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:
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters: Criterion is giving Paul Schrader’s 1985 masterpiece a 4K upgrade, and it’s a spectacular one. Written with his brother Leonard, Schrader dramatizes the life of Japan’s most celebrated author, Yukio Mishima, using the events leading to his 1970 protest suicide as a framework for flashbacks to key moments of his life, intercut with relevant interpretations of his work. Cinematographer John Bailey alternates crisp black and white with stylized color (along with theatrical lighting and staging) to create a sumptuous visual palate, given further juice by Philip Glass’s enthralling score. Though Mishima has the take-no-prisoners inevitability of Schrader’s best work, he never made another movie quite like it. Nor, really, did anyone. (Including audio commentary, alternate English narration tracks, featurettes, interviews, documentary, trailer, and essay by Kevin Jackson.)
ON HULU:
Presence: Steven Soderbergh has spent his entire career experimenting, and the experimental concept of this, his first of two 2025 releases (so far!) is that it’s comprised entirely of subjective camerawork, though not quite in the same way as something like, say, Nickel Boys. The point-of-view he’s adopting here, first seen moving quickly but smoothly through a very empty house, is that of a ghost—the titular entity, which never leaves the confines of that house’s walls. That logline makes Presence sound like a haunted house movie, which isn’t entirely accurate. It’s more of a character study, cloaked in the veil of the supernatural, boasting a tightly constructed script by his frequent collaborator David Koepp and first-rate performances across the board.
ON MUBI:
Viet and Nam: Writer/director Truong Minh Quy uses a mixture of verite technique and lyrical expressionism to tell the story of Viet (Dao Duy Bao Dinh) and Nam (Pham Thanh Hai), two coal miners who have fallen in love, and find moments of quiet, intense intimacy down in the dark. Quy takes pains to share how it sounds, looks, and feels down in those mines, and the 16mm photography is rich and textured. His script is unhurried, setting the scene at a leisurely pace and revealing its story points just as organically; it’s a picture that feels episodic for much of its running time, but the threads that pull us through come together with emotional force at its conclusion.
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
Bottoms: Shiva Baby director Emma Seligman and star Rachel Sennott (who also collaborated on the script) reunited for this deliciously dark and frequently subversive riff on the high school sex comedy. They’re joined by the always welcome Ayo Edebiri, who can put a comic spin on pretty much any line and make it twice as funny; Sennott and Edebiri star as a pair of gay seniors who start an after-school club for women’s self-defense and empowerment, which basically amounts to a fight club for high-school girls. (They mostly do it to meet girls.) Seligman can’t match the nerve-rattling brilliance of Shiva Baby, but in all fairness, she’s not really trying; this one’s a winking homage and deliberate throwback, and once you adjust your expectations, you’ll have a good time. This one’s been streaming on Amazon since fall of 2023, and (like too many other movies) it could’ve withered away there; kudos to KL Studio Classics for a long-overdue physical media release. (Includes audio commentaries, deleted scenes, outtakes, featurette, and trailer.)
ON 4K:
Brazil: Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian masterpiece, a dark comedy of Orwellian proportions, has been a Criterion Collection mainstay; it first hit DVD in a three-disc set clear back in 1999, bumped up to Blu-ray in 2012, and now gets the 4K upgrade. In some ways, it’s the ne plus ultra of Criterion releases: a beautifully crafted, visually stunning picture that always looks great in the newest format, and whose complicated history allows for scores of bonus features. But that’s not to diminish the quality of the movie itself, which remains a stunner — bleak, distinctive, eccentric, and unforgettable. (Includes audio commentary, featurettes, interviews, “Love Conquers All” version, trailer, and essay by David Sterritt.)
The Wiz: Sidney Lumet, the poet laureate of grimy New York realism, must’ve seemed like a peculiar choice to direct the big, brassy, movie adaptation of the all-Black Broadway musical version of L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, and it must be said: he doesn’t quite pull it off. But his valiant effort, a new addition to the Criterion Collection, is quite a lot of fun, thanks to the memorable songs, inventive production design (which devises a kind of fairy-tale dreamscape NYC using both sets and real locations), and the charismatic performers—particularly Michael Jackson’s charming turn as the Scarecrow and Richard Pryor’s inspired work in the title role. (Including audio commentary, archival interviews, trailer, and essay by Aisha Harris.)
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: This rough-edged, gnarly 1974 effort from director Sam Peckinpah (upgraded to 4K from Shout! Selects) is an existentialist dirge in genre movie’s clothing, a sweaty, grimy piece of work that’s nonetheless exhilarating in its freedom and self-awareness. Warren Oates does God-level work as Bennie, an American ex-pat hired by a pair of bounty hunters to track down the title character, who knocked up the daughter of a Mexican crime boss; it turns into a mini-“Heart of Darkness,” with Bennie peering into his own dark soul, and Pecknipah examining the ethos of Western masculinity while joining Bennie on his journey into madness. Oates, an actor who can speak monologues just by crinkling the lines on his face, may never have topped his scorching work here, in a role that ably captures his gruff sensitivity and offhand humor (his mumbling commentaries to “Al,” the head of the title, are as pitch-black as comedy gets). There’s a really specific demo for this kind of thing, but this is perhaps as pure a distillation of the filmmaker’s romantic brutalist vision as we ever got. (Includes audio commentaries, interview, trailer and TV spots.)
