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:
Night of the Juggler: KL Studio Classics’ new 4K UHD release — indeed, any contemporary home video release at all — felt like an impossible dream to fans of this grungy, sleazy, exhilarating 1980 New York City crime movie, which was mired for years in licensing and ownership issues. James Brolin stars as a truck driver (and former NYPD officer) whose tween daughter is mistaken for the offspring of a rich developer, and kidnapped by a paranoid, ranting racist who develops a deeply uncomfortable attachment to his victim. It becomes a race against time, as our hero attempts to track down his daughter in a sweaty city (all while eluding a mostly hostile police force). Even fans from its bootleg era will want to give this a fresh look; the cinematography and sound are lively and immersive, and the shadows, darkness and silhouettes of the climax are finally distinct (and impressive). (Includes audio commentary, interviews, featurette, and trailer.)
ON APPLE TV+:
Highest 2 Lowest: The most recent collaboration between director Spike Lee and actor Denzel Washington is probably the least successful of their five to date — and it’s still better than just about anything out there. A riff on Kurosawa’s High and Low (see below), it features the same basic setup of the wealthy man who first believes his son has been kidnapped, only to discover it was the similarly-aged son of his loyal chauffeur. (There’s some Night of the Juggler in there too, now that you mention it.) The first half, most faithful to the original, is the least successful, with Lee and screenwriter Alan Fox letting the long sequences in the far-removed penthouse play out for too long, with too little life. But once Lee gets to ground level, the picture comes to life; the set piece of the ransom drop, which Lee stages on a subway to Yankee Stadium in the midst of the Puerto Rican Day Parade, is one of the best of his career. And the second half, which divulges wildly from the police procedural elements of original film (and novel), explores fascinating questions and tensions surrounding class and art.
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
Friendship: Writer/director Andrew DeYoung’s vehicle for the singular charms (?) of I Think You Should Leave star Tim Robinson opens with a group counseling session flush with uncomfortable subtext, and never looks back. Robinson stars as a seemingly bland suburban middle-manager type who strikes up a casual friendship with his new neighbor (Paul Rudd), a TV weatherman who plays local dive bars with his punk band. DeYoung’s script is initially rooted in the discomfort of hanging out with a (comparatively) cool guy when you’re a total square, but soon stakes out territory in the realm of the surreal; the more time we spend with this guy, the more off-putting and concerning his behavior becomes. Upon release, Friendship was compared to The Cable Guy, but it hews closer to something like Observe & Report, primarily thanks to its sense of perspective — it’s told from the point-of-view of its unhinged character, which gives DeYoung the freedom to go in whatever weird directions present themselves, creating a real (and welcome) sense of danger and uncertainty throughout. (Includes audio commentary, deleted and extended scenes, and Q&A.) (Also streaming on HBO Max.)
The Gullspång Miracle: It started so nicely. Kari and May reached out to filmmaker Maria Fredriksson promising “a miracle,” and telling the story of how, by sheer coincidence, they came face-to-face with the doppelgänger of their sister, who killed herself decades earlier. And then they discovered that it wasn’t just a resemblance; they were twins, separated at birth, her rediscovery allowing her lost family to get to know her at last. But in the process of investigating her new past, this outsider gets more than she bargained for, and Miracle is a fascinating example of a documentary going where its strange story takes it, becoming something quite different than the warm and fuzzy family reunion story we might expect. (Includes interview and essay by Sara Clements.)
![High and Low (1963) Original Trailer [4K]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ELsgPvgDBoY/hqdefault.jpg)
ON 4K:
High and Low: Just in time for the release of Spike Lee’s remake Highest 2 Lowest, Criterion gives a long-overdue bump to Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 adaptation of Ed McBain’s novel. Toshirō Mifune stars as Kingo Gondo, a show executive who’s making a play for a takeover of his company when, in a bit of inconvenient timing, his son is kidnapped. But it turns out the kidnapper made a mistake, grabbing the son of his chauffeur, prompting a real moral dilemma for our hero. Kurosawa spends a bit more time on the cultural questions and quandaries of the central premise, and then almost leaves his protagonist entirely to follow the police on their investigation. Those sections are stimulating, the kind of forensic analysis and investigation that now motors countless TV cop shows, but Kurosawa wisely brings the emotions and themes back around with a powerful final scene of tough, hard truths. (Includes audio commentary, documentary, interviews, teaser, trailers, and essays by Geoffey O’Brien and Donald Richie.)
