on the museum’s opening day.

 

 

At first, the filmmakers concentrate on Shulan’s iffy background, although they cover others equally important in the genesis of the museum, so it’s odd that the film is titled The Outsider. He does give good sound bites, but so do people like the museum’s head, Alice Greenwald—so why single Shulan out? It’s too bad, because the film is a decent overview of cultural institution that has had controversy baked into its DNA.

 

 

 

 

 

Rare Beasts 

(Brainstorm Media) 

Billie Piper, a vital and buoyant performer, takes on too much in her triple-threat debut feature: the writer-director plays Mandy, who’s at the center of a personal but scattershot and superficial look at the ups and downs of the most indispensable relationships: with parents, children and significant others.

 

 

Piper bleakly teases out the insanity lurking around our everyday lives, and there are sequences here that are dazzlingly, daringly original. Too often, though, however clever the dialogue, excellent the acting and eye-popping the visuals, Rare Beasts is that not-so-rare beast: a nice try that doesn’t quite succeed.

 

 

 

 

 

Riders of Justice 

Usually I have little use for half-crazed, blackly comic explosions of violence like Anders Thomas Jensen’s revenge drama; but if it owes too much by half to Sam Peckinpah’s violent orgies from the ‘60s and ‘70s, its unique point of view is supported by characters worth watching and worrying about.

 

 

Mads Mikkelsen, indomitable as ever, plays an Afghan vet out to avenge his beloved wife’s death—which he believes might be murder—and allows himself to be taken in by a trio of brilliant outcasts with a plausible (maybe) theory; meanwhile, his teenage daughter, who was with her mom when she died, is navigating new terrain: her heretofore absent dad is also she has left. It’s all slightly ludicrous but done so persuasively, wittily and even touchingly that it somehow works.

 

 

 

 

 

Who You Think I Am 

The always luminous Juliette Binoche stars in director-writer Safy Nebbou’s banal twist on the rom-com, which does little with its intriguing premise of ghosting (in the technical sense).

 

 

Unfortunately, despite her usual elegance, Binoche is unable to enliven the character of Claire, a middle-aged professor who—after being unceremoniously dumped by her younger boyfriend—decides to makes a fake Facebook account to spy on him and, of course, ends up destroying his innocent roommate’s existence. An occasional scene works handily and suggests what the film might have been, but it returns too often to a torpid study of uninteresting people.

 

 

 

 

 

Wildland 

In director Jeanette Nordahl’s messy but explosive study of dysfunctional family ties, the great Sidse Babett Knudsen plays the matriarch of a family of three sons who takes in her teenage niece after the girl’s troubled mother is killed in an accident. The niece tries to ingratiate herself with her older male cousins, and they tolerate her up to a point—then a death occurs and she must decide if she’ll talk or keep quiet.

 

 

Knudsen is terrific, as always, and Sandra Guldberg Kampp is her equal as the niece: she must navigate treacherous emotional and physical terrain in a drama that dramatically demonstrates the devastation wrought in such situations.

 

 

 

 

Pre-Hamilton, Lin Manuel Miranda created and starred in this energetic musical that hit Broadway in 2008; Miranda was surrounded by such equally talented performers as Mandy Gonzalez and Karen Olivo, who gave gravitas to Miranda’s concept. Onscreen, director Jon M. Chu catches a lot of the atmosphere of this slice of upper Manhattan—Washington Heights, for those who don’t know—but expands other parts into something that approaches Lawrence of Arabia-sized spectaculars: “86,000,” a charming enough song onstage, becomes a cast of thousands.

 

 

It almost swallows up the individuals at the heart of the story, but the charming and gifted Melissa Barrera is nearly Olivo’s equal, which is saying a lot. The movie is a nice enough approximation of Miranda’s musical but pales next to the original. The UHD image is first-rate; the accompanying Blu-ray disc includes several on-set featurettes.

 

 

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

In the final, shattering film in his classic WWII trilogy that began his career—A Generation (1954) and Kanal (1956) preceded it—Polish master Andrzej Wajda explores the emotionally intense final days of the Polish Resistance against the Nazis. Wajda may have made better films in a storied career that lasted nearly six decades (he died in 2016 at age 90), but rarely did he create such a drama of gripping immediacy.

