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 Mother and the Whore: Jean Eustache’s 1973 interpersonal epic was, for decades, something of a cinematic holy grail — all but impossible to see, thanks to the firm grip of the filmmaker’s estate on the rights to his work, its legend only amplified by its seeming esotericism (a nearly four-hour French, black-and-white relationship drama). Yet this first-time viewer found it surprisingly accessible, a snapshot of twentysomething listlessness that has only aged in its most minute specifics (and those, like the portraiture of Bohemian Parisian life, only add spice). Eustache’s thorny script addresses the stubbornness of love, heteronormative double-standards, and sexual jealousy with refreshing frankness, drilling down on the genuinely complex and sometimes contradictory dynamics of the participants of its love triangle, understanding, perhaps more than any film that comes to mind, the impulse to stay, knowingly, in a bad thing that feels good. The expansive running time is ultimately its best feature; we sit with these people so long that it really does feel as though we know them, in all of their pleasure and misery. (Includes interviews, featurettes, archival footage, trailer, and essay by Lucy Sante.)
ON PARAMOUNT+:
Black Box Diaries: Japanese journalist Shiori Ito details her journey as a survivor of sexual assault in this devastating documentary. It occurred in April 2015, at the hands of a powerful and respected colleague; she went public two years later, in the face of infuriating hostility from members of the media and police investigators. Ito isn’t just the subject of “Black Box Diaries” — she’s also its director, and that cinematic intimacy, that raw, open-wound quality, gives the picture much of its considerable power. She’s also, luckily, a compelling protagonist, tough and resourceful and determined, taking on not just one well-connected journalist, but an entire corrupt system. It’s a tough sit, but an important one, and there’s a telephone conversation near its ending that’s one of the most moving things I saw in any film last year.
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat: Belgian filmmaker and multimedia artist Johan Grimonprez’s film sounds, from its logline, like a fairly straight-forward historical documentary, chronicling the struggle for Congolese independence from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s. But Grimonprez eschews most of the stylistic markers such a description calls to mind; there are no talking head interviews and no contemporary voice-of-God narration, and he shines the story through the prism of the era’s jazz music, as well as that music’s intersections with the politics and protest of the moment. So the jazz gives the picture its heartbeat, its rhythm; it’s a masterfully edited case of form following function, medium marrying message. This is a long movie — just shy of 2.5 hours — but it moves like lightning, its flurry of information and insight powered by sly, sharp juxtapositions and unexpected connections. (Includes interview and trailers.)
The Dead Don’t Hurt: Viggo Mortensen is the writer, director, and star of this thoughtful, graceful, contemplative revenge Western. But this is no vanity project; in fact, he hands the best role in the piece to the wonderful Vicky Krieps, who has had precious few opportunities to display the fire and grace she burst onto our radars with in Phantom Thread. The vistas are beautiful (Shout Factory’s Blu-ray transfer is tip-top), the writing and characterizations are textured, and Krieps and Mortensen are just very good together — and that’s half the job, honestly? (Includes deleted scenes, interview, and featurette.)
My Name is Alfred Hitchcock: The latest cinema history essay film from Mark Cousins (The Story of Film, The Eyes of Orson Welles) is built around a premise playful enough that his subject would likely have approved: an opening credit informs us that it was written and narrated by Hitch himself, whose first chunk of narration conceded, “I know I’ve been dead for 40 years…” The words are in fact written by Cousins, and voiced by impressionist Alistair McGowan, and if the impersonation isn’t always convincing, it’s a clever conceit, allowing Cousins to put his analysis and research through a more personal prism. Organized by recurring themes (escape, loneliness, time, etc.), packing in history, compositional assessment, and humor (“Only the most diehard of my fans would have seen Juno and the Paycock!”), it’s a treat for both experts and novices. (Includes interview, animation and vocal tests, trailers, and Cousins’s introductions of three Hitchcock classics.)
ON 4K:
Yojimbo/Sanjuro: Another must-have upgrade from the Criterion Collection, which made these two samurai classics from Akira Kurosawa early additions, and have upped the game with each new release. Released just one year apart, in 1961 and 1962, they showcase a filmmaker at the absolute top of his game, and a leading man whose strengths he by then understood intuitively; Toshiro Mifune brings grace, swagger, and wit to the role of samurai Sanjuro, who uses his masterless status to play two warring clans against each other in Yojimbo, and to help clean out a rotting clan in Sanjuro. One of the most oft-told of tales (A Fistful of Dollars was so clearly a lift of Yojimbo that Kurosawa sued), yet there’s not an ounce of dust on either of these masterpieces. (Includes audio commentaries, featurettes, teasers and trailers, and essays by Alexander Sesonske and Michael Sragow.)
Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling: Richard Pryor’s ‘80s film output was mostly a depressing one, of easy paychecks and dopey comedies that sanded off his rough edges. The exceptions were his masterful concert films and this 1986 roman à clef, his sole narrative directorial effort, in which he tells the thinly-veiled story of his life, his career, and most importantly, his nearly fatal addiction to drugs. As with All That Jazz or 8 1/2 (both clear influences), Pryor finds an inventive, sui generis way to dramatize his own story, and the closing passages are just shattering, a harrowingly honest confession that’s also dramatically riveting. (Includes new and archival interviews and essay by Hilton Als.)
Seven: David Fincher’s breakthrough feature makes its 4K debut, and while some have raised objections to the transfer and tinkering, those modifications are (to these eyes) pretty minor, and don’t detract in any noticeable way from the considerable power of this dread-filled thriller—ostensibly a serial-killer police procedural, but ultimately a rain-soaked meditation on decay, of both the urban experience and the human soul. The look and feel remains haunting, and Andrew Kevin Walker’s script is ingenious, but the real achievement, from this perspective, is Fincher’s casting: each actor is doing the ne plus ultra of what they do best, from Morgan Freeman (wise veteran) to Brad Pitt (blowhard dipshit) to Gwyneth Paltrow (wounded faun) to Kevin Spacey (glowering sociopath). (Include audio commentaries, additional/extended scenes, alternate ending, and featurettes.)
Aguirre, The Wrath of God: Shout Factory gives the 4K treatment to another deserving recipient: Werner Herzog’s 1972 historical epic, with Klaus Kinski as Lope de Aguirre, a 16th century Spanish conquistador who led a doomed mission down the Amazon river in search of El Dorado, the city of gold. This was the first of the five (to put it mildly) tumultuous collaborations between the filmmaker and star, and he was clearly the director most equipped to harness Kinski’s gonzo, take-no-prisoners onscreen energy. Herzog’s melding of historical storytelling and handheld style gives Aguirre an immediacy unusual for period pieces; it’s an odd and difficult picture, but at its best, it’s a scathing critique of colonialism and an indelible portrait of stubbornness and paranoia in the face of defeat. (Includes audio commentaries and trailer.)
Internal Affairs: 1990’s Pretty Woman may have been the hit that made Richard Gere a movie star again, but this hard-hitting cop thriller from earlier that year was the one that made everyone reassess what he could really do. He’s an unrepentant villain here, an L.A. street cop as dirty as the day is long who doesn’t care for the questioning of I.A. officer Andy Garcia, and makes his distaste pointedly personal. The sticky screenplay by Harry Bean (The Believer) resists the urge to make Garcia the “good guy,” though; there’s not as much real estate between them as you’d think, and that moral fuzziness, coupled with the occasional formal innovations of director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas), turns it into something quite special. It gets a little too conventional in the home stretch, but even then, this is a crackerjack crime movie and a tightly wound psychological study. (Includes audio commentaries, interviews, additional/extended scenes, alternate ending, and trailer.)
The Holdovers: When Alexander Payne’s Oscar nominee hit Blu-ray last year, many of us wondered why there was no 4K release as well; thankfully, Shout Factory has solved that problem. Payne is 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, alternate ending, and featurettes.)
The Gift: The timing of these things is often coincidental, but it feels like kismet that the long-awaited hi-def debut of Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan has been followed so closely by its most similar match in his filmography, another small town Gothic about the evil men can find themselves doing (and co-written, even, by Simple Plan co-star Billy Bob Thornton). Cate Blanchett stars a medium whose “gift” for seeing is called upon when the brutal death of a young woman (Katie Holmes) leaves local police stumped; among the stacked supporting cast (Greg Kinnear, Giovani Ribisi, Hilary Swank, J.K. Simmons), the surprising standout is Keanu Reeves, who is utterly terrifying as a backwoods psycho who is the perhaps-too-obvious suspect. Raimi directs with his customary flair while respecting the text, and Shout’s 4K transfer is a knockout. (Includes audio commentaries, isolated music and effects tracks, new and archival interviews, music video, trailers, and TV and radio spots.)
