Blu-rays of the Week 

(Film Movement Classics)

Bill Forsyth’s breakthrough feature was this extremely charming 1981 romantic comedy about a teen who falls for a sporty tomboy who makes the high school’s soccer team. Although Forsyth would go on to make better, more memorable films—like his masterpieces Local Hero and Housekeeping—there’s something disarmingly unpretentious to this perceptive comic study.

Winning performances by John Gordon Sinclair (Gregory), Dee Hepburn (tomboy) and Claire Grogan (another girl) help keep this as fresh and funny as it was nearly 40 years ago. The new hi-def transfer looks luminous; extras include a new Forsyth commentary, new interviews with Forsyth and Grogan, and a vintage interview with Forsyth.

Britt-Marie Was Here 

(Cohen Media)

Swedish actress Pernilla August—an accomplished veteran of films by Ingmar Bergman and her ex-husband Bille August—plays a forgotten 63-year-old wife who discovers her husband is having an affair, so she moves away and improbably becomes the soccer coach to a bunch of unruly teens.

This is crowd-pleasing, safe filmmaking whose sentimentality and cutesiness is obviously the draw here, along with August, always an appealing presence, as our heroine. There’s a fine hi-def transfer.

Fail Safe 

Sidney Lumet’s pulse-pounding 1964 drama about a Cold War nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet Union had the misfortune of being made at the same time as Stanley Kubrick’s scaldingly comic take on the subject, Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick even sued the production).

Fifty-six years later, Lumet’s tense thriller—with a fine cast led by Henry Fonda as the president, Larry Hagman, Fritz Weaver, Walter Matthau and Dan O’Herlihy—can be appreciated on its own. Criterion’s hi-def transfer is exceptionally vivid; extras include Lumet’s 2000 commentary; an interview with film critic J. Hoberman; and Fail-Safe Revisited, a 2000 documentary short including interviews with Lumet, O’Herlihy and screenwriter Walter Bernstein.

George Benjamin—Written on Skin/Lessons in Love and Violence 

(Opus Arte)

With 2013’s Written on Skin, British composer George Benjamin became a rock star in the opera world: his spiky music and the intense drama of Martin Crimp’s libretto about a fateful adulterous affair combine with committed performers and interpreters to create an overwhelming dramatic and musical sensation.

His 2018 followup, Lessons in Love and Violence—a static drama about an enraged and enraging monarch and the bitter rivalries among his family and subjects—finds Benjamin and Crimp spinning their wheels, even with returning Skin collaborators: director Katie Mitchell and singers Barbara Hannigan and Stephane Dagout. Hi-def images and audio are first-rate; extras are short interviews with Benjamin, Crimp and Mitchell.

Leonard Bernstein’s Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic, Vol. 2 

As music director of the New York Philharmonic, conductor Leonard Bernstein—a brilliant musical polymath and teacher with the rare ability to talk about music to any audience, young or old—hosted dozens of concerts in which the orchestral players demonstrated works both familiar and obscure while he chattily discussed the pieces’ relevance and originality.

Like volume 1, this four-disc set collects 14 episodes from the series that CBS aired (in prime time!) from 1958 and 1972—along with three episodes featuring young performers—as music by Copland (on his 60th birthday) and Shostakovich is played and analyzed alongside a couple of Beatles tunes. The half-century-old televised episodes look fine, if unspectacular, on Blu.

DVD of the Week

The Cellist 

(First Run)

Russian cellist Gregor Piatigorsky (1906-76) led a fascinating personal and artistic life, and Murray Grigor and Hamid Shams’s affectionate documentary rises to the occasion by being thoughtful about his legacy as it drifts heavily into “music geek” mode.

Interviews with many of Piatigorsky’s students and fervent admirers—including fellow cellists Yo-Yo Ma, Mischa Maisky and Stephen Isserlis—further illuminate a magnanimous portrait of a man, musician and mentor. 

CD of the Week 

(Harmonia Mundi)

Beethoven’s lone opera, Fidelio, originated as Leonore, titled after the eponymous heroine whose beloved husband, Florestan, has been jailed for crimes against the state.

Although both versions have their dramatic clunkiness—redeemed throughout by Beethoven’s soaring music, especially the great overtures (“Leonore No. 2” is included here)—there have been attempts in recent decades to resuscitate Leonore. In this estimable new recording, housed in an impressive hardcover book, René Jacobs adeptly conducts the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra as well as several well-cast soloists, led by Marlis Petersen’s transfixing Leonore. 

With her 1995 album Jagged Little Pill, 21-year-old Canadian singer Alanis Morissette was catapulted into the stratosphere. However cringeworthy many of her lyrics were, the songs were raw and angry, instantly memorable and singular, so it’s no surprise that she never approached that level of creativity or success again.

But making a dozen impassioned tunes of post-teen angst the basis of a musical would appear to be foolhardy—and after seeing Jagged Little Pill on Broadway, I realized that my fears were confirmed. It might not have been dramatic enough to put onstage a young woman trying to make sense of relationships; but that might have been more honest than what we get: Diablo Cody’s book concerns a superficially “perfect” middle-class Connecticut family surrounded by seemingly every conceivable social issue in the news recently.