This is Spinal Tap: The rock documentary—and rock music, for that matter—would never be the same after director Rob Reiner and stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer took them on in this 1984 “mockumentary.” In doing so, they proved the essential rule of comedy: what’s funny isn’t people trying to “be funny,” but going about their business totally straight-faced and utterly oblivious to how ridiculous they are. (Or, to put it another way, you can’t fail when creating a world in which “no one knows who they were or what they were doing.”) And yesterday’s satire is today’s status quo, and as the real deal grew more ridiculous, rock stars began quoting its dialogue and making amps that went up to 11. In retrospect, Spinal Tap seems prescient, insightful, and even quaint and restrained, while remaining—as ever—wickedly funny. Its new 4K Criterion edition is a bit of a homecoming; the company released it on laserdisc in its early days, and now restores those original bonus features, plus more from the ensuing years. (Includes audio commentaries, new and archival interviews, outtakes and deleted scenes, original fundraising demo reel, excerpts from The Return of Spinal Tap, trailers, media appearances, music videos, and essay by Alex Pappademas.)
Get Carter: Michael Caine was already a star, thanks to Alfie five years earlier, when writer/director Mike Hodges cast him in this ferocious adaptation of Ted Lewis’s novel Jack Returns Home. But this may be his most indelible performance of that early era, the one that most evenly mixes both his purring charisma and steely-eyed malice. He stars as a London gangster going “up North,” initially, we’re only told, “to find out what happened.” But he’s investigating the death of his brother, and Jack Carter is not the kind of guy you want to get all bent out of shape about family affairs, and it turns out that the original, anodyne explanations from the thugs up there don’t wash with Carter. Hodges’ elliptical approach and tough-as-nails style recall John Boorman’s Point Blank a few years earlier (and Soderbergh’s The Limey many years after), and Warner Archives’ 4K transfer brings out the pulpy texture of the image and (especially) the sharpness of Roy Budd’s ripper of a score. (Includes audio commentaries, introduction, interviews, featurette, and trailer.)
Undisputed: This 2002 effort from co-writer/director Walter Hill (new on 4K from KL Studio Classics) is an unabashed and unapologetic B-movie, trafficking in the tropes of two of its most durable subsets: the boxing picture and the prison movie. The set-up, simple and efficiently conveyed (not a second of the 94-minute runtime is wasted), finds Wesley Snipes as the undisputed boxing champ of a high-security prison for particularly violent offenders — a title that’s jeopardized by a new celebrity inmate (Ving Rhames), the heavyweight champ outside those walls, a character clearly inspired by Mike Tyson. Rhames is chilling in the role, never giving an inch to notions of sympathy, and Snipes wisely underplays opposite him; both men are boosted by a stellar supporting cast, including Michael Rooker, Wes Studi, Master P, and MTV’s Ed Lover as the quite colorful color commentator for their bouts. By telling a boxing story, Hill is going all the way back to his roots, to his directorial debut Hard Times, and the highest compliment one can pay to Undisputed is that it does Hill’s legacy proud. (Includes audio commentary, interviews, and trailer.)
The Two Jakes: Roman Polanski’s Chinatown was one of the finest films of the 1970s, a full-throated film noir-style psychological mystery with a decidedly post-Watergate slant. Screenwriter Robert Towne completed a follow-up in the early 1980s, pitching himself as director to star Jack Nicholson and producer Robert Evans. The duo agreed, and decided to keep it even more in the family by casting Evans (who had started in Hollywood as a pretty-boy actor) as Nicholson’s co-star, the second “Jake” of the title. It was a strange idea, and one that ultimately sunk the film when Towne got his cast into rehearsals and discovered that Evans couldn’t pull it off. It lay dormant for five years, until Nicholson resurrected the project and directed it himself (with Harvey Keitel as the second Jake). It doesn’t approach the heights of Chinatown, by a long shot. But Nicholson really came to play here, as both an actor and director (it wound up being his last go-round behind the camera); he whips up plenty of moody atmosphere, gets fine work out of Keitel and femme fatale Madeleine Stowe, and puts just enough miles on ol’ Jake Gittes. (Includes audio commentary, interviews, and trailer.)
