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:
The Movie Orgy: It ranked, for decades now, high on the list of physical media holy grails — and indeed, it would seem impossible that Joe Dante and Jon Davison’s 1968 mash-up, a gleeful, funny, bizarre compilation of film clips, TV commercials, early TV shows, trailers, and other video ephemera, would ever see the light of an official release. And that’s because it was never properly licensed, so as the film toured college campuses (and, in more recent years, revival houses and art museums) in its various mutations (it was an ever-evolving organism, with some cuts mutating to over seven hours), it seemed forever fated to be a thing you just had to be lucky enough to see. Bless, then, the fine folks at AGFA and Vinegar Syndrome, who cleared enough of the clips to release this 276-minute version on Blu-ray, and it’s nearly as much of a hoot at home. Don’t crowd me! (Includes introduction by Dante, trailer, and essays by Frank Felisi and Justin LaLiberty.)
ON NETFLIX:
Wake Up, Dead Man: The most admirable quality of Rian Johnson’s latest Knives Out sequel is how adroitly he manages to both deliver what audiences are expecting, and take real risks in the process of that delivery. Benoit Blanc doesn’t show up until a good 30 minutes in, following a complex setup that methodically introduces a sprawling cast of characters – not only who they are, but how they’re broken. But it’s never less than involving, thanks to the trust Johnson has earned in these previous installments; we put ourselves in his hands, and those of his tip-top cast. Some cringed at the explicitly online-political pieces of Knives Out, and they’ll feel the same about some of this material, but to tell a story about modern religion without getting political would be wildly dishonest. More importantly, when you least expect it, Johnson nimbly navigates a turn into genuine grace and empathy; Benoit Blanc may be a “proud heretic,” but I don’t think Johnson is, and that matters. Wake Up Dead Man does everything you want the third Knives Out movie to do — and then it goes deeper, which is some neat trick.
ON MUBI:
Die, My Love: Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s novel has the punk energy of the filmmaker’s best work, full of forceful compositions, knife-sharp edits, and intermingling flashbacks and detours, cultivating a dread-filled, anything-can-happen vibe. Jennifer Lawrence is magnificent (you absolutely cannot take your eyes off her) as a young mother suffering from a combination of postpartum depression and the mental illness of your choice; it’s a slow-motion spiral into a bottomless pit of despair and fury, and she slowly but surely loses her damn mind. It’s a tightrope of a performance, somehow retaining empathy while doing the most unsympathetic things, and the extent to which both the actor and director give no quarter to the expectations of a general audience is, frankly, sort of inspiring.
ON PARAMOUNT+:
Predators: It’s easy to imagine how a documentary that casts a critical eye on the investigative series To Catch a Predator could turn into an apologia for sexual predators, so it’s a small miracle that director David Osit walks that line with such grace and precision. Predators is thoughtful and inquisitive and (certainly) empathetic, in a way the source material never was; it interrogates true crime with real insight, and Osit refused to let himself off the hook either. “I’m thinking about the morality of what I’m asking people to look at,” he explains, and that’s a tricky knot to try and unravel, even when he lands an interview with host Chris Hansen, who’s currently doing a pale imitation of the show on YouTube. That interview, and how Osit handles it, sticks the landing in a really powerful way.
ON 4K / BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
Bugonia: Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone’s latest mind-melt starts out looking like something much more conventional than it is: the story of a couple of fringe conspiracy theorists (Jesse Plemmons and Aidan Delbis) who kidnap a wealthy CEO (Stone) to make a statement. Those opening stretches are entertaining, to be sure; Stone convincingly mouths her character’s language of corporate double-speak, Plemmons refreshingly refuses to find a single sympathetic quality for his character, and the clumsiness of the crime is just about perfect. But Lanthimos puts the movie on a slow, sturdy, sticky boil, building up the bleakness and bloodiness on the way to a genuinely insane home stretch and a deliciously nihilistic conclusion. (Includes featurettes and trailer.)
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
I’m Still Here: We’ve had to wait an unreasonably long time for the physical media release of Walter Salles’s latest, which garnered considerable critical acclaim around this time last year, nabbed star Fernanda Torres a well-deserved Golden Globe, and won the Oscar for Best International Film. But the good thing about that wait is that now you can pair it with Kleber Mendonça Filho’s similarly acclaimed and award-winning The Secret Agent, another true story of the political and social tumult of Brazil in the 1970s. They complement each other well; that’s a sprawling, playful thriller, while I’m Still Here is a tightly-wound character drama, in which Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a former congressman, is taken from his family by government agents without explanation, and does not return. (Thank God that only happened decades ago, in foreign countries!) But the focus here is on Eunice (Torres), Rubens’s wife and mother to his children, who keeps pushing for answers, searching for clues, and hoping for the best as months turn to years, and then to decades. It’s a powerful portrait of injustice and grief, and her performance is worth all the accolades it gathered. (Includes featurettes.)
ON 4K:
Boogie Nights: Paul Thomas Anderson may be on what looks (and hopes) to be a smooth ride to his first Best Picture and/or Best Director Oscar for One Battle After Another, but it’s easy to forget how long ago he was an upstart, a preposterously young auteur who burst into the mainstream with big, ambitious, provocative yet crowd-pleasing ensemble epics. This 1997 favorite, new on 4K from Warner Bros., was only his sophomore feature, but it bursts with the skill, craft, and cajones of a seasoned filmmaker, telling the sprawling story of the San Fernando Valley porn industry from its late ‘70s heyday through the coked-out, cranked-up, ugly video early-‘80s. Mark Wahlberg was never this good again; Burt Reynolds had never been this good before; Julianne Moore, Heather Graham, William H. Macy, and John C. Reilly established themselves as indie superstars. But the most heartbreaking performance is that of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who turns what could have been an embarrassing caricature into one of the most warm and empathetic turns in all of ‘90s cinema. (Includes audio commentaries, deleted scenes, featurette, music video, and Q&A.)
