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.
There are some heavy hitters among this week’s new disc and streaming releases, including a new (and not half bad) Marvel movie, the latest from one Steven Spielberg, and (per the Oscars) the best picture of 2002. But the pick of the week is for a set spotlighting the quintessential arthouse hits of the 1990s:
PICK OF THE WEEK:
Three Colors (Blue / White / Red): The notion of giving Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1993-1994 trilogy the ol’ 4K bump is such a no-brainer, it’s sort of shocking that Criterion took this long to get around to it, but jeez Louise is it ever worth the wait – these pictures, always breathtaking, have simply never looked better. But now we’re talking surfaces; this remains an astonishing achievement of long-form storytelling, as the great Polish master weaves three separate but ingeniously interconnected tales of three similarly disparate women (Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy, and Irene Jacob) navigating the (then) modern world and all of its woes. It all sounds like homework, and nothing could be farther from the truth; these films are frisky, sexy, strange, and wonderful. (Includes interviews, video essays, short films, trailers, documentaries, and essays.)
ON 4K/ DVD / VOD:
The Fabelmans: Steven Spielberg’s latest is the story of how a movie-crazy kid turned his love of movies into a career, and a life. It is, of course, inspired by Spielberg’s own child- and young adulthood, following the broad strokes of his early years and the beginnings of his obsession; he co-wrote the screenplay with his frequent collaborator Tony Kushner, his first such credit since AI: Artificial Intelligence (and before that, Poltergeist). So it’s obviously very personal to him, and that sense of genuine emotion, of pathos via memoir, is beating under every scene. But this isn’t simply a case of roman a clef curiosity either – Spielberg isn’t interested in mere nostalgia, and the clarity with which he sees the actions of the adults in this tale (and the specificity with which they are played, by Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, and others) is startling. (Includes featurettes.)
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
Strange World: One day, someone’s going to write one gripping account of exactly why and how Disney’s most recent animated adventure was buried, with the hastiness and sloppiness, of Goodfellas’ Billy Batts – barely promoted, half-heartedly screened for critics, quickly shuffled off to Disney+ when it predictably underperformed. One can formulate theories, based on the film itself; my best guess is that the hilariously outsized hoopla from “social conservatives” that greeted the barely-there same-sex relationship in Lightyear, coupled with the rapidly escalating rhetoric of the borderline-fascist governor of the state that houses Disney World, made the studio a bit more nervous about a picture with an openly, casually queer hero. But that might be giving the Mouse House a bit too much credit. The more likely explanation is that it wasn’t an easy money-maker, and this wasn’t a movie that was going to spawn a series of sequels or a tourist-grabbing theme park ride, and that was that. And it’s a shame, because this is one of their lightest and most agreeable movies in a good long while – nothing that’ll stop the earth from spinning on its axis, to be sure, but an agreeable 90+ minutes’ entertainment. Which is plenty! (Includes featurettes, outtakes, and deleted scenes.) (Also streaming on Disney+.)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: Director/co-writer Ryan Coogler had, by all reasonable measures, an impossible task on his hands in attempting to continuing the lucrative Black Panther franchise after the unexpected death of leading man Chadwick Boseman – and doing so in a way that didn’t feel ghoulish or exploitative. He does his best, which is saying something, and there’s a lot to admire here: the beats of mourning and grief that open the picture are genuinely, deeply felt, the supporting players (especially Winston Duke and Lupita Nyong’o) are never less than 100, and the action beats move like bullets – especially, as with the first film, a four-star car chase. One must ask, though: if Kevin Feige is such a super-producer, how can he no longer wrestle one of these things down to a reasonable running time? (Includes audio commentary, deleted scenes, gag reel, and featurettes.) (Also streaming on Disney+.)
ON 4K:
They Live: John Carpenter’s 1988 action/sci-fi favorite gets the 4K treatment from his favorite distributor, Shout Factory, and I whole-heartedly welcome a crystal-clear presentation of a movie that’s all about seeing things clearly. Universal savvily marketed it as a bone-crushing action movie (the lead is pro wrestler Roddy Piper, after all, dropping the “Rowdy” from his moniker, like respectable thespians do), and it fits snugly into his filmography’s subset of urban mayhem movies (alongside Escape from New York, Assault on Precinct 13, and parts of Big Trouble in Little China). But it hit theaters at the end of the Reagan era, as that administration’s cheery-eyed bullshit was really starting to curdle, and the filmmaker was crafting something akin to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, using sci-fi/alien invasion tropes at the service of biting social and political commentary. It ain’t subtle – those block-lettered consumer message rewrites smell of a first-semester media studies course – but then again, neither were the Reagan years. (Includes audio commentary, interviews, new and archival featurettes, in-film commercials, trailers, and TV spots.)
Belly: “It was the best time of our lives,” explains Sincere (Nas). “Gettin’ money was all we ever did.” So begins Hype Williams’s 1998 crime drama, his first and only feature directorial effort, in which longtime friends Sincere and Tommy (DMX) try to rise up and get theirs, only to ruin themselves and their relationship along the way. Critics at the time were unkind, and some of the jabs have merit: some of the performances are wooden, it literally ends with a morality sermon, and boy oh boy is that not a movie that loves women. But most simply seized on the clichés of Williams’s screenplay, a critique that doesn’t give the filmmaker nearly enough credit; he’s acutely aware of the picture’s predecessors, and not just the likes of Menace II Society, but the generations of fathers (Mean Streets) and grandfathers (Little Cesar) before it. Like Spike Lee’s similarly misunderstood Clockers two years earlier, Williams is nailing up the coffin of the so-called “hood movie,” and using its playbook (to say nothing of its commercial viability) as a blueprint for his personal preoccupations and style. And what style it is – I’d give anything for a single studio picture today to open with the pulse-quickening flair that this one does. (Includes audio commentary, featurette, deleted scene, and music video.) (Also streaming on Peacock.)
Warm Bodies: Like too much of recent popular culture, this 2013 sleeper hit has taken on a bit of unfortunate relevance for the post-COVID viewer; I may have audibly flinched when a few of the too-few human survivors despaired that there would never actually be a cure. At any rate, this zombie rom-com (newly upgraded, and into a handsome Steelbook, by Lionsgate) remains about as light and lovely as a movie can be with so much brain-eating, with Nicholas Hoult unsurprisingly charming as a post-apocalypse zombie who develops a lil’ crush on a human survivor (Teresa Palmer, who should be a bigger star by now) who makes him want to be a better man – or, just to be a man, period. The third-act monster rally is disappointingly pro-forma, but little else is; writer/director Jonathan Levine (adapting Isaac Marion’s novel) works just the right balance of the grisly and the gleeful. (Includes audio commentary, deleted scenes, featurettes, gag reel, and trailer.)
ON BLU-RAY:
Chicago: With its twