Jason Bailey
Every Tuesday, discriminating viewers are confronted with a flurry of choices: new releases on disc and on demand, vintage and original movies on any number of streaming platforms, catalogue titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This twice-monthly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.
PICK OF THE WEEK:
Lone Star: Arguably John Sayles’s finest film, this 1996 indie hit has been perpetually MIA on Blu-ray, so Criterion leap-frogging it to 4K is manna from heaven. Chris Cooper, in a too-rare leading turn, is the sheriff of a Texas border town, widely disliked in comparison to his father and predecessor (Matthew McConaughey, in one of his breakout roles). The discovery of a skeleton at a shooting range reopens old wounds and the other, more metaphorical skeletons, and the genius of Sayles’s screenplay is the efficiency with which he pulls his large, Altman-eseque ensemble cast of characters together without ever bending to the demands of a conventional narrative. A true ‘90s masterpiece. (Includes interviews and trailer.)
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
The Holdovers: Alexander Payne has kinda been making Hal Ashby movies his entire career, but this is his most concerted effort to do so; it’s shaggy and shambling in its approach and execution (and running time), as well as its sometimes-too-obvious musical choices (when “The Wind” by Cat Stevens drops, it feels all but preordained). He’s not credited on the script—that goes solely to David Hemingson—and it’s his first feature since the unfortunate Downsized. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that, at this perhaps tenuous juncture in his filmmaking career, he’s reconnected with the star of his most acclaimed film, Sideways, or maybe he was looking for a good luck charm. Whatever the case, it’s good to see them together again, as Paul Giamatti seems a uniquely ideal vessel for Payne’s notions of the woes of the intelligentsia, and Payne seems to bring out the nuances of Giamatti’s now-established persona. (Includes deleted scenes and featurettes.) (Also streaming on Peacock.)
Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia: An utterly bewitching follow-up to Ernest & Celestine, the charming French animated film from 2012 — an Oscar nominee for best animated film that lost to Frozen, an ACTUAL INJUSTICE) — based on the children’s books by Belgian author and illustrator Gabrielle Vincent. Trip again finds Celestine the mouse and Ernest the grizzly bear on an adventure, this time to Ernest’s home town of Gibberitia, which he remembers as a musical wonderland, only to discover that all musical notes are forbidden (except “do”). It’s a cute concept, giving way to surprisingly heavy themes of family and responsibility, and ending with a warm hug — an apt encapsulation of the entire enterprise. (Includes interviews, featurettes, and trailers.)
ON DVD / VOD:
Four Daughters: Olfa Hamrouni has, per the title, four daughters; the shocking story of what happened to two of them (but really, to everyone in the family) is brought to life by Tunisian documentarian Kaouther Ben Hania, who brings in two actors to play the two absent daughters for a combination of documentary and reenactment. “We’re going to relive it all,” explains daughter Eya. “It’s going to open those wounds.” She is not wrong. The turns of their story are shocking and occasionally hard to take, though they approach these memories with a combination of pain and humor; its feels something akin to Robert Greene’s Procession, an affecting example of filmmaking as trauma therapy. Innovative and inventive in form, and powerful in both its roars and its silences, this is one of the best documentaries of 2023. (Includes interview and trailer.)
ON 4K:
Blood Simple: The Coen Brothers have made sleeker movies than their debut feature, and funnier ones, and more heartbreaking ones. But they never again made a movie as deliciously nasty as this Texas-set film noir riff (upgraded to 4K by the Criterion Collection), about a greasy private detective (the great M. Emmett Walsh), the cuckolded husband who hires him, and the bloody indignities that ensue. Throw in a handful of particularly ingenious set pieces, a fuming Dan Hedaya as the skeezy husband, and Frances McDormand (the future Mrs. Joel Coen) in her film debut, and you’ve got a breakout movie that still jolts. (Includes interviews and trailers.)
The Apu Trilogy: Legenday Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s immortal trilogy is also getting the Criterion 4K upgrade, with three features (1955’s Pather Panchali, 1956’s Aparajito, and 1959’s Apur Sansar) tracking the early years of a young Bengali man named Apu. Adopting a slice-of-life approach and a playful sense of narrative, Ray’s films — shot primarily with amateur actors and crews — capture the rhythms of village life, the episodic nature of young adulthood, and the complexity of family relationships. His work glows with warmth and affection for these characters; they’re modest films, yet the smallest moments tremble with recognition and empathy. (Includes interviews, featurettes, video essay, and archival Ray audio and video.)
