Blu-rays of the Week 

(Criterion)

Between 1963 and 1972, French director Eric Rohmer made several films exploring how a man interested in one woman is tempted by another: these Six Moral Tales are filled with endless talk, sometimes intelligent and insightful, other times pregnant and ponderous, with arid stretches only Rohmer aficionados will appreciate.

The most memorable are 1969’s My Night at Maud’s with the fabulous Francoise Fabian as Maud and 1972’s Love in the Afternoon with its enticing depiction of the sexual aroma in our daily lives. Criterion’s excellent boxed set collects these films in very good new hi-def transfers; extras include four Rohmer short films, archival interviews and a book of Rohmer’s own stories.

The Jesus Rolls 

(Screen Media)

John Turturro’s 2017 remake of Bertrand Blier’s 1974 romp Going Places (with a then unknown Gerard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert) is one of the more unnecessary recent movies, and this disappointment comes after his amusing 2013 Fading Gigolo with Woody Allen.

This vanity project—Turturro stars, directed and wrote—allows the actor to ham it up as Jesus Quintana from The Big Lebowski, but even with a top cast—Audrey Tautou, Bobby Cannavale, Susan Sarandon, Gloria Reuben, Christopher Walken—such a heavy-handed, unfunny misfire makes the occasionally clever original look like a classic in comparison. There’s a superior hi-def transfer; lone extra is a Turturro and Cannavale commentary.

Rachel and the Stranger 

In this straightforward 1948 western, a widowed father (William Holden) raises his young son alone who hires an indentured servant (Loretta Young) to be teacher, mother and wife—until a family friend (Robert Mitchum) comes along and disrupts their arrangement.

The stars make a formidable trio as the servant-owner relationships slowly blossoms into something more intimate, while director Norman Foster leaves no clichéd stone unturned, including a rote Indian attack for a not particularly dramatic ending. There’s a sparkling hi-def transfer of this good-looking B&W film.

Reflections in a Golden Eye 

(Warner Archive)

Carson McCullers’ novel about the tortured relationships of a flirty wife, her closeted army husband and a brazen young enlistee became a compellingly bizarre 1967 character study directed by John Huston and a daring film for its time with male nudity and repressed sexual transgressions.

The cast—Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Robert Forster (in his debut), Brian Keith, Julie Harris—is racily overripe and Huston’s direction combines pretentiousness with stylishness. This two-disc set contains Huston’s original golden-hued vision and the studio-imposed normal-colored version; both look stupendous on Blu. Lone extra is 20 minutes of on-set silent footage.

VODs of the Week 

(Film Rise)

Actor Brian Dennehy—who died last month at age 81—gets a nice send-off in this sensitively performed drama about an elderly vet who forms an unlikely friendship with a shy 8-year-old boy staying next door with his mother as she cleans out the home of her recently deceased sister.

Director Andrew Ahn and writers Hannah Bos and Paul Thurteen map out these grieving characters with wise understatement, and Dennehy’s towering presence is easily matched by youngster Lucas Jaye opposite him. 

Hope Gap 

(Screen Media)

William Nicholson directs his own adaptation of his first-rate chamber play The Retreat from Moscow, which I saw on Broadway in 2003 with the magisterial John Lithgow and Eileen Atkins as a long-married couple about to break up and Ben Chaplin as their son caught in the middle.

In this well-made if too restrained version, Bill Nighy and Annette Bening are persuasive as the couple and Josh O’Connell is decent as their son—but the raw emotions that propelled the play onstage are mostly missing. Instead, we get the scenic Sussex coastline—one of its cliff sides provides the movie’s title—as a lovely postcard backdrop to the marital battles.

Blu-rays of the Week 

(Film Movement Classics)

In Alain Corneau’s provocative 1979 study of lowlifes and delinquents based on Jim Thompson’s novel A Hell of a Woman, Patrick Dewaere—who killed himself six years later at age 35—projects sheer desperation better than anyone this side of Klaus Kinski.

Next to Dewaere’s memorably sketchy turn as a small-town salesman are finely etched performances by Myriam Boyer as his mousy wife and 16-year-old Marie Trintignant (also lost early when she was beaten to death by her boyfriend at age 40) in an astonishing debut as a troubled teen who gets involved with him. Seire Noire remains the second-best Thompson adaptation, runner-up to Bertrand Tavernier’s searing 1982 Coup de Torchon. The film’s grit is well-served on the grainy Blu; extras include 2002 interviews with Trintignant and Corneau and a recent retrospective making-of documentary.

Arrow—Complete Final Season 

(Warner Bros)

Eight seasons of Arrow are wrapped up in satisfying fashion as Oliver Queen (aka the Green Arrow) turns from protecting his beloved hometown Star City to being the last bulwark of safety for the entire multiverse—with several surprising (and even touching) outcomes as the 10 episodes move back and forth thousands of years in the past and into the future.

The uniformly appealing cast is led by Stephen Amell’s Oliver and Emily Bett Rickards, Melanie Merkosky, Katherine McNamara and Katie Cassidy as several of the women revolving around him. The hi-def transfer looks excellent.

Fist of Fear, Touch of Death 

Matthew Mallinson’s 1980 martial-arts drama is haphazardly cobbled together from undistinguished vignettes shot in Manhattan, footage from karate bouts at Felt Forum and glimpses of the beloved Bruce Lee in early celluloid appearances (he died several years earlier).

