Blu-rays of the Week 

(Warner Bros)

The ludicrousness of this gargantuan shark movie—it’s Jaws on steroids—is beside the point when all anybody wants is to see, in CGI, how the ocean behemoth makes mincemeat of lots of awful—and some not so awful—characters.

 

 

 

This is the kind of movie that wears its influences not on its sleeve but right in front of the camera, so director Jon Turteltaub must have shrugged and said the hell with it: The Meg goes full speed ahead into campy monster movie craziness. It’s definitely not good, but it’s entertaining in its own ridiculous way. There’s a sterling hi-def transfer; extras are featurettes and interviews.

 

American Dresser 

(Cinedigm)

Tom Berenger is persuasively wounded as a widowed (and alcoholic) Vietnam vet who goes cross-country on his bike with a compatriot (Keith David) to find himself after his beloved wife (Gina Gershon) dies of cancer in this one-note character study written and directed by Carmine Cangialosi, who plays a handsome ladies’ magnet who joins the pair.

 

 

 

Although Berenger and David have terrific camaraderie, their director is content to wallow in clichés and superficial characters—Gershon, Penelope Ann Miller, Bruce Dern, Jennifer Damiano and Elle McLemore have literally nothing to do—which knocks this otherwise watchable buddy movie down a notch. Extras are featurettes.

 

 

 

 

 

Bloodlust  

Supposedly based on a true story, this grimly sick little movie, directed by Marijan Vayda, follows a loner bullied at work and mocked by seemingly everyone who discovers he has a taste for the blood of dead females. Soon he is digging up cadavers in their coffins and going about his yucky business.

 

 

 

Obviously, you have to be a fan of a certain kind of demented films to enjoy chose, but those viewers know who they are. It all looks good and grainy in hi-def; extras are interviews with the assistant director and actress Birgit Zamulo.

 

Gaughin—Voyage to Tahiti

(Cohen Media)

Vincent Cassell throws himself into the role of painter Paul Gaughin, who infamously left France for the South Pacific in 1891 in order to start his art—and—life anew, in Edouard Deluc’s well-made but by-the-numbers biopic.

 

 

 

Shot luminously by Pierre Cottereau, the film gets the physical details of the artist’s new home right, but despite Cassell’s intensity, we never really get inside Gaughin’s head: there’s never a moment where Deluc illuminates his protagonist in a profound way. The film sparkles in hi-def; extras comprise on-set featurettes.

 

 

 

 

 

Midaq Alley 

Director Jorge Fons made this 1995 adaptation of a novel by Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, relocating it to Mexico City: its interest today is primarily Salma Hayek appearing in one of her earliest roles, because, even at 145 minutes, this multi-character drama is too melodramatic and sentimental.

 

 

 

The stories are presented straightforwardly, even cursorily, as if just watching several people intersecting through and divided by class and wealth is interest-holding enough. It’s not: Hayek is fine and the rest of the cast is equally good, but the total is much less than the sum of its parts. The hi-def transfer looks good; lone extra is a behind-the-scene featurette.

 

DVD of the Week

The Children Act 

(Lionsgate)

Ian McEwen’s novel about a British judge whose intense focus on cases involving children has pretty much destroyed her own marriage has become a talky, plodding drama by director Richard Eyre, whose streamlined adaptation—the script is by McEwen—strips away much of the book’s nuance.

 

 

 

Although this might straitjacket a lesser actor, Emma Thompson is able to make the judge sympathetic, even admirable, despite her own ethical and moral lapses.

 

The first-rate Hungarian National Ballet had its proper U.S. debut on the evenings of Wednesday, November 7th, Friday, the 9th, and the afternoon of Sunday, the 11th with dazzling productions of, respectively,Swan Lake and Don Quixote,and the elegant presentation of three works by the Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen, under the title LOL.

 

Swan Lake,the beloved masterpiece created by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov—and here reimagined by Rudi van Dantzig—with a glorious score by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, was brilliantly conducted by Balázs Kocsár, with beautiful sets and costumes designed by Toer van Schayk. Tatiana Melnik was a fabulous Odette (and Odile) expertly partnered by Gergely Leblanc as Prince Siegfried—he was memorable in the Pas de trois from Le Corsaireat the gala performancea few days previously. Mikalai Radziush was an effective Rothbart and Dmitry Diachkov a fine Alexander. Also extraordinary were Ellina Pokhodnykh and Diana Kosyreva in the Pas de trois and Kristina Starostina, Nadezhda Sorokina, Yuka Asai, Olga Chernakova, and Lili Felméry amongst the swans. The corps de ballet was superb. The artists received an exceedingly enthusiastic ovation. One hopes that this thrilling production will return and receive wider exposure.

 

Fluffier but immensely enjoyable, the current production of Don Quixote is a restaging by Michael Messerer based on the classic Marius Petipa original revised by Alexander Gorsky, with additions by Kasyan Goleizovsky. The tuneful score is by the underrated Ludwig Minkus, which, if not of the order of any of Tchaikovsky’s ballets, nonetheless consistently charms. The appealing sets were designed by István Róbzsa and the wonderful costumes are by Nóra Rományi. The cast was even more remarkable than in Swan Lake,led again spectacularly by the astonishing ballerina Melnik as Kitri, comparing not unfavorably with Natalia Osipova’s celebrated performance in the same role. Her partner, Igor Tsvirko was magnificent as Basil. Mesmerizing too were Iurii Kekalo as Espada, Sofia Ivanova-Skoblikova as Mercedes, Karina Sarkissova as the street dancer, and Lili Felméry and Rita Hangya as Kitri’s girlfriends. Entertaining in character parts were Attila Szakács in the title role, Maksym Kovtun as Sancho Panza, Alekszandr Komarov as Gamache, and Gábor Szigeti as Lorenzo. The corps de ballet was again superlative. The audience was enormously appreciative.