ON BLU-RAY:
Queen of Earth: “I could do without the attitude, the whole ‘Catherine is crazy’ attitude,” snaps Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) at her friend Ginny (Katherine Waterston), in the midst of one of their many hostile interactions in this uneasy and often powerful psychological drama from writer/director Alex Ross Perry (finally making its domestic Blu-ray debut). They’re prickly to each other through most of Catherine’s stay at Ginny’s country house, an “exile” while her ex moves out of their apartment; they’re prickly to each other in a very different way in the intercut snapshots of their time there the summer before. The dialogue between those timeframes—during which, as Ginny predicts, they “trade places” emotionally—keeps Perry’s film from falling into familiar patterns, even as it unfurls Catherine’s carefully modulated descent into madness (one foreshadowed by the moody, scary score, which the picture slowly catches up with). More than anything, it’s a showcase for the considerable gifts of Moss, who has several unforgettable moments. It’s a brilliant performance, in a stark and overwhelming movie. (Includes audio commentaries, new and archival interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, video essay, and trailer.)
Running Scared: Director Peter Hyams (Outland) wasn’t looking to reinvent the wheel with this 1986 buddy cop comedy. It’s got all the familiar ingredients: a black guy, a white guy, a dastardly villain, big action set pieces, a big-city setting, and lots of wisecracks. What made this one special was the casting. Affable stand-up Billy Crystal and renowned hoofer Gregory Hines are not the first people you’d think of for a shoot-‘em-up action/comedy, but their remarkable byplay is what lifts this one above the crowd; as Roger Ebert wrote, Crystal and Hines each play their roles “as if they were both successfully stealing the picture.” (Includes audio commentary, outtakes, featurettes, and trailer.)
The Inspector Wears Skirts: This 1988 Hong Kong action comedy from director Wellson Chin was produced by Jackie Chan, and you can feel his influence in the four-star action sequences and banger set pieces. It sags a bit between them — there’s a bit too much dopey romance, as though the fact that it’s about an elite squad of female cops means they all have to have boyfriends — and the divine Cynthia Rothrock is wasted in a too-small role. But the group dynamic is credible, the stars are charismatic, and it goes out with such a bang that you’ll likely forgive the lulls that preceded it. (Includes audio commentary, featurettes, interviews, alternate title sequences, and trailers.)
My Happy Family / In Bloom: Big World Pictures’ new Blu-ray double-feature spotlights the work of Georgian directors Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross. In Bloom, from 2013, is a fine introduction, but the real draw here is My Happy Family (previously only available on Netflix), in which mother Manana (Ia Shugliashvili) who has finally had enough of her clan and the tiny apartment they inhabit (it’s stressful to even watch people move through it), so she rents an apartment, packs a bag, and takes off. Unsurprisingly, they don’t take it well, though the filmmakers subtly convey that the family’s response is less about Manana’s absence than the fact that she’s puncturing the presumptive order of things. They understand the complexity of her decision, of what she’s leaving behind, and the closing shots have a quiet urgency rarely glimpsed in contemporary drama. (Includes trailers.)
Skateboard: Factory 25 typically releases contemporary(ish) low-budget (and often mumblecore-adjacent) indies like Actual People, Uncle Kent 2, and Funny Haha, so it’s a bit of a shock to see them releasing a studio comedy from 1978. But it’s easy to see the draw, and crossover appeal, of this shaggy sports comedy, which amounts to The Bad News Bears by way of Gleaming the Cube. The great Allen Garfield stars as Manny Bloom, a sleazy D-level Hollywood talent agent who needs a quick cash infusion to pay off his gambling debts, and seizes on the (then) nascent skateboarding craze by putting together a traveling team of teenage wonders—including a young Leif Garrett. Garfield lends the picture a freewheeling improvisational spirit, and eases along the young actors and non-acting skateboarders of the cast into pleasingly naturalistic performances. (Includes audio commetnary, interview, safety PSA, and trailer.)