Monkey Shines: George A. Romero’s 1988 adaptation of Michael Stewart’s horror novel (also new on 4K from Shout!) is a deliciously nasty piece of work, telling the story of a rising young athlete (Jason Beghe) who’s paralyzed in a freak accident, and the intelligent service monkey who makes his newly difficult life easier — at first. Romero’s screenplay is predictable but intelligent, and his direction plays up the claustrophobia, tension, and helplessness of the situation adroitly. He also casts it well; Stanley Tucci and Stephen Root both turn up in early, scuzzy supporting roles, and leading man Beghe overcomes the material’s short shot to silliness by playing it straight and credible. And then Romero truly goes for it in the third act, which is cuckoo-bananas in all the right ways. (Includes new and archival audio commentaries, featurettes, alternate ending, deleted scenes, vintage interviews, trailers and TV spot.)
ON BLU-RAY:
4-Film Collection: Clark Gable: Warner Home Video’s “4-Film Collections” have been the collector’s friend since the DVD days, offering up themed quartets of memorable movies for a nice price. Their Warner Archive label is picking up that mantle with a series of collections centered on the brightest stars of classic Hollywood, starting with this fine demonstration of the range of an actor who could do much more than play Rhett Butler: he could do costume drama (Mutiny on the Bounty), witty banter (Idiot’s Delight), romance (San Francisco), and comedy of manners (Wife vs. Secretary). The last is my favorite of the bunch, in which Gable’s wife Myrna Loy begins to believe the (untrue) office whispers about her husband and his secretary, “an uncommonly good-looking girl” (a well-cast Jean Harlow). The central conflict is set up gracefully and Gable generates palpable chemistry with both of his leading ladies — and even gives Harlow the best single moment in the movie, as she acts up a storm in a silent, loaded moment before quietly declaring, “We’ve had an awful lot to drink.” It’s a perfect little moment in a darling little movie. (Includes newsreels, cartoons, short films, alternate endings for San Francisco and Idiot’s Delight, trailers, and “Clark Gable: Tall, Dark and Handsome” documentary.)
4-Film Collection: Elizabeth Taylor: Taylor’s stardom came later enough that she was allowed to show even more range, nicely showcased in her set, from the blushing ingenue of Father of the Bride to the Technicolor beauty of The Last Time I Saw Paris to the de-glammed, dissatisfied wives of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Reflections in a Golden Eye. (This one is actually a five-disc set, with Warner Archive going the extra mile of including both of the discs from their original Golden Eye release, presenting the film in both its theatrical version and director John Huston’s preferred “gold”-hued presentation.) She’s terrific in all of them, but Virginia Woolf is a legendary performance, and one of the most highly-regarded movies of the 1960s, for a reason. (Includes audio commentaries for Virginia Woolf, newsreels, cartoons, featurettes, trailers, and “Elizabeth Taylor: Intimate Portrait” documentary.)
Nate and Hayes: This 1983 swashbuckler (new on Blu from KL Studio Classics) has pirates and swordfights and so on, but director Ferdinand Fairfax — working from a script penned by David Odell and rewritten, incongruently enough, by John Hughes — is doing everything he can to ape the high style and spirit of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and not quite successfully. But he’s lucky enough to have Tommy Lee Jones as William “Bully” Hayes, the charming rogue at the story’s center, and Michael O’Keefe as his stick-in-the-mud foil-turned-buddy (he’s the kind of guy who says things like “I was a varsity boxer at Harvard, I can take care of myself”). The movie may not land, but they’re having such a good time, it almost doesn’t matter. (Includes audio commentaries.)
The Pusher: This 1960 B-movie, new on Blu from MGM, has an impressive pedigree: the screenplay is by Harold Robbins, right on the verge of becoming one of the best-selling novelists of the era, and based on a novel by Ed McBain, no slouch in the sales department himself. Essentially a post-Naked City docudrama-style police procedural (complete with eye-catching NYC location photography) with its cops searching for an especially vile “junk” dealer, it has a slight scent of sleaze, condemning the underworld activities of its fringe characters while also indulging in them. But there are some unexpected twists as well; it turns out our well-respected cop character’s daughter is a junkie herself, allowing director Gene Milford to veer from the boilerplate and turn the picture into a harrowing (if slightly histrionic) recovery story.
Swordfish: Let’s not beat around the bush here: this 2001 techno-thriller from director Dominic Sena (Gone in 60 Seconds) is deeply silly stuff, loaded to the edge of the frame with the stylistic, aesthetic, musical, and verbal indicators of its turn-of-the-century vintage. But if you’re the right age (helloooo) you’re probably at least a little nostalgic for this kind of disposable, stakes-free, one-and-done fun, and everybody in it seems to be having a pretty good time collecting their easy paychecks. Arrow’s 4K presentation is crisp and the audio is appropriately subwoofer-shaking; this is not some secret masterpiece waiting to be discovered, but it’s exactly what it aspires to be, and absolutely nothing more. (Includes audio commentary, new and archival interviews, alternate endings, “HBO First Look” featurette, music video, trailer, and essay by Priscilla Page.)