Of Monsters and Madness: The Films of Larry Fessenden, Vol. 1: Fessenden is one of the more fascinating fringe figures of independent genre cinema in the 1990s (and beyond), and this new 4K/Blu-ray set from Vinegar Syndrome collects his first two feature films, which remain scrappy and thrilling even after all these years. 1991’s No Telling starts out looking like a fairly standard indie granola drama, with an attractive young couple moving to a new small town and trying to set down roots — and then it takes a couple of wild turns, introducing a tense love triangle, science-fiction elements, and a welcome sense of “anything goes” storytelling. His 1997 follow-up Habit is somewhat easier to classify, one of several moody black-and-white, NYC-set vampire indies of the era (alongside Nadja, The Addiction, and Night Owl), capturing the griminess of the era and serving up subtle subtextual commentary on the AIDS crisis and the rise of gentrification in the city. Neither picture is predictable, and both showcase a gifted filmmaker figuring out his voice and style on the fly. (Includes audio commentaries, featurettes, interviews, short films, sizzle reel, and trailers.) \
ON BLU-RAY:
Born in Flames: The downtown New York City art scene of the early 1980s gave birth to an entire raucous movement in music, film, and visual art; this 1983 feature from director Lizzie Borden (Working Girls) is one of the most vibrant and pointed of all of those works, a pseudo-documentary story of radicalism in a post-revolution America. Borden ingeniously uses the rough edges of her low budget to amp up the picture’s verisimilitude and outlaw spirit, all while crafting and capturing thought-provoking debates and discussions on a wide array of topics that are still very much in the national discourse. And Criterion’s solid transfer makes this no-budget production look and sound better than it ever has. (Includes audio commentary, additional Borden feature Regrouping, and essays by Yasmina Price and So Mayer.)
Flaming Brothers: This 1987 Hong Kong action movie, new on Blu from Eureka, will likely attract the eye for the presence of the legend Chow Yun-Fat in the leading role; also worth noting is the screenplay, credited to a young Wong Kar-wai (it was released a year before his directorial debut As Tears Go By). The plot is rather old hat, but the performers are pure fire; Chow is at maximum charisma, while Alan Tang more than holds his own as his brother (in spirit, at least) and business partner. Some of the whimsical diversions don’t work, but the script is well-structured, pulling its various characters and plotlines together smoothly, while director Joe Cheung orchestrates the action nicely, up to and including a killer climax. (Includes audio commentary, featurette, archival interview, trailer, and essay by Camille Zaurin.)
Smoke / Blue in the Face: Director Wayne Wang and screenwriter Paul Auster’s 1995 indie drama Smoke is one of the loveliest movies of its era, a literate yet emotionally raw story of familial connection and cultural divides in ‘90s Brooklyn. Harvey Keitel is the neighborhood’s designated chronicler, snapping a photo in front of his cigar shop every day and William Hurt is the novelist who lives nearby, and over the course of a leisurely 112 minutes, their lives intersect and expand in unexpected directions. Wang and Auster had such a good time making the film that they got Miramax to fund the quickie follow-up Blue in the Face, with much of the cast returning for extended improvisations in the cigar shop. It’s not as successful, but there are some memorable bits, and they make for a delight of a double feature. (Includes interviews, featurette, and press conference.)
Greta Garbo: 4-Film Collection: Frankly, Ernst Lubitcsh’s 1939 comic masterpiece Ninotchka is worth the price of the purchase of this four-disc set alone; it’s one of the best films of Lubitcsh or his leading lady’s career, and that’s saying something. But all four of these selections are classics, each spotlighting different aspects of Garbo’s distinctive persona, from the tragedy of Camille to the darkness of Anna Christie to the toughness of Queen Christina, a film whose “strong female protagonist” — to say nothing of her gender fluidity and even androgyny — makes it feel more forward-thinking than most movies that are made today. (Includes alternate versions of Anna Christie and Camille, newsreels, radio adaptations, cartoons, short film, and trailers.)
Errol Flynn: 6-Film Collection: Warner Archives expands their showcase box sets from the typical four titles to six for Errol Flynn, not only one of the biggest stars of his time, but an early example of what we’d now call an action hero. Their selection displays some of his versatility — it includes the Western Santa Fe Trail and the war pictures Objective Burma and Edge of Darkness — but we’re watching Flynn for swashbucklers, and this one has three beauts: The Sea Hawk, Adventures of Don Juan, and the best of them all, The Adventure of Robin Hood, whose Technicolor photography is a vibrant and intoxicating as ever. (Includes audio commentaries, “Warner Night at the Movies” wrap-arounds, documentaries, featurettes, outtakes, radio adaptations, cartoons, short films, newsreels, and trailers.)
