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:
Clean and Sober: A year before becoming Batman, Michael Keaton made his first significant stretch from the fast-talking comic persona that’d been his 1980s bread and butter with this low-key drama from director Glenn Gordon Caron (himself stretching from his rat-tat-tat roots as creator of TV’s Moonlighting). As a coke addict who goes into rehab to escape a bad business deal and a dead girl in his bed, Keaton curbs his comic instincts without diffusing the electricity of his earlier work—it’s a marvel of a performance, hinting at the live-wire unpredictability of his work in the following decade. The stellar supporting cast (including Kathy Baker, M. Emmet Walsh, and a still up-and-coming Morgan Freeman) is aces, while Caron and screenwriter Tod Carroll evocatively capture the one-day-at-a-time grand of rehab and recovery. A long overdue but quite welcome addition to the Warner Archive Blu-ray library. (Includes trailer.)
ON AMAZON PRIME VIDEO:
Nickel Boys: RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel is somehow both strikingly beautiful and utterly heartbreaking. It’s formally breathtaking, told first-person camerawork, initially from the point-of-view of a young Black man in the ‘60s-era South, though Ross brilliantly tinkers with that formal innovation as he tells his story. Whitehead’s book supplies a riveting narrative, and Ross is true to it, but he also has an impeccable sense for how efficiently a single image can tell an entire story story, and the subtle revisions of selective memory—the things you might remember, and the things you might choose, and work, to forget. It’s a stunning piece of work, and confirms Ross as a major American filmmaker.
ON HULU:
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found: South African photojournalist Ernest Cole published his book House of Bondage in 1967, an essential document of that nation during the shameful Apartheid era. Fifty years later, 60,000 of his previously unknown and unpublished negatives were discovered in a Swiss bank vault. “This is the story of what happened between those two dates,” notes the on-screen text of this poignant documentary, and director Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) does that job admirably; he attempts to create, simultaneously, a bio-doc of Cole, an appreciation and analysis of his work, and the story of South Africa’s considerable shifts in that period. The photos, private, powerful, heartrending portraits of poverty in both that country and ours, are riveting, evocative, and brilliant, and Cole’s words are given life by LaKeith Stanfield’s often searing, sometimes halting, always thoughtful voice-over narration.
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD / PEACOCK:
Black Bag: The timing of Steven Soderbergh’s spy thriller, while entire accidental, is sort of hilarious, hitting theaters just as the Broccoli family and Amazon have made a deal that will allow the streamer to take the venerable James Bond franchise and, most likely, turn it into “content.” And here comes Steven Soderbergh, quietly directing a better spy movie than, let’s be honest, most of the Bonds — and widely winking by casting both the most recent Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and the last Bond (Pierce Brosnan) in key roles. The whole movie plays like a rejoinder to the current excesses of the industry; while major studios are releasing tentpole slop, crafted by hacks, with nearly three-hour running times, Soderbergh is operating at a gallop, giving us a fast, sharp, sexy thriller that tells a gripping story and gawks at movie stars, and gets the job done in a tight 94 minutes. (Also streaming on Peacock.) (Includes deleted scenes and featurettes.)
Last Breath: Speaking of efficiency, writer-director Alex Parkinson’s adaptation of his 2018 documentary clocks in at 93 minutes, though in this case it feels like mercy; the picture operates at such a high frequency of tension and dread that anything longer would feel like punishment. It tells the true story of the daring rescue of Chris Lemons (Finn Cole), a young diver who lost his oxygen supply during a dangerous repair gone sideways; this places it firmly in one of my favorite subgenres, the Smart People Solve a Problem movie. Apollo 13 is the obvious comparison, and it works on that level, thanks especially to Woody Harrelson’s lived-in performance as the mission’s old pro. But it also hews closely to another Tom Hanks docudrama, Captain Phillips, by lingering in the aftermath, and addressing the considerable emotional fall-out for its characters. (Also streaming on Peacock.) (Includes audio commentary and featurette.)