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure: Co-writer/star Paul Reubens and director Tim Burton were cult figures, all but unknown, when they teamed up for their shared 1985 mainstream breakthrough (making its 4K debut joining the Criterion Collection) but it was so wonderfully eccentric, so utterly itself and immediately unforgettable, that it cast a long shadow over both careers (for better or worse). What’s striking now, viewing it with some distance, is how its world is both carefully, painstakingly constructed and refreshingly lived-in; the screenplay is a marvel of structure, of set-up and pay-off, but Reubens is such a free performer and Burton such an instinctive filmmaker that it nevertheless feels like anything can happen at any time. In ’85, it felt like a piece of outsider art; but now, from the 40-year distance of an undeniable classic, it feels like the beloved personality-based comedies of masters like W.C. Fields, Mae West, and the Marx Brothers. (Includes audio commentaries, deleted scenes, new and archival interviews, screening excerpts, trailer, and essay by Jesse Thorn.)
American Utopia: David Byrne’s American Utopia seems like something that’d be hard to screw up capturing for the film camera; the Talking Heads frontman honed it as a touring show before its Broadway run, cooking up a nicely balanced mixture of classics and newer material, pacing the crowd-pleasers wisely, and putting together a completely wireless, mobile, “untethered” band. But the fluidity of that staging is where director Spike Lee shines; he’s always finding new and interesting ways to shoot Byrne and his band, and he’s interested in everyone on that stage, not just the star. Lee’s connection to the material is palpable (Stop Making Sense was an early influence), and you get the feeling he had as much fun making the movie as you’ll have watching it. (Includes featurette, interview, and essays by K. Austin Collins and Jia Tolentino.)
Dogma: Kevin Smith’s fourth feature film started a firestorm upon its release in 1999, where its irreverent take on organized religion and the stories it tells prompted protests from the likes of the Catholic League and Westboro Baptist Church — the kind of enemies that I like my filmmakers to have. The movie at the center of the controversy is a tad on the messy side; Smith’s long-running difficulty matching his sharp dialogue to compelling visuals first became abundantly clear here, and while many of the performances are bang-on, Linda Fiorentino never quite finds a comfortable groove for her leading turn. But there’s still much to admire here, and much to long for; it’s hard to imagine a mainstream filmmaker eagerly reaching for the third rail like this anymore. (Includes audio commentaries, deleted scenes and outtakes, new and archival featurettes, commercials, storyboards, new introduction, trailers and TV spots.)
ON BLU-RAY:
Descendant of the Sun: In this very space two scant weeks ago, I was extolling the virtues of Arrow’s Shawscope Vol. 4, which augments the usual Shaw Brothers kung fu and wuxia films with some of their wilder dips into the pool of ‘80s gene filmmaking; this new release from Vinegar Syndrome (volume two of their “Shaw-sploitation” series) fits snugly into that tradition. It’s one of their nutso “everything but the kitchen skin” sort of efforts, mixing traditional martial arts aesthetics with entertainingly primitive special effects, hilarious creature costumes, and generous helpings of the… Superman origin story? (Includes audio commentary, interview, and video essay.)
Shaw Scares Vol. 1: And this trio of horror-infused Shaw efforts, also collected by Vinegar Syndrome, works in that same, engagingly gonzo realm. The diptych Haunted Tales is the weakest of the bunch, but there’s fun to be had in both Sex Beyond the Grave (or, as it’s called in the opening credits, Love Beyond the Grave), which is essentially an Amityville or Poltergeist-style “get out of the house” movie, yet is rather inexplicably also filled with erotic thriller sequences, narrative whiplash be damned. And Hell Has No Boundary is a terrific mixture of possession horror and Asian police movie (don’t ask), bananas in the best way, and loaded with quotable lines like “the four-eyed pervert is active again.” All in all, a must-have for connoisseurs of out-there cinema. (Includes audio commentaries and interviews.)
Blue City: When this one hit theaters in 1986 and home video shortly thereafter, most of us assumed it was yet another failed attempt (like that year’s Emilio/Demi match-up Wisdom) to awkwardly insert Brat Packers into “grown-up movies.” And while Breakfast Club alums Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy take some getting used to in roles like this, Blue City is an admirably tight little B-movie, an Elmore Leonard lite crime story with a splash of the Miami Vice aesthetic. There are some clichés, to be sure — bars in ‘80s movies only exist as a place for bar fights — but Nelson’s smarm is well-aimed, Sheedy is scrappy and fun to watch, and the supporting cast (particularly David Caruso as Nelson’s best buddy, Paul Winfield as a folksy police chief, and an unhinged Scott Wilson as the villain) is first-rate. (Includes audio commentary, interview, featurette, and video essay.)
Lady of Burlesque: The first credit after the title writes a check it would be hard for any movie to cash: “Based on the novel The G-String Murders by Gypsy Rose Lee.” But William H. Wellman’s 1943 backstage thriller (new on Blu from The Film Masters) comes pretty close, thanks to a typically fire-breathing performance by an especially sexy Barbra Stanwyk. There’s a plot, of sorts, with Stanwyk as a headliner whose rivalry with another dancer intersects with a mystery at the burlesque house where they work, but it’s frankly secondary. This is a hang-out movie, a peek behind tightly closed doors, with Gypsy Rose Lee’s text providing at least a simulacrum of verisimilitude. There are plenty of familiar types, a few good bits (onstage and off), and a climax with a gunman literally taunting the “coppers”; I don’t know what else you want from a ‘40s B-movie. (Includes audio commentary and trailer.)