 

The first part of LOL was Trois Gnossiennes, set to the gorgeous, eponymous piano pieces by Erik Satie. It had been danced by a different couple at the gala performance the previous week but it was gratifying to have a chance to see Melnik again in this iteration, here ably partnered Igor Tsvirko. Judging from this program, van Manen seems to have minimalist leanings with some affinities with the corpus of George Balanchine. Regrettably, the remaining two works were presented with pre-recorded scores, beginning with the engaging 5 Tangos, set to music by Astor Piazzolla and starring Minjung Kim and Gergő Armín Balázsi. The afternoon concluded with the intermittently more avant-garde but also enjoyable Black Cake, with music by Jules Massenet, Pietro Mascagni, Igor Stravinsky, Leoš Janáček, and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and with attractive costumes by Keso Dekker.

 

I greatly hope that this exceptional company will return to the New York stages before long.

Now in its ninth year, the documentary festival DOC NYC—which this year comprises 135 features, among many other screenings and events—opened with John Chester’s The Biggest Little Farm and closes with the world premiere of Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, about two of the seminal NYC newspaper columnists. 

 

I caught a dozen films that range from contemporary politics to artist profiles, including The Ghost of Peter Sellers, director Peter Medak’s account of the ill-fated movie he made with the great comic actor in 1973—after Medak was flying high with The Ruling Class and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg—a pirate adventure called Ghost in the Noonday Sun, in which everything that could go wrong did. The biggest problem was the mercurial Sellers himself, who had never enjoyed the best on-set reputation, and Medak digs through memories as he reminisces with others around back then to assuage his own feelings that, decades later, he still feels responsible for this disaster. It’s a weirdly funny and fascinating on-set journey.

 

In The Artist and the Pervert, Beatrice Behn and Ren̩é Gebhardt chronicle the fascinating love (and kinky sex) story of an eye-opening couple: Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas—whose parents were Nazi sympathizers—and African-American performance artist Mollena Williams. The film’s title raises a pertinent question: which is which? 

 

The Greenaway Alphabet, a personal look at British filmmaker Peter Greenaway by his artistic and life partner Saskia Boddeke, could also have been called The Artist and the Pervert, as anyone who’s seen Greenaway’s visually and thematically complex films can attest. But Boddeke and their teenage daughter Pip actually bring some humanity to Greenaway, especially when he and his daughter discuss autism when they go through the A’s.

 

Today’s right-wing extremists—and those gung-ho in their youth but who left the movement, for various reasons—are the subjects of Exit, an engrossing study by director (and former hate-group member) Karen Winther.

 

The dangerous conditions under which war correspondents toil are explored in Chris Martin’s shattering Under the Wire, a tribute to and eulogy for (among others) U.S. journalist Marie Colvin, who died covering the civil war in Syria. 

 

Katrine Philp’s False Confessions eye-openingly shows how many people are trying to remedy an intolerable situation: notably defense attorney Jane Fisher-Byrialsen, who goes to Amherst, an affluent Buffalo suburb, to look into the case of Renay Lynch, behind bars for more than 20 years for a 1995 murder she did not commit. Under the microscope are coercive police interrogations, which Philp and Fisher-Byrialsen shine a necessary light on.

 

Maxine Trump (no relation, I hope!) describes her life without children in To Kid or Not to Kid, an evenhanded documentary about how women—whether by choice or by chance—deal with their childless lives and the shaming that still takes place, whether by well-meaning family members and strangers or anonymous people on social media. 

 

Patrimonio, set in Baja, Mexico—near vacation paradise Los Cabos—is a David vs. Goliath story of village fishermen going against a rich developer that wants to take over their local lands and waters, shown by directors Sarah Teale and Lisa F. Jackson as a possibly optimistic result. 

 

Vivian Vazquez and Gretchen Hildebran’s emotional Decade of Fire looks past the conventional thinking about the “Bronx is burning” 1970s and uncovers that not only were its inhabitants—primarily blacks and Latinos—painted with a broadly racist brush, but they were also the catalysts for the completely trashed area’s later revitalization. 

 

Another monstrous corporation is given the once-over in Inside Lehman Brothers, Jennifer Deschamps’ feature that trods familiar ground—did the bigwigs from the big banks get away with high crimes after the 2008 financial meltdown?—but remains an enraging cautionary tale. 

 

Our own inadequate medical system is given a merciless treatment in The Providers, Anna Moot-Levin and Laura Green’s clear-eyed but encouraging look at a collapsed community in New Mexico cared for by a few health-care providers who help a financially vulnerable population deal with the widespread opioid crisis. 

 

Finally, another world premiere, Barbara Kopple’s New Homeland, is also extremely relevant to our tRumped-up world, sympathetically following Middle Eastern families given refugee status that are welcomed to Canada by their local sponsors. The difficulties of one of the teenage boys to assimilate into his new society is heartrending, but there are also feel-good successes that make any viewer hopeful about our shared future.