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:
Some Like It Hot: Billy Wilder’s 1959 screwball classic – newly upgraded to a crisp 4K disc by the Criterion Collection – has topped more than one list of the best comedies ever made, and for good reason: it has Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in drag, Marilyn Monroe at her very best, Curtis’s Cary Grant impression, and one of the all-time great closing lines (“Nobody’s perfect!”). But it’s not just that it’s madly, uproariously funny; it’s one of those lightning-strike comedies that captured every involved party at the absolute tip-top of their game, and its cheerful acknowledgement of sexual fluidity means it’s aged far better than any dozen gay-panic comedies that came much later. As a result, it’s a classic comedy that still feels fresh and funny to this very day. (Includes audio commentary, behind-the-scenes documentaries, featurettes, archival interviews, trailer, and essay by Sam Wasson.)
ON 4K / BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
The Brutalist: Brady Corbet’s award-season favorite wears its ambitions on its sleeve — it’s a three-and-a-half hour large-scale widescreen historical epic, telling a story of the American Dream and the Immigrant Experience and all sorts of other weighty topics that are currently preoccupying our collective subconscious. But it doesn’t feel like Corbet is pandering for the praise and awards he (deservedly) received; form follows function, and the picture’s entire “why not make it big and grand and overwhelming” ethos matches the worldview of its protagonist. A gorgeous, glorious achievement. (Includes audio commentary and featurette.)
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
Dog Man: The popular kids’ graphic novel series by Dav Pikey gets the big-screen treatment, and I’m pleased to report that this one goes on the “not just for kids” shelf; they’ll certainly appreciate it more, particularly if they’re steeped in Pikey’s world, but this is the kind of loosey-goosey charmer that more family filmmakers should aim for. It’s delightfully silly, telling the story of a dopey cop and his brilliant canine companion who are combined into one super crimefighter in a wire-snipping accident. The frames are crowded with jokes — it reminded this viewer less of recent cartoon fare than an old Naked Gun movie — and the voice actors (including Pete Davidson, Lil Rel Howry, and Isla Fisher) are expressive and amusing. (Includes deleted and extended scenes and featurettes.)
Mother, Couch: Plenty of films have attempted to replicate the dream logic and anything-goes imagery of nightmares or fantasies, but I’ve never seen a movie so successfully do what director Niclas Larsson does in his feature debut: he creates a cinematic stress dream, where everything’s in motion and out of your control. He composes and cuts his scenes so they’re a little bit off, the rhythm ever-so-slightly sprung, while keeping his impressive cast’s feet on the ground, making fine use of Ewan McGregor’s crisp comic timing, providing a fine showcase for the very promising Taylor Russell (the best part of Bones and All), and getting yet another great late-in-the-game performance for Ellen Burstyn, who has a piercing way of delivering an already tough line like “I never wanted any children, David.” (David is her child.) It’s all legitimately bizarre and refreshingly unpredictable, and he sees it all the way through to an appropriately bonkers conclusion. (Includes audio commentary, featurette, and essay by yours truly.)
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / NETFLIX:
One of Them Days: The current, stifling homogeny of big studio releases makes us perhaps unreasonably nostalgic for the throwaway entertainment of yesteryear, and once upon a time, low-stakes buddy comedies like these were a dime a dozen. But they just don’t bother with this kind of thing anymore, which makes director Lawrence Lamont and screenwriter Syreeta Singleton’s achievement all the more noteworthy. Keke Palmer (a scream, as usual) and SZA (every bit her comic equal) are best girls whose rent has been swiped by the latter’s no-good boyfriend, so they’re on a ticking clock to raise some quick cash before eviction. It’s a rare mainstream movie with a working-class perspective (there’s a payday loan sequence!), but it also fits snugly into that reliable standby of the One Crazy Day/Night movie. Plus, any movie with the good sense to bring in Janelle James for a slapstick set piece deserves our applause. (Also streaming on Netflix.) (Includes gag reel and featurettes.)