We’re introduced to the Healy (for “healing”—get it?) family: there’s smiling mom Mary Jane, who’s hooked on painkillers and nearly dies from an OD. There’s Frankie, the smart high school daughter who’s adopted, bisexual and black, the progressive trifecta. There’s older brother Nick, the favorite, who witnesses a date rape at a drunken party and doesn’t do the right thing. And there’s dad Steve, who watches porn at work and is generally oblivious to what’s really going on under his roof.

The problem isn’t that Jagged Little Pill tackles heavy-duty issues, it’s that it does so without delving even semi-deeply into them; after bringing up one, it moves quickly onto the next. This creates a jagged little tonal problem for the show, most obviously when Morissette’s still-powerful smash hit “You Oughta Know”—turned into a brilliant showstopper by Lauren Patten as Jo, Frankie’s former girlfriend who discovered that Frankie slept with a male classmate—brings down the house, immediately followed by a harrowing account of the school-party date rape, a moment as awkward as Morissette’s teen-diary lyrics. Putting a teen’s anger over her girlfriend cheating on the same level as date rape is false equivalence of the highest order.

The bright spot of Cody’s book is “Ironic,” with its infamously ill-chosen lyrics about events that actually aren’t ironic. One day in class, Frankie reads from her own short story, which comprises the song’s lyrics. As she sings, other students—and the teacher—pipe in exasperatedly about the unironic nature of her passages. But that amusing self-reference only undermines the rest of the musical’s surface-level exploration.

Jagged Little Pill has been brashly directed by Diane Paulus, whose visual tour de force is a clever rewinding of the action during the song “Smiling,” one of Morissette and Glen Ballard’s two new songs, showing Mary Jane’s desperately buying her pills from a dealer after she can’t get a new prescription. Paulus has been immeasurably helped by marvelously suggestive sets by Riccardo Hernandez and insinuatingly evocative lighting by Justin Townsend. 

Songs old and new are well-handled by a cast that’s otherwise unable to create real characters out of ciphers. Along with Patten’s formidable Jo, the show’s standouts are Celia Rose Gooding’s Frankie and Elizabeth Stanley’s Mary Jane, all of whom at least nod toward complexity in an otherwise mainly cartoonish 2-1/2 hours.

(Criterion)

Jean-Luc Godard made his second film immediately after his breakthrough debut, 1959’s Breathless, but the incendiary material—the director scaldingly indicts both the French and the Algerians’ use of torture in the then-current Algerian War—caused its ban in France and it was not shown elsewhere until 1963.

Its elliptical narrative is typically Godardian, but Godard’s political urgency, the sharp B&W Raoul Coutard photography, and the first appearance of his then-muse, Anna Karina, make Soldat pointed and still relevant. Criterion has provided its usual superb hi-def transfer; the interesting if skimpy extras comprise two Godard interviews—a 1961 audio one and a 1965 video one—and a 1963 interview with actor Michel Subor.

London Kills—Series 2

Doc Martin—Series 9

(Acorn TV)

In the second series of London Kills, the team investigates the killing of an elderly man whose nine-year-old grandson called in the killing. Soon child abuse and other cover-ups dominate in this taut, tantalizing and extremely well-plotted follow-up to last season’s auspicious debut.

By now, Doc Martin is as comfortable as an old shoe, but series 9 throws a curve ball: the good doc is being hounded by officials unpersuaded by his unorthodox methods, even though it’s been good enough for the locals for years. Both series feature tremendous acting to go along with the fine writing. There are first-rate hi-def transfers; extras include interviews and behind-the-scenes featurettes.

Primal 

Even by the standards of recent Nicolas Cage fare, this is a doozy: he plays a big-game hunter whose treasured catch, a white panther, is cargo on a ship heading back from Africa to America. Also on board is a dangerous prisoner who, of course, gets loose and causes trouble, especially when he frees the panther and other dangerous animals of Cage’s including—of course—deadly snakes.

The claustrophobic ship setting isn’t really given a thorough workout by director Nick Powell, but it remains mindless (and relatively brief) entertainment. There’s an excellent hi-def transfer; lone extra is a making-of featurette.

DVD of the Week

In Safe Hands

(Icarus)

Jeanne Henry has made an emotionally involving look at adoption, and how each person involved—would-be parents, temporary guardians and, of course, the agency workers themselves—rides a personally wrenching roller coaster as the bureaucracy’s slow machinery grinds its way forward.

Marrying insightful writing and precise directing with exemplary performances—particularly from that sorely underused actress Elodie Bouchez as the expectant mom and Sandrine Kilberlin as the lead agency rep—Henry’s drama is a memorable soap opera.

CD of the Week 

(SPPF)

The great composers of French song include Fauré, Chausson, Poulenc, Duparc—and Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947), whose own mastery of the French art song, the mélodie, was wide-ranging and impressive through several decades and dozens of songs.

This four-disc set collects everything that Hahn composed, from the early “Rêverie” and “Si mes vers avaient des ailes”—written at age 14 to words by Victor Hugo—to the posthumously published Neuf Mélodies retrouvées. All 107 songs—for which the lavish and illustrated booklet includes the French texts and English translations—are expressively sung by Greek baritone Tassis Christoyannis, who is beautifully accompanied by American pianist Jeff Cohen.