7 Women: The shoddy treatment MGM extended to John Ford’s final film — wherein they slashed the budget and barely released the final product as the bottom half of a double bill — had extended into its home video afterlife, making decent versions borderline impossible to find. Thankfully, Warner Archive has given it the Blu-ray treatment at long last, allowing curious viewers to check out the old man’s last stand. It’s certainly not up to the standards of his masterpieces, but it’s a compelling work, extending the filmmaker’s late-period exploration of stories about characters typically sidelined in his earlier pictures. Per the title, it’s almost entirely about women, in this case a group running mission in mid-1930s China. Anne Bancroft is particularly good as the tough, cynical doctor whose arrival at the mission shifts the ground beneath it. This is one of the best performances of her early career, and its closing moments land with a wallop. (Includes featurette, cartoon, and trailer.)
Winter Kept Us Warm: Canadian International Pictures brings the recent 60th anniversary restoration of this unsung gem of queer cinema — though it’s so modest in both its style and substance that an inattentive viewer could miss its gay themes entirely. Co-writer/director David Secter establishes the dynamics of his two college student protagonists from the jump, one a shy introvert and the other a gregarious B.M.O.C., and lets them circle each other into a developing friendship, and then more. Its 1965 production is clear in not only the dress and music but the filmmaking techniques (still photo montage sequences, for example, make it feel dated but striking), and the tiny budget renders some production values unsurprisingly sparse (dialogue audibility is occasionally an issue). But it’s an earnest and sensitive film, and an important one as well.
Drug-o-Rama Video Party: The latest collaboration between the American Genre Film Association and Something Weird Video is, like their earlier “Blood-A-Rama Triple Frightmare” and “Shock-O-Rama Video Party” discs, greater than the sum of its parts. The three or four cheapie exploitation movies they group for these single-disc collections are rarely terribly good; the fun comes in their bells-and-whistles “play all” function (here dubbed the “all nite slumber party mode,”), which runs all of the films, along with movie theater snack bar promos, additional trailers, and other ephemera for a loop of nostalgia and sleaze. There’s plenty of the latter in the four films here; the first two (Help Wanted Female and Hedonistic Pleasures) are basically softcore sexploitation flicks where the drug elements are mostly an afterthought, though that’s certainly not the case with Alice in Acidland, which is pretty much what you’d expect from the title. The strangest, yet most successful, film in the set is The Hard Road, directed and edited by Gary Graver, now celebrated for his work as Orson Welles’s last cinematographer. It’s a downright bizarre mixture of Reefer Madness-style cautionary tale and classroom hygiene film (complete with stomach-churning medical textbook closeups), yet it somehow transcends its propagandistic aims to become a haunting time capsule of both the era and the fear surrounding it. (Includes booklet with essay by Lisa Petrucci.)
The Woman Chaser: The latest release from Cinématographe is an odd little item, a cock-eyed black-and-white adaptation of Charles Willeford’s novel starring Patrick Warburton (Seinfeld’s Puddy) as a used car salesman and ladies’ man who decides to use the skills he’s acquired as both to become… a film director. Long unavailable on disc (and unseen in its original form), it’s so peculiar and potentially off-putting that it’s tough to fully engage; writer-director Robinson Devor deliberately keeps his audience at a distance, both with meta-textual devices and his cold protagonist. But you have to admire his ambition and refusal to play it easy — and its look and style are strikingly distinctive. (Includes full-length alternate version The Art of Insanity, audio commentaries, interviews, trailer, and essays by Glenn Kenny, Chris Cabin, and Jesse Sublett.)
Patterns: Screenwriter Rod Serling and director Fielder Cook’s 1956 boardroom drama has long been available only in shoddy, public domain transfers, which makes the Film Masters’ new Blu-ray release a welcome upgrade indeed. What’s most fascinating about the picture is the degree to which Serling’s sharp, insightful script keys in on the big ideas of efficiency and profitability that would power American business (and American life) in the decades to come. It may be more explicit, but Serling and Cook are painting the same kind of poisoned portrait of corporate (specifically, executive) culture as Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond in The Apartment four years later; this is a portrait of an utterly and undeniably toxic workplace, decades before that phrase existed, and this fierce, intelligent work breaks your heart without stacking the deck.
Invasion, U.S.A.: No, not the jingoistic, alarmist Chuck Norris action movie… instead, it’s a jingoistic, alarmist Cold War Red Scare movie. Most folks will know the title from its appearance as a sixth-season episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000; furthermore, The Film Masters’ new Blu-ray includes the bonus film Rocket Attack U.S.A, itself the subject of a memorable MST3K episode. As you might expect from those factoids, neither film is particularly good, in any traditional sense — but they are absorbing, a curious two-part deep-dive into how the iconography of Americana is combined with fear and paranoia of the Other to create political propaganda. (Includes audio commentaries, program of propaganda shorts, featurettes, MST3K episode, short film, trailers, and essays by Don Stradley and Toby Roan.)