ON 4K:
Ugetsu: This melancholy masterwork from director Kenji Mizoguchi is a difficult film – richly detailed but narratively mysterious, filled with flawed people making poor decisions and paying for them, dearly. Mizoguchi crafts it as an ornate period piece, but the story’s temptations and betrayals keep harshly interrupting its scenes of splendor and grace with unexpected bursts of brutality and pain, masterfully using errant sounds and unsettling music to create real discontent. It’s far from a fun movie, but it sticks with you. (Includes audio commentary, documentary, featurette, interviews, trails, and essay by Phillip Lopate.)
Chungking Express: Wong Kar-Wai’s 1994 international breakthrough has a loaded history with Criterion, which is releasing this new 4K upgrade: it was one of their inaugural Blu-ray releases, but it was inclusion in the company’s 2021 Wong box set, which got quite a bit of blowback for the filmmaker’s tinkering (most specifically with color temperatures). That’s the version here, so hang on to your Blu-ray if you’re so inclined; personally, I find the shifts unnecessary but ultimately not too distracting. He’s telling a two-part story of lonely policemen and the women who fascinate them, weaving a spell of gorgeous visuals, dreamlike cityscapes, and pop music. In doing so, he masterfully captures the spark, the pulse, the very feel of casual attraction—and something of the joy of that feeling. (Includes deleted scenes, archival interviews, trailer, and essay by Amy Taubin.)
Brimstone & Treacle: This 1982 British drama, adapted from an unaired telefilm penned by Dennis Potter (and making its 4K debut via Vinegar Syndrome) is a pleasant surprise; it stars Denholm Elliott and Joan Plowright opposite Sting, and the rock star is entirely up to the task; he goes toe to toe with acting royalty, and doesn’t blink. Potter’s masterful writing helps; Sting plays a savvy, gifted con artist who bluffs his way into Elliott and Plowright’s suburban home by claiming to be the long-lost beau of their incapacitated daughter, and he quickly sees the fault lines in this family, and doesn’t hesitate to step on them. It becomes a battle of wills, acutely exploring themes of religion and morality with wit and intelligence. (Includes select-scene audio commentary, interviews, featurettes, and trailer.)
Sands of Iwo Jima: The ad copy for KL Studio Classics’s new 4K release of Allan Dwan’s 1949 war picture calls it “the quintessential WWII film,” and that’s an accurate assessment — in fact, it’s difficult to diagnose whether Dwan revels in the war movie cliches, or if he’s merely creating them. John Wayne (Oscar-nominated) stars as the tough-as-nails sergeant who’ gonna whip these hooligan Marines into shape; they’re an assortment of easy-to-categorize types, and several of the big scenes have been done to death in the years since. But Dwan directs with a sure hand, crafting thrilling battle scenes and credible byplay within his cast (even if co-star John Agar is a bit of a hunk of plywood), and KL’s 4K image is a knockout. (Includes audio commentary, featurette, and trailer.)
Blue Sunshine: This delightfully unhinged item from director Jeff Lieberman, new to 4K from Synapse, cheerfully intermingles the tropes and treats of ‘70s conspiracy thriller, drug scare flick, and horror movie into a bonkers grab bag. Zalman King (future purveyor of such softcore treats as 9 1/2 Weeks and Red Shoe Diaries) stars as a Hitchcock-style innocent-man-wrongly-accused who stumbles into a suspicious series of murders committed by regular folks who took a strain of bad acid in college. It’s both savage and silly (“There’s a bald maniac in there — he’s goin’ batshit!” explains a survivor of a discotheque attack), with some of the best mindless-monster-in-a-mall action this side of Dawn of the Dead, and an inadvertently chilling promise in the home stretch: “It’s time to make America good again.” (Includes audio commentaries, new introduction, new and archival interviews, Lieberman’s previous feature The Ringer, trailers, booklet, and poster.)
The Long Kiss Goodnight: This 1996 amnesia action thriller from writer Shane Black and director Renny Harlin, which is getting the deluxe special edition treatment from Arrow, stars Geena Davis (then Harlin’s wife) as a suburban mom who unlocks her contract-killer past, and Samuel L. Jackson as the scuzzy private eye along for the ride. The premise is fairly ridiculous, but Black and Harlin and their stars know it; this one runs on pure, electrifying style, harnessed by a director equally obsessed with showing off his blockbuster-making stills (it came on the heels of his unfortunate Cutthroat Island) and his hot wife. It’s a wildly uneven but endlessly entertaining stew of creative profanity, blood-spurting action, and (being a Shane Black movie and all) incongruent Yuletide flourishes. (Includes new audio commentaries, deleted scenes, new and archival interviews, new and archival featurettes, and video essays.)