Hatari!: It has, by now, become common wisdom that Howard Hawks made hangout movies, and few of his films meet that definition more snugly than this 1962 adventure comedy, in which John Wayne and a crew of pretty ladies and misfits (Red Buttons?) spend 157 minutes hanging out, capturing wild game, trying to get laid, and getting hammered (“You have been drinking a little, haven’t you?” “No ma’am, I’ve been drinking a lot!”). There’s not much plot to speak of, but the romantic entanglements are entertaining, the procedural sections are fascinating, and the animals are majestic — I’m only a man, and I’m not above giggling at a baby elephant knocking shit over. And if the process shots are especially noticeable in 4K, that barely detracts from the beauty of the East African settings. (Includes audio commentary and trailer.)
Far and Away: Another showcase disc from a scenic standpoint, this time from Shout Factory — a movie I, and many others, sneeringly dismissed as stiflingly old-fashioned back in 1992, and which now seems like the kind of blast from the past we could sorely use more of. Ron Howard directs with the sure-handed journeyman craftsmanship that was already his brand, telling the shopworn tale of a pair of Irish immigrants making their way to the new world and staking out a piece of it for themselves. It’s all corny as hell, and Tom Cruise’s Irish accent is as laughable as it was back then. But the heat he generates with then-wife Nicole Kidman is considerable, and she finds all sorts of unexpected colors for what could’ve been a cardboard caricature of a snooty rich girl. (Includes feature-length making-of documentary and trailer.)
Rock n Roll High School: Shout has released Allan Arkush’s 1979 punk-rock high-school comedy in pretty much every format you can, so its 4K upgrade is not only welcome, but inevitable. It remains, as ever, a top-volume blast of music and attitude, a tribute to the ageless pleasures of Ramones music, bad behavior, and P.J. Soles’s cuteness. She stars as Riff Randell (still one of the all-time great movie names), a bad girl and would-be songwriter who is willing to burn the damn school down to catch the attention of her beloved Ramones; Mary Woronov is a delight as the deliciously evil school administrator who becomes her chief antagonist. The music is a riot, the gags are broad but beautiful, and Arkush orchestrates it all with the energy and anarchy of a Spike Jones record. (Includes audio commentaries, new and archival interviews and featurettes, audio outtakes, trailer, and TV and radio spots.)
Snake Eyes: KL Studio Classics gives the 4K bump to one of Brian De Palma’s lesser efforts, because a lesser De Palma is still more electrifying and enjoyable than a top-tier work by just about anyone else. The main problem with the enterprise is David Koepp’s screenplay, which just relies too heavily on creaky dialogue and red herrings; everything else is aces, from De Palma’s reliably inspired camerawork to Nicolas Cage’s reliably unhinged performance to the pulse-quickening supporting turn from Carla Gugino, who would’ve been a multi-movie De Palma muse in a just and reasonable world. (Includes audio commentary and trailer.)
Silent Night, Deadly Night: It was one of the most controversial horror movies of the 1980s — no small achievement, that — the story of a little boy who watched his parents murdered by a criminal in a Santa costume, only to turn homicidal himself when put in a Santa suit by his department-store boss a decade later. The whole thing is unseemly in its sleaziness, which is what made it such a cause célèbre back in 1984. But that unapologetic disreputability is part of what has drawn modern audiences to it; in this super-safe era, at least at the cinema, it’s sort of refreshing to come across something that takes such delight in being grimy. That griminess is both in its soul and on its surface, which makes it an unlikely choice for the Shout 4K treatment, but it looks… well, about as good as it probably could. (Includes new and archival audio commentaries, new and archival interviews, featurettes, trailers, TV and radio spots.)
ON BLU-RAY:
Miracle Mile: It’s a set-up brilliant in its simplicity: you pick up a pay phone, and hear something you’re not supposed to, and it concerns, well, the end of the world. This was the central premise of this 1988 cult thriller from writer/director Steve De Jarnatt, which plays like a cross between After Hours and The Day After, as a likable everyman (Anthony Edwards, terrific) meets up with a would-be dream girl (a beguiling Mare Winningham) when she finishes up her late shift at a diner, only to get that phone call, which seems to imply that the nukes are on their way. De Jarnatt is a smart enough filmmaker to know that the dread comes from the uncertainty, and he milks that angle for all its worth, up to and including a conclusion that’s as unpredictable as it is inevitable. (Includes audio commentaries, featurettes, interviews, short film, featurettes, storyboards, deleted scenes, outtake, bloopers, and trailers.)
