Blu-rays of the Week 

(Universal)

In his first film since winning the Oscar for directing the wildly overpraised musical La La Land, Damien Chazelle proves his versatility, even though his straightforward biopic of astronaut Neil Armstrong—the first man to step on the surface of the moon—received mixed reviews upon its release. I’m not sure why: Chazelle handles the sweeping historical and dramatic canvas impressively, keeps the CGI from overpowering the human story, and even finds suspense and tenseness in the various space flights.

If Ryan Gosling seems too emotionless, he still evokes Armstrong’s steely resolve; even better is Claire Foy in the thankless role as Neil’s wife, turning her into the film’s most fascinating character. The film looks superb on Blu; extras include a Chazelle commentary, deleted scenes and featurettes. 

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days 

(Criterion)

Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s intense 2007 drama tells a simple story about an illegal abortion. The spellbinding acting—especially by Anamaria Marinca as a woman stuck between her friend and boyfriend (her minutely detailed expressions at a long meal with his family are priceless)—is partly derailed by Mungiu stacking the deck and letting his characters act too implausibly.

Would the abortionist—shown as a professional in every way—not notice a knife missing from his case and leave his identity papers at a hotel desk? Would our heroine leave her friend during a crucial time to visit her boyfriend even after telling him she’s busy and can’t come? Such weakly-rendered details nag mostly because Mungiu gets so much else right in this strong, tense film. Criterion’s hi-def transfer is immaculate; extras include a Mungiu interview, deleted scenes, Cannes Film Festival press conference and featurette on Romanian audiences’ reactions.

Spiral 

The horrible reality of contemporary bigotry is revealed in Laura Fairrie’s powerful documentary, which dives head-first into today’s burgeoning anti-Semitic movement in Europe.

We illuminatingly hear from Jews who have taken their own sort of refuge by deciding to return to Israel, along with others who are staying in place: after all, Europe is their original homeland, even if there remain many Holocaust deniers and other racists in their midst, often making their benighted opinions known in a very public manner. The hi-def transfer looks excellent; lone extra is an interview with Fairrie.

DVDs of the Week

The Lost Village 

(First Run)

The gentrification of many NYC neighborhoods has continued apace for decades, and Roger Paradiso’s documentary shows how New York University has done its part to help bring about the ruination of Greenwich Village. The problem is that his righteous bitterness and anger too often distract him from getting more in-depth about what’s going on.

Just saying “NYU bad” and repeating that rents and tuition are so high that some students have turned to the sex industry to get by (now that would make a fascinating documentary) isn’t enough. Too much interesting info is simply mentioned but left unexplored. There’s sleight of hand too: the McDonald’s on West 3rd and on Broadway are seen as recent interlopers, when both franchises have been there for decades.

Tea with the Dames 

This beguiling documentary about four grand dames of British acting—Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith—lets us watch as they engagingly, hilariously and touchingly discuss their careers, friendships and even mortality.

Director Roger Michell smartly allows the ladies to go back and forth, feeling free enough to let fly with a curse word here, an extra slug of champagne there; inserting vintage clips of the quartet in their prime—from 50s Shakespeare to 21st century films—is an extra added nice touch. One quibble is the film’s brevity: 83 minutes is not nearly long enough to do these women justice; at the very least there must be hours of deleted sequences, so let’s see those!

Blu-rays of the Week 

(Universal)

Forty years after the original slaughter by Michael Myers, original survivor Laurie Strode—now a grandmother—always felt he would return to finish her off: now that he’s (improbably) escaped from prison, will her own paranoid behavior (learning how to shoot and booby-trapping her home) help her, her daughter and her granddaughter survive another attack?

This belated sequel disappoints mainly because David Gordon Green directs only a few sequences interestingly; the rest are familiar cookie-cutter slasher movie moments. Jamie Lee Curtis is in fine form, but the killings are uninventive (lone exception: a quick knifing in front of a living room window) and even original director John Carpenter’s score is a trite throwback to the dull sounds of yesteryear. There’s a solid hi-def transfer; extras include deleted and extended scenes and several featurettes.

Madeline’s Madeline 

(Oscilloscope)

A stunning performance by newcomer Helena Howard brilliantly anchors Josephine Decker’s alternately marvelous and frustrating character study about a teenager in a theater troupe whose personal and acting lives intertwine.