ON 4K:
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg: Romance isn’t all smiling faces and happy endings, even—as is the case with Jacques Demy’s 1964 charmer—when every word is sung. There is joy and sweetness in this story of love won and lost, but sadness and tenderness too, and perhaps what is most magical about Demy’s film is how it encompasses all of those moods and colors. And speaking of colors: as Cherbourg is so renowned for its candy-coated photography, it’s somewhat surprising that it took the Criterion Collection this long to upgrade their 2014 Blu-ray to 4K. But they did, and it’s glorious. (Includes documentary, interviews, restoration demonstration, and essay by Jim Ridley.)
In the Heat of the Night: The most iconic moments of Norman Jewison’s 1967 race-based drama – Sidney Poitier declaring, “They call me Mister Tibbs”; how he immediately returns a slap across the face – haven’t lost their electricity in the fifty-plus years since the picture’s release. What’s striking about it, this far on, is how carefully couched those moments are; Jewison seemed to know that he would have to smuggle such provocations into what is, when you get down to it, a fairly straight-forward whodunit, coupled with an early iteration of the soon-to-be-inescapable opposites-attract buddy-cop formula. But it’s an expertly crafted picture any way you slice it, with a deeply embedded sense of place, mood to spare, and ace performances by Poitier and Rod Steiger; Criterion’s upgrade of their previous Blu-ray edition gives the proper weight and texture to Haskell Wexler’s vivid photography. (Includes audio commentary, featurettes, interviews, trailer, and essay by K. Austin Collins.)
What Lies Beneath: Robert Zemeckis’s marital thriller may well play better now than it did upon its 2000 release, as this is the kind of adult-oriented, star-adoring stuff that studios rarely bother with anymore. (This response may have something to do with it being new to this viewer; I skipped it 25 years back because of its trailer, which sorta gave the whole thing away.) It’s too damn long and some of the behavior, particularly by paranoid wife Claire (Michelle Pfeiffer), stretches credibility. But the bravura closing scenes offer Zemeckis the opportunity to indulge in pure style and suspense, and he runs with it, lobbing broad winks at Psycho, Diabolique, and the like. Shout Factory’s 4K restoration just sings — particularly when it comes to the A+ sound design, which is loaded with legit bumps and jumps. (Includes audio commentary, documentary, and featurette.)
Lilo & Stitch: Another one I’d somehow missed for all these years, its new 4K release prompted by the forthcoming (and, at risk of sounding like a broken record, entirely unnecessary) “live action” remake. And it frankly feels all wrong for that kind of Disney Classic treatment; like The Emperor’s New Groove two years earlier, it has a goofy, free-wheeling spirt that feels closer to Looney Tunes than the Mouse House, and its fun, poppy, seemingly hand-drawn style gives it extra juice. The story of a mutant alien and a withdrawn Hawaiian girl with a thing for Elvis, it’s a charming ode to losers and weirdos, and Stitch in particular is a triumph of character design and personality-plus animation. (Includes audio commentary, featurettes, and music videos.)
Donovan’s Reef: Holy hell, if you thought KL Studio Classics’ recent 4K UHD of Hatari! looks phenomenal, wait till you get a load of this late-period John Wayne effort, also shot on location with one of his go-to directors. In this case, the location is picturesque Hawaii, and the director is John Ford, who matches Wayne with Lee Marvin at his most charmingly roguish. The story is pure nonsense; as was so often the case with Ford, what matters here are the vibes, and they are immaculate: gorgeous scenery, cheerfully lunk-headed camaraderie (during the first of Wayne and Marvin’s bar brawls, Duke warns sharply, “Not the brandy, you dope!”), and Wayne at his warm and likable best. (Includes audio commentaries, Ford short film, and theatrical trailer.)