ON BLU-RAY:
The Dish and the Spoon: Look, I’m thrilled Greta Gerwig is an industry now — mainstream cinema is better for it. But I miss her omnipresence in indie cinema, when she would bring her singular sensibility (funny and heartbreaking and sexy and weird) to several no-budget movies a year, and make them all better for it. This was one of the last, released in 2011 (between Greenberg and Frances Ha), as a young woman having an early-life crisis when she discovers her husband’s infidelity. In between having breakdowns and delivering hilariously unhinged tirades at him over pay phones, she meets an odd young man who accompanies her on her little journey. So it’s a boy/girl hangout movie, like the Before series, and you similarly fall for the characters (and actors) just a little bit. It’s a short, slight movie, but a charmer. (Includes deleted scenes and outtakes, interviews, location scouting featurette, and trailer.)
Shaw Brothers Classics Vol. 6: It really says something about the deep well of great movies produced by the Shaw Brothers studio that in this, Shout!’s sixth collection of a dozen or so titles, that I found my favorite Shaw picture to date: Chor Yuen’s 1971 Duel for Gold, a blood-soaked and badass banger with an ingenious start-at-the-beginning structure, a slyly self-aware narrator, and a narrative that starts as a wire-fu wuxia and pivots, deliciously, into a riff on Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Several of the other ten films are worth your time as well (also noteworthy: the thrillingly acrobatic The Black Tavern, a gory stuck-in-a-snowstorm tale filled with clever choreography and a barn-burner of a last battle), but this one would be worth picking up for that title alone. (Includes audio commentaries, interviews, and trailers.)
Last of the Red-Hot Lovers: This 1972 adaptation of Neil Simon’s play, directed by his frequent collaborator Gene Saks, stars Alan Arkin as a 45-year-old family man, blind-sided by the sexual revolution, who sets out to have an affair — and spends the next 90+ minutes (spoiler alert) failing to do so. As with Melvin Frank’s film of Simon’s Prisoner of Second Avenue, Saks nails the big laughs but doesn’t shy away from the darker psychological undercurrents of the text, and the picture is better for it. Arkin is a good Simon avatar (his neurotic voice-overs are spot-on), and Sally Kellerman is a scream as his first failed conquest, increasingly and uproariously impatient with his dithering and dilly-dallying. In fact, she’s so strong that the movie ends up peaking early, though Paula Prentiss and Renée Taylor land a few laughs as well. Contemporary critics mostly gave it thumbs-down, so hopefully this lovely release from Cinématographe will help rehab its reputation. (Includes audio commentary, interview, video essay, and essays by Drew McWeeny, Chris Shields, and Justine Smith.)
Cannibal Girls: Director Ivan Reitman and future SCTV stars Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin took their first shots at moviemaking (thanks to those lucrative Canadian tax shelter situations) with this 1973 horror comedy, new to Blu from Canadian International Picture. Though most of the dialogue is improvised, it’s not quite as funny as you’d hope — the future Ghostbusters director and his fresh-faced leads were clearly still figuring this stuff out. But it’s a pretty decent ‘70s exploitation movie, thanks to the grimy production values, the Manson girls-inspired title characters, and the always-reliable narrative of a forgotten small town where horrible secrets lurk right under the folksy surface. (Includes audio commentary, new and archival interviews, featurettes, early Reitman short with commentary, theatrical trailer, and TV and radio spots.)
The AGFA Mystery Mixtape Vault: The American Genre Film Archive’s mixtape Blu-rays have been among my favorite releases of recent years, and their latest doesn’t disappoint. The eight found-footage mixtapes contained herein run over 500 minutes, spread over two discs, and all are varying degrees of nutty, funny, and inexplicable; my favorite is “The Stairway to Stardom Mixtape,” a dizzyingly funny compilation of snippets from Stairway to Stardom, a jaw-dropping, low-rent NYC public access talent show that makes American Idol look like Masterpiece Theatre. (Includes audio commentary.)