Nearly as good as Howard are Miranda July as her single mom and the always underrated Molly Parker as the troupe’s director, and Decker insightfully shows how these women navigate emotional bumpy terrain, but her visual tricks remain off-putting and opaque rather than illuminating and urgent. The hi-def transfer looks great; extras comprise a Decker interview, deleted scenes, rehearsal footage and the film’s dazzling trailer.

DVDs of the Week 

(Sundance Selects)

The U.S. (and the world) has turned to factory farming in order to sate the enormous appetites of our growing population since the 1970s, and Christopher Quinn’s documentary—based on Jonathan Safer Foer’s book—is an urgent expose into the underhanded ways that such methods are gaining traction with the tacit approval of the government.

Narrated by Natalie Portman, the film also shows the small but real pushback by farmers who have decided not to ruin the environment and our very lives by trying humane and ethical practices. Extras are two deleted scenes and a short Foer interview.

Far from the Tree 

(Sundance Selects)

Based on a book by Andrew Solomon, whose being “different” from his family led to his parents being unable to deal with his homosexuality, Rachel Dretzin’s touching documentary explores with extreme tact how several “different” people interact with their loved ones and others.

There’s a 41-year-old man with down syndrome; an autistic teenage boy who does not speak; a dwarf couple hoping to have a child; and a young man who murdered a young boy. The interviews with these people and family members are done so artfully and intimately that the emotions can’t help but spill out, making this essential for anyone with an ounce of empathy. Extras are deleted scenes.

The 28th edition of the New York Jewish Film Festival comprises its usual enticing mix of features and documentaries for its annual two-week stay at Lincoln Center.

The closing night film, Bille August’s potent and engrossing A Fortunate Man, is a return to the kind of rousing, old-fashioned epic that August made his name with 30 years ago when he directed Pelle the Conqueror. Based on a novel by Danish author Henrik Pontoppidan, A Fortunate Man follows a young, intelligent, headstrong engineer who abandons his deeply religious Lutheran family to move from the countryside to Copenhagen, where he marries into a wealthy Jewish family. However, despite his brilliance and exciting new ideas, his stubbornness ultimately leads to his downfall. It sounds like a soap opera, and it is, more or less; but with August’s expert direction, superb cinematography, exacting set design and costumes, and a terrific cast led by Esbven Smed as our hero and Sara Viktoria Bjerregaard Christensen as the woman who loves him, A Fortunate Man is a richly rewarding experience.

Israeli director Amos Gitai is unafraid to tackle thorny questions that have no easy answers in his home country; his latest, the episodic A Tramway in Jerusalem, is a typically complex Gitai journey, on a rail line that connects Jewish and Palestinian neighborhoods. Alongside glimpsing the locals who share the trams—and who interact at times cordially, at others antagonistically—are visitors like French actor Mathieu Amalric, who plays a tourist with his young son, oohing and aahing over an oud player on board and later being laughed at for his naïve views on Israel.

Polish director Michał Rosa’s Happiness of the World casts an amused but weary eye on the exploits of a beautiful young Jewish woman, Rose (played with gusto and verve by Karolina Gruszka), who lives—and loves—freely in an apartment building on the Polish-German border in 1939, delighting and offending her neighbors in turn. 

Silvia Quer’s The Light of Hope is the best kind of docudrama, making us care for its heroic, selfless real-life characters, especially a Swiss Jew named Elisabeth Eidenbenz (a powerful Noémie Schmidt), who helped save the lives of hundreds of young children as head of a maternity home in Vichy France, just miles from the Spanish border.

Part of an illuminating selection of documentaries, Roberta Grossman’s Who Will Write Our History gives trenchant and necessary voice to those killed in the Warsaw Ghetto thanks to a cache of documents discovered after World War II in which their writings were saved. 

Elizabeth Rynecki’s Chasing Portraits—based on her own absorbing book of the same name—follows the filmmaker's emotional journey as she tries to track down the artwork of her great-grandfather, killed by the Nazis. 

And Oren Rudavsky’s Joseph Pulitzer: A Voice of the People—a PBS American Masters documentary—succinctly explores the life of the great American newspaperman, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant whose story and legacy are even more relevant in this benighted era of “fake news” brought on by the current imposter in the White House.