Vice Squad: KL’s other new 4K showcases the opposite extreme of the high-resolution format; this 1982 cop thriller from director Gary Sherman (Dead & Buried) is anything but traditionally pictorial, set as it is among the sleaziest corners and darkest back alleys of Sunset Boulevard. But Sherman finds personality and verve within the “neon slime,” thanks in part to the vivid cinematography of John Alcott (one of Kubrick’s go-to guys), and in part to exploitation mainstay Wings Hauser, whose vicious pimp “Ramrod” is one of the most memorable villains in all of ‘80s cinema. It’s one of those wonderful instances of going above and beyond the assignment; Sherman delivers the thrills and sex expected of such a narrative, but uses his considerable craft and intelligence to elevate the material into something truly sublime. (Includes audio commentaries, interviews, featurette, trailer, and TV and radio spots.)
Motorpsycho: Severin Films continues their delightful partnership with the Russ Meyer estate, following up their release of the Vixen trilogy earlier this year with two of the exploitation filmmaker’s deeper cuts. This one was produced and released immediately before Meyer’s sensational Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and amounts to essentially a gender-swapped dry run, detailing a three-man motorcycle gang’s reign of terror in a middle-of-nowhere small town. Unsurprisingly, the raping and pillaging aren’t nearly as fun with male antiheroes, but this one boasts an early and enjoyable turn from Alex Rocco (aka Moe Green in The Godfather), the first appearance by Meyer regular Haji as the story’s Final Girl, and a memorable role for Holle K. Winters, who you cannot convince me was not the inspiration for the look and costuming of Vanessa Ferlito in Death Proof. (Includes audio commentary and interviews.)
Up!: Meyer’s penultimate completed narrative feature is one of his wildest pictures (which is saying something), the work of a director unapologetically letting his freak flag fly, indulging in not only his sexual fetishes, but his stylistic ones. It’s everything you expect from a Meyer movie — insane angles, rapid-fire editing, baroque storytelling, and heaving bosoms — only even more so, as he found himself navigating an era in which erotica had become too extreme for even him. As a result, this and its followup, Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, feel like he’s bordering on self-parody, and therefore (paradoxically enough) like they might be the closest to his true self. (Includes audio commentary, interview, and radio spot.)
The Nesting: This 1981 chiller — the only mainstream feature from adult filmmaker Armand Weston — was a spooky old house movie launched into the slasher marketplace, an unfortunate fit that resulted in a variety of running times and release titles. Vinegar Syndrome’s new 4K release restores it to its full 110-minute duration (and alternate title Phobia), and it’s occasionally goofy but mostly effective. The cinematography by João Fernandes (himself an alum of adult entertainment, lensing Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones) is visually inventive, using flashbacks, fantasies, and fisheye POVs to give aesthetic snap to the story of an agoraphobic novelist (Robin Groves, a good actress with a great scream) who rents a country house to isolate and work, but is haunted by visions of its sordid past. Weston creates a compelling mystery with real stakes, relying more on mood and dread than blood and guts, and he gets striking late-period performances out of John Carradine and, in her final performance, Gloria Grahame, who lends it an appropriately ghostly presence. (Includes audio commentary, interviews, featurette, outtakes, alternate footage, trailers, TV and radio spots.)
Murderock: This 1984 thriller (full on-screen title: Murder-Rock: Dancing Death) was Lucio Fulci’s final giallo, but the end result feels less like his earlier work than the most 1984 movie possible — like he threw Flashdance, Fame, Breakin’, and a gallon of blood into a blender and hit puree. The set-up is a good one, in which the three best dancers from the “Arts for the Living Center” in NYC will be plucked from their class for a high-profile TV appearance. “If the kids find out, they’ll tear each other to shreds,” despairs one of the ostensible adults, and that’s pretty much exactly what happens. The resolution of the mystery is utterly ridiculous, but it barely matters; the kills are clever, the performances are appropriately operatic, and Giuseppe Pinori’s camera captures some awfully fun period NYC photography, as well as some delightful period dancing. (Includes audio commentary, new and archival interviews, and original video trailer.)