Charlie Victor Romeo: The title refers to the aviation jargon of CVR, for “cockpit voice recorder”; Charlie Victor Romeo began as a 1999 theatrical production, in which an ensemble cast reenacts six aviation incidents and accidents with dialogue taken entirely from their cockpit voice recordings. This 2013 film version was shot, in 3D, in front of live audiences, and the inherent staginess is perhaps helpful to keep it from becoming overwhelmingly harrowing. But it’s still a mighty tough sit for nervous flyers, veering from the genuine panic of these situations (which occasionally creeps up and sustains, and sometimes comes from nowhere it all after disquietingly calm chit-chat) to the cold, hard facts of the slideshows that open and close each vignette. Difficult, yet powerful, making fine use of its immersive technology. (Includes audio commentary, featurettes, teaser trailers, 3D glasses, and 2D, 3D polarized, and 3D anaglyphic presentations.)
The Man Who Wasn’t There: Clarity is important: this is not a new Blu-ray release of the 2001 Coen Brothers picture, but the 1983 3-D Steve Guttenberg comedy from director Bruce Malmuth (Nighthawks). It is, to put it mildly, a lesser effort, and also pales in comparison to the 3-D immersion of Charlie Victor Romeo; it’s from the much shorter-lived fad boom of the technology in the early 1980s, simultaneous with the leering sex comedy explosion, which means we get the rather inevitable display of a 3-D invisible girls’ shower sequence. The rest of the picture is similarly stupid, but it’s a fascinating relic, the supporting character actors (including Jeffrey Tambor and William Forsyth) have a good time, and the central romantic entanglement, between Guttenberg’s title character and Lisa Langlois’s “Cindy,” is surprisingly sweet and earnest. (Includes audio commentary, 3D glasses, and 2D, 3D polarized, and 3D anaglyphic presentations.)
King on Screen: Daphné Baiwir’s documentary on the film interpretations of Stephen King’s work begins with a clever dramatized sequence of a visit to Castle Rock which turns into a non-stop barrage of reference points — every detail is a shout-out, and it’s a real treat. The documentary that follows is a bit more standard issue, but enjoyably so, starting with Carrie but moving through the films thematically rather than chronologically, whip-smart in its analysis and connections to not only his prose but the culture at large. There are some issues of accessibility causing lopsidedness — they got Frank Darabont, for example, so the amount of time spent on The Green Mile isn’t exactly equitable to its importance in the filmography. But this is a minor quibble; anyone drawn to the subject matter will likely enjoy what they find here. (Includes alternate version, deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes footage, featurettes, and trailer.)
The Devil’s Partner / Creature from the Haunted Sea: Filmmasters continues their series of remastered releases from Roger and Gene Corman’s Filmgroup with another early-‘60s double feature. The Devil’s Partner was a pick-up job for the Cormans; the director was one Charles R. Rondeau, whose story of demonic possession and goat sacrifice is more of a small-town melodrama than a supernatural tale (though it does both well). Corman’s Creature from the Haunted Sea fills out the double bill, and contrary to its title, it’s less of a monster picture than a tongue-in-cheek crime spoof with a witty script by frequent collaborator Charles B. Griffin (The Little Shop of Horrors, A Bucket of Blood). And that’s for the best, since the monster is truly ridiculous, even by the standards of a shot-in-days Corman quickie; more successful, though still not quite on the money, is a waaaay-pre-Chinatown Robert Towne (acting under the alias of Edward Wain) in the leading role. (Includes audio commentaries, featurettes, Corman interview, and trailers.)
Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe: From 1964 to 2008, Brazilian filmmaker José Mojica Marins wrote and directed in a series of wildly off-the-wall mixtures of horror, thriller, dark comedy and winking eroticism, as well as starring as the character of “Coffin Joe,” a menacing undertaker and general boogeyman. Arrow’s new six-disc Blu-ray set combines all ten of the Coffin Joe features; their quality varies wildly (the best of the bunch is the first, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul), but most offer, at the very least, a kooky good time, baroque and self-aware, and always given at least some juicy life by Marins’s deliciously hammy lead performance. (Includes audio commentaries, documentary, featurettes, video essays, early short films and excerpts, interviews, alternate sequences, deleted scenes, and trailers.)