But, despite the presence of Blaxploitation vets Fred Williamson and Ron van Clief—and the always interesting Adolph Caesar as our ringmaster of sorts—this never becomes anything other than a curio for desperate Lee fans. There’s a nice, grainy Blu-ray transfer; the lone extra is a retrospective featurette including interviews with Mallinson, Williamson and producer Terry Levene.

World on Fire—Complete 1st Season 

(PBS Masterpiece)

This absorbing seven-episode historical miniseries thrusts viewers headlong into the beginning of the Second World War on a large canvas that includes Germany, Poland, France, England and Belgium.

The story strands follow ordinary people—we don’t see politicians or generals—and although it’s at times marred by clichés, the tenor of lives threatened with total war is generally well-realized, and the weighty cast (Helen Hunt, Lesley Manville, Sean Bean, and an astonishing young Polish actress, Zofia Wichłacz, for starters) easily does the necessary heavylifting. There’s a superb hi-def transfer.

DVDs of the Week 

(Distrib Films)

The title means “Remember?” in Italian, and director Valerio Mieli examines how memory (and, as Milan Kundera has it in his great novel, forgetting) informs a young couple at the center of his messy but intriguing romantic drama.

The performances of the delightful Linda Caridi and brooding Luca Marinelli are the heart of a film that dives into the complexities of how each partner sees the relationship, no matter how contradictory or maddening it may be to the other one.

The Sharks 

(Breaking Glass Pictures)

Uruguyan director Lucia Garibaldi’s slight but engaging character study concerns teenager Rosina’s infatuation with a slightly older boy who works for her father.

Newcomer Romina Bentancur never hits a false note in her portrayal of a smart and headstrong girl dealing with friends and family—and some of best moments occur as Garibaldi observes Rosina’s sister, who has own teen-related difficulties.

CD of the Week 

(Pentatone)

The shimmering German soprano Hanna-Elisabeth Müller has fashioned a lovely recital out of the great practitioners of German lieder and French melodies—Schumann, Poulenc and Zemlinsky—in a program of love, life and the depths of the soul.

Müller’s clear soprano rings out with authority and aching honesty, and she is sensitively accompanied by the excellent pianist Juliane Ruf. The Poulenc songs, particularly—two sets of his most beguiling works—are the highlights of a superlative recording.

VOD of the Week 

(Arrow)

Kirill Sokolov’s jet-black kind-of comedy follows a young man who’s egged on by his girlfriend to kill her father—and that’s just the beginning of 90 minutes’ worth of back-stabbings (figurative and literal), double-crossings and some of the most ridiculously over-the-top bloodlettings in a while.

Whether such violence is an acceptable form of entertainment is, of course, the sticking point; but Sokolov’s irreverence keeps one watching to see what lunacy he’s dreamed up, and his cast is game enough to make it seem as real—or at least as surreal—as possible. 

Blu-rays of the Week

Alastair Sim’s School for Laughter 

(Film Movement Classics)

The great British actor Alastair Sim—best known for playing Scrooge in the 1951 movie version of A Christmas Carol—is the focus of this boxed set containing four comedies to which he contributed: the best of the lot are the classic girls-school farce, 1954’s The Belles of St Trinian’s (in which he plays both the headmistress and her gambling brother) and 1960’s hilarious School for Scoundrels.

All four B&W films have been lovingly restored; extras include interviews with scholars, historians and even Sim’s daughter.

The Cremator 

In this caustic 1969 black comedy, the head of a crematorium in 1930s Czechoslovakia follows the Nazis’ agenda to its ultimate end, and his own “final solution”: beginning with his Jewish wife and children.

Czech director Juraj Herz’s allegory of evil might be too heavyhanded, but his dazzling visual slight-of-hand, Rudolf Hrušínský’s tremendously portentous performance and Zdeněk Liška’s scarily perfect score make this an especially potent example of the Czech New Wave. As usual, Criterion has an excellent hi-def transfer; extras comprise Herz’s 1965 short, The Junk Shop; 1993 Hrušínský interview; 2011 featurette of Herz returning to his film’s locations; and a 55-minute documentary about Liška.

Guns Akimbo 

(Lionsgate)

Daniel Radcliffe plays a nerdy video-game developer who becomes the prey in a terminal live-streamed death match in Jason Lei Howden’s pointlessly—and repetitively—ultra-violent actioner that’s heavy on blood, guts and flying bullets but light on everything else.

Radcliffe is unsurprisingly unable to fashion an interesting character out of someone with guns welded onto his hands; Samara Weaving persuasively plays the professional killer tracking him down, but how expert is she if 99.9 percent of her shots miss? The film looks fine on Blu.

CD of the Week 

(Alpha)

The remarkably daring Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan returns with another spectacular recording, as she does double duty as a singer—on two fiendishly difficult modernist works of the mid and late 20th century—and conductor, on Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 49, which gives this album its title.

Hannigan attacks the swooping and chattering vocal line of Luigi Nono's disturbingly raw five-minute solo Djamila Boupacha (1962) with her customary ease; but that brief work is a mere prelude to her mesmerizing tour de force as vocalist and conductor of Gerard Grisey's 1998 masterwork Quartre Chants Pour Franchir le Seuil (his last completed composition). Hannigan and the versatile Ludwig Orchestra forces bring it all home with a propulsive and—in the atypically mournful opening movement—somber reading of Haydn's minor-key symphony.