Vixen!: The home media event of the month, at least for us sickos, is the HD debut of three seminal (pardon the pun) works by the exploitation maestro Russ Meyer, whose sensible iron-fisted grip on his copyrights meant that his somewhat shambolic estate kept his movies out of general circulation for decades now. Luckily, Severin Films is riding to the rescue, with the first three of at least five releases of vintage Meyer titles; these three are dubbed the “Vixen trilogy,” beginning with this 1968 underground hit that would become one of Meyer’s (or, frankly, anyone’s) most profitable pictures. And it’s an ideal introduction to his oeuvre, showcasing what his specific sensibility: a non-stop, rapid-fire assault of sex, violence, and vulgarity as a clever cover for social commentary, stunningly inventive photography, and a rat-tat-tat editing style that was decades ahead of its time. Erica Gavin is a stick of dynamite in the title role, as a bitter, racist nymphomaniac who makes everyone she meets want to bed her or kill her (or maybe both). (Includes new and archival audio commentaries, new and archival interviews, featurette, and trailer.)
Supervixens: Vixen! got Meyer a major deal at 20th Century Fox, and though he made his masterpiece Beyond the Valley of the Dolls there, he was a poor fit with the studio system. He was happier making his own fringe productions, like this breathless 1975 smash-up of sex, violence, and masculine insecurity. Character actor extraordinaire Charles Napier is terrific — both homey and horrifying — as a backwoods cop whose brutal murder of a lusty local woman sets the convoluted plot in motion. It was, to that point, Meyer’s wildest effort, and in retrospect, its ultra-violence gets at something genuinely ugly in the ‘70s male psyche. (Includes audio commentary, interviews, The Incredibly Strange Film Show episode, trailer, and TV spot.)
Beneath the Valley of the UltraVixens: Supervixens may well have taken Meyer as far into his own sensibility as he could go; his final two features of note, 1976’s Up! and this gonzo 1979 effort, pushed his signature style and sensibility into something bordering self-parody. It’s still a blast to watch tho, as the director happily skewers small-town values, religious hypocrisy, and class warfare with the sweaty, busty abandon we’ve come to expect. It’s perhaps his nuttiest movie, and boy is that ever saying something. (Includes audio commentary, new and archival interviews, and trailer.)
Let’s Get Lost: “He was bad, he was trouble, and he was beautiful.” Those words come early in Bruce Weber’s indelible 1988 portrait of the jazz musician Chet Baker, with whom Weber spent a considerable amount of time, and apparently gained an equitable amount of confidence. The contrast between the archival footage of this young, handsome, matinee idol and the weathered, spent man he’s become 25 years later is striking, and while Weber eventually saunters into biographical territory, he’s best at pinpointing Baker’s particular appeal, and how the too-cool persona that made him so attractive in the Eisenhower era had nowhere to go but the gutter in the years that followed. It’s about Baker, and jazz, and that time in our history, but at it best, it’s about the impossibility of the truth—how the lies you tell about yourself eventually become the reality you have to live in. (Includes Weber’s short films and trailer.)
The Killer is Loose: We all know and love our Budd Boetticher Westerns, but he could do much more than just that, as this 1956 crime thriller shot in a jaw-dropping 15 days, more than proves. The B-movie efficiency is on full display here, with a narrative that leaps right in and lets us figure it out, as a bank heist progresses into a tightly-wound manhunt procedural as cop Joseph Cotten’s wife is targeted by escaped convict Wendell Corey, doing a terrifying, banality-of-evil sorta turn. Cotten is sturdy and sure-handed, and Boetticher directs with the kind of confidence and competence that was secondhand by this point in his career. (Includes audio commentary and trailer.)
Inglourious Basterds: Time for a confession: I’ve never counted Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 hit (and Oscar-winner) as one of my favorites of his works. To these eyes, it’s one of the few that actually commits the crimes his critics apply to his entire filmography, smacking of rank self-indulgence, a first draft that needed a couple more passes through the typewriter. But there are still great things in it, chief among them Christoph Waltz’s justifiably celebrated performance as a thoroughly self-satisfied Nazi and the holy-shit-they-did-that ending, and those who admire it more than I do (and there are many of them) will love the special features of this new Arrow edition. (Includes audio commentary, new and archival interviews, new and archival featurettes, visual essays, extended and alternate scenes, and trailers.)