ON BLU-RAY:
The Wind Will Carry Us: Abbas Kiarostami’s 1999 drama, new to the Criterion Collection, is a self-reflective piece of work, in which an undercover journalist (Behzad Dorani) attempts to document the funeral rites of a small village, a mission somewhat thwarted by the verrrrry slow death of the woman they’re planning to mourn. It’s less grim than it sounds, casually funny in an off-the-cuff way, as the stubborn villagers force this city boy to slow down to their tempo. (The best running gag finds him panicking every time his cell phone rings, as he must run to his car and drive to higher ground to get any kind of reception.) Deftly mixing documentary, observation, and narrative, it’s a moving valentine to The Old Ways. (Includes documentary, interview, video essay, trailer, and essay by Kaveh Akbar.)
Room 666 / Room 999: “Is cinema a language about to be lost?” It’s a pointed and thought-provoking question, and one that director Wim Wenders asked of several of his fellow filmmakers at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, where he set up a camera and an audio recorder in a hotel room, and left each of them alone in the room with a page of questions to consider, mull, answer, and expand on. Some are philosophical, some are funny (“This type of question should not be answered with shoes,” Werner Herzog announces, as he goes barefoot) and some are eerily accurate. Forty years later, at Cannes 2022, director Lubna Playoust took up the mantle and asked the question of a new group of filmmakers, beginning with Winders (a kind and appropriate gesture). Taken together, Room 666 and Room 999 are a fascinating inquiry into the importance and longevity of moviemaking, where certain concerns evaporate, and others linger for as long as people are pointing cameras at each other. (Includes interview and trailer.)
Side Street: Arguably the best of the shot-in-NYC police procedurals that hit theaters following the success of The Naked City, this 1949 noir stars the great Farley Granger as a sad-sack soon-to-be-dad who, while trying to swipe a few extra bucks, accidentally steals a small fortune in mob money. Director Anthony Mann was, at this point in his career, one of the best crime directors in the business (he’d cranked out T-Men, Raw Deal, and Border Incident in the previous years), and he orchestrates the events with his customary urgency, complex characterizations, and attentiveness to detail. Warner Archives’ gorgeous Blu-ray beautifully captures four-time Oscar winner Joseph Ruttenberg’s knockout black-and-white cinematography. (Includes audio commentary, featurette, cartoons, short film, and trailer.)
Three the Hard Way: The Blaxpoitation craze was already beginning to subside by 1974, so director Gordon Parks Jr. (Super Fly) did what countless savvy filmmakers have done before and since: he cooked up a superstar team-up. Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, and Jim Kelly were three of the biggest names in urban action movies; this silly but engaging action extravaganza as a trio of badasses who join forces to rescue Williamson’s girl — and save the Black population from a deadly toxin perfected by evil white supremacists. The trio’s charisma is formidable, and Parks pulls it all together with his customary resourcefulness, with a big assist from songs by The Impressions; kudos to Warner Archive for restoring the picture to its original 97-minute version, rather than recycling the shorter version of previous home video releases. (Includes trailer.)
Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw: In between her stints as Miss World USA and Wonder Woman on the original TV show, Lynda Carter made her film debut with this affable lovers-on-the-run flick from exploitation kingpins AIP and director Mark L. Lester (who would go on to direct Firestarter and Commando, among others). It’s basically a country-scored Bonnie and Clyde in a contemporary setting, with Carter as a carhop who falls for a drifter (child-evangelist-turned-B-movie-star Marjoe Gortner) who fancies himself a 20th century Billy the Kid. Gortner’s gnarly charm is well used, and Carter is a vision (and a pistol), while Lester deploys a jittery, run-and-gun energy to make the picture move as fast and recklessly as his protagonists. (Includes audio commentaries, interview, theatrical trailer, and radio spots.)
