Blu-rays of the Week 

(Fox)

Remi Malek’s remarkable transformation into Farrokh Bulsara, aka Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, is the no-brainer reason to see this entertaining if flawed and disappointingly tame biopic about the lead singer of one of the most flamboyant, loathed and loved rock bands of all time. There are some electric moments—the recreation of Live Aid, the hilarious scene with Mike Myers as a record exec who hates the title song—that are dragged down by by-the-numbers filmmaking by Bryan Singer (who was fired with a few weeks left to shoot).

So it’s incredible that Malek digs in so deeply despite the onscreen superficiality, and there are also impressive turns by Gwilym Lee as guitarist Brian May and Lucy Boynton as Mercury’s BFF Mary Austin. The film looks terrific in hi-def; extras comprise featurettes about Malek, the band and how the Live Aid performance was filmed, and the actor’s full LiveAid concert is also included.

All the Devil’s Men 

(Lionsgate)

In this middling thriller by director-writer Matthew Hope, a former Navy Seal turned CIA mercenary leads a covert group that’s tracking down “bad hombres” in the darkest, dankest corners of London.

There’s a kernel of a decent action flick in here, but despite a serviceable cast—led by Milo Gibson (Mel’s son), William Fichtner (who’s gone way too early) and Dutch actress Sylvia Hoeks—there’s nothing onscreen that hasn’t been done (often far better) hundreds of times before. The Blu-ray transfer is sparkling; lone extra is an on-set featurette.

Berlin Alexanderplatz 

Reiner Werner Fassbinder’s greatest accomplishment was his 15-hour 1980 adaptation of Alfred Doblin’s classic novel about an ordinary man in 1920s Berlin. Fassbinder provides ample insight and sentiment alongside his usual cynicism and campiness during this gargantuan piece of cinema that’s never less than engrossing. Fassbinder’s actors, such as Hanna Schygulla, Barbara Sukowa and especially Gunter Lamprecht in the lead, give career-best performances.

The Blu-ray transfer is first-rate; Criterion’s voluminous extras comprise two documentaries (from 2006 and 2007) detailing the film’s production and restoration; an on-set featurette showing Fassbinder at work; the 1931 feature adaptation, with Doblin himself writing the script; and 2007 interview with author and Fassbinder expert Peter Jelavich.

The Giant Behemoth 

(Warner Archive)

One of a batch of monster movies spawned by the horror and fright over the dawning of the nuclear age, director Eugene Lourie’s bizarrely tranquil 1959 B&W entry concerns a massive irradiated sea creature up from the depths who terrorizes London. It’s a compact 80 minutes but still seems stretched beyond its slender narrative.

The stop-motion effects, needless to say, look laughably amateurish by today’s standards, although that may be what endears them to those at whom this release is targeted. The hi-def transfer is immaculate; there’s a commentary by special effects veterans Dennis Muren and Phil Tippett.

Peppermint Soda 

Diane Kurys’ sensitive and lyrical 1977 coming-of-age movie piggybacks on classic school-age dramas like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct without betraying any obvious debts (at least until the final shot).

The central—and autobiographical—character is played with lovely restraint and naturalness by Éléonore Klarwein, a dazzling teenager who never became the female equivalent of Jean-Pierre Leaud, much to our cinematic detriment. The film looks fine in hi-def; extras are archival interviews with Kurys, Klarwein and composer Yves Simon.

DVD of the Week

The Owl’s Legacy 

(Icarus)

French director Chris Marker’s typically ambitious and eclectic 1989 multi-part project comprises a baker’s dozen episodes, each about a half-hour in length, that each start as a riff on a Greek word like “democracy” or “symposium” and spiral out from there into typically wide-ranging and intelligent discussions about art, politics, history … in short, anything.

With special guest talkers including film directors Elia Kazan and Theo Angelopoulos, this release is another in Icarus’ valuable volumes of Marker works, and since this is one of his most arcane and unknown, it is even more necessary and collectible. 

CD of the Week 

(Hyperion)

Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů, one of the most underrated 20th century composers, compiled an estimable musical career that ran the stylistic gamut from solo piano and chamber music to orchestral and stage works.

This superb four-disc set collects earlier Hyperion releases of the prolific composer’s output for violin and orchestra, with Bohuslav Matoušek as the brilliant soloist in 11 works including two vividly scored violin concertos, and melodic and attractive concertos for flute and violin, two violins, and violin and piano. There’s no shortage of arresting music on these discs, given greater immediacy by the Czech Philharmonic under Christopher Hogwood.

Blu-rays of the Week 

(Severin)

In this entertaining giallo (the irrepressibly Italian horror/mystery genre), Edwige Fenech gives another impressively scream-laden performance as an unstable young woman dealing with murder, mayhem and madness in gloom-filled London. Director Sergio Martino (Fenech’s then-husband) shows a boisterous eye for dazzlingly bloody set pieces, with some kinky sex scenes thrown in for good measure.

The 1972 film looks supremely good on Blu-ray; extras comprise They're Coming to Get You, the 88-minute alternate U.S. cut; interviews with Martino, screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, actor George Hilton and Italian horror expert Antonio Tentori; audio commentary by Martino expert Kat Ellinger; and a CD of composer Bruno Nicolai’s score.