 

 

Lead actor Zbigniew Cybulski’s charismatic presence was lost far too soon when he was run over by a train at age 39 in 1967. Criterion’s new hi-def transfer is full of crisp and vivid detail: here’s hoping A Generation and Kanal—and many more Wajda features—will follow. Extras are a 2004 commentary and new video segment by film scholar Annette Insdorf, along with archival Wajda interviews from the film’s release and from 2005.

 

 

 

 

 

The Gang/Three Men to Kill 

French director Jacques Deray (1929-2003) is enjoying a posthumous renaissance of sorts: following Criterion’s release of 1969’s La Piscine, a pair of crime dramas also with heartthrob Alain Delon are out.

 

 

1977’s The Gang follows a group of crooks in post-WWII France, based on a true story; 1980’s Three Men to Kill is a twisty “policier” about corporate malfeasance and and hired killers. These effective contraptions include a couple of jaw-dropping action sequences, like the breathless car chase in Three Men that culminates with an exploded car where Delon himself is too close to the action for comfort. Both films look good and grainy on Blu. 

 

 

 

 

 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 

Choreographer John Neumeier’s COVID-era staging of the classic ballet based on Shakespeare uses some of Felix Mendelssohn’s immortal score but throws in atonal György Ligeti organ music and traditional barrel organ tunes that throw the fantastical elements of the forest-set scenes into sharp and vivid relief.

 

 

Neumeier’s dancers are superb actors and even better movers, and the entire show is alternatively entrancing and terrifying which, in these times, might be the right approach. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio; lone extra is a 30-minute Neumeier interview.

 

 

 

 

 

Prodigal Son—Complete 2nd Season 

The second season of this high-concept series ups the ante even more than it did originally, as the profiler working with the NYPD to track down murderers discovers that there’s a lot of ambiguity to his relationship with his father—a serial killer of a couple dozen victims who’s currently in jail—whom he relies on to crack cases involving equally fiendish criminal minds.

 

 

the drama is even more over-the-top, the performers gleefully dive into their roles: Tom Payne as our anti-hero criminologist, Bellamy Young as his glamorous mother and Michael Sheen as dangerous dad who’s crazy like a fox. There’s a first-rate hi-def transfer; extras are two making-of featurettes.

 

 

 

 

As one of the most successful franchises on network TV, the NCIS umbrella encompasses three series: the original, set in Washington D.C.; the first spinoff, set in Los Angeles; and the most recent, in New Orleans, which is also the first to sign off, after seven seasons. Each series shrewdly uses its city’s locations as the rigorous investigators solve their increasingly dramatic cases.

 

 

All of the series’ casts—which are led by Mark Harmon and Maria Bello (D.C.), LL Cool J and Chris O’Donnell (Los Angeles), and Scott Bakula and CCH Pounder (New Orleans)—often mustovercome the intermittently stale writing and clichéd directing to make these entertaining watches. All three sets contain the entire current seasons (number of episodes: 16 for D.C. and New Orleans and 18 for L.A.); extras include commentaries, featurettes and deleted/extended scenes.

 

 

 

 

 

Three works by Argentine tango master Astor Piazzolla (1921-92)—hence the album title—are dispatched with élan and vigor by violinist Karen Gomyo, who also conducts the string players in an enticing account of Piazzolla’s masterly Vivaldi-inspired The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires.

 

 

Gomyo shows off her own—as well as Piazzolla’s—virtuosity in three of his Tango Etudes, and she teams with guitarist Stephanie Jones for an exuberant run-through of Histoire de Tango, in which Piazzolla presents the evolution of the tango in an irresistible musical form.

 

 

 

 

 

Songs for New Life and Love 

For British soprano Ruby Hughes, this superbly programmed recital is the result of a personal connection to Helen Grime’s 2017 song cycle Bright Travellers, an emotional reaction to the joys and difficulties of pregnancy and motherhood—Hughes gave birth to her son before performing Grime’s work for the first time.

 

 

For this recording, Hughes intelligently pairs Travellers with songs that sensitively evoke childhood—two Mahler cycles, including the sorrowful Kindertotenlieder, a handful of Charles Ives songs and, finally (and equally personally), a traditional Welsh lullaby that Hughes sang to her son as an infant. Hughes caresses these tunes as only a mother can, and pianist Joseph Middleton offers sterling accompaniment.