The Guilty 

(Magnolia)

This claustrophobic thriller is set in a police station, where an officer relegated to desk duty for a serious infraction finds himself immersed in a potentially dire situation while answering calls: is a father about to kill his wife after leaving their two young children home alone?

Director Gustav Möller skillfully ratchets up the tension throughout, aided by an impressively controlled performance by Jakob Cedergren—literally the only actor we see onscreen for the entire 90 minutes—and by Möller’s own clever script, which periodically drops in new information to upend what we think is going on. There’s a first-rate transfer.

John McEnroe—In the Realm of Perfection 

Using footage from the 1984 French Open—in which he lost the final in five hard-fought sets to Ivan Lendl—director Julien Faraut has made a bizarrely fascinating if ultimately self-indulgent documentary about tennis legend John McEnroe.

With valuable footage from multiple cameras shown repeatedly, sometimes in slo-mo or zoomed-in, as narrator Mathieu Amalric drones on, the film’s attempts to equate tennis and cinema fall flat, and McEnroe’s temper tantrums are shown as comic relief instead of as the embarrassment to the sport they truly were. The film looks terrific in hi-def; extras are a director interview and a 1948 short, Facts about Film.

Time Regained 

(Kimstim/Icarus)

Adapting Proust’s colossal masterpiece In Search of Lost Time is a fool’s errand, and Raul Ruiz—the late Chilean filmmaker of time-shifting and surrealistic touches—comes a cropper with his 1999 version of Proust’s classic.

There’s much to admire—the performances are stellar, the editing, camera movements and production design visualize some of what Proust’s gargantuan sentences do on the page—but there’s a feeling of incompleteness, of a highlight reel for something that should be much longer, like a Netflix series instead of the two-plus hours this is. It all looks spectacular on Blu; lone extra is an interview with film critic Bernard Genin.

DVD of the Week 

(Icarus)

Raymond Depardon’s documentaries blend incisive reportage and a personalized point of view that gives his subjects a humane immediacy. 12 Days is an eye-opening glimpse at the messy French mental-health care system, a bureaucracy that still—thanks to the herculean efforts of many —tries to treat the individuals caught up in it fairly.

Bonuses come in the form of two more Depardon feature docs: 2012’s France (Les Habitants) and 2016’s Journal de France, both of which display the director’s penchant for traveling on the road to discover how ordinary people live.

Blu-rays of the Week 

(Lionsgate)

In this efficient if undistinguished action flick, a group of American soldiers in Bosnia agrees to bring up from the surface of a nearby lake a cache of gold hidden by the Nazis—but have to fend off local criminal elements (and the men’s own superior officer) before they can succeed.

Director Steven Quale’s by-the-books narrative has a few tense underwater moments near the end, and J.K. Simmons gives his typically blustering performance as the commander. There’s an excellent hi-def transfer; extras comprise several on-set featurettes.

Humans 3.0 

(Acorn)

The third season of this daring (if at times desperate) sci-fi series begins a year after “day zero”—when a cataclysmic event killed hundreds of thousands of people and gave consciousness to many “synths,” which has caused consternation across the globe.

The lines that have been drawn between both camps in a tense and difficult-to-navigate world is interestingly if insufficiently explored, and a game cast does its best to keep this diverting and watchable. The eight episodes look great in hi-def; extras include cast and crew interviews.

Judgment Night 

Four clueless buds who get lost in a shady section of Chicago while driving to a boxing match in a Winnebago—don’t ask—witness a killing and find themselves chased within an inch of their lives by a tough hombre and his minions in Stephen Hopkins’ fast-paced but imbecile 1993 thriller.

The movie functions mainly as a look at the beginnings of a few careers—namely, Denis Leary, Cuba Gooding Jr., Jeremy Piven and Stephen Dorff—as well as the continuation of Emilio Estevez’s, with a few fun scenes amid the dross. There’s a quite good hi-def transfer.

The Prize 

(Warner Archive)

In this sluggish 1963 mystery, Paul Newman plays a Nobel-winning author who feels something isn’t right about another honoree, and finds himself in trouble while investigating—including nearly being killed. This is Hitchcockian in theory, but in practice director Mark Robson’s 135-minute drama has little urgency to it.

And all that despite a top pedigree: Newman, Edward G. Robinson, Elke Sommer and Diane Baker are in fine form, Ernest Lehman (North by Northwest) wrote the script, and the Stockholm locations are undeniably photogenic. But it ends up being little more than a passable time-waster. The hi-def transfer is first-rate.

Speed Kills 

A puffy John Travolta at least looks like he’s having fun playing a gangster who loves fast boats and fast women in this based-on-a-true-story drama that has a couple of entertaining water sequences to go with inexplicable things like a goofy cameo by a miscast Matthew Modine as George Bush the elder.

In a movie like this, the women who play Travolta’s love interests have virtually nothing to do, but they do try: so my hat’s off to Jennifer Esposito and Katheryn Winnick. The film looks good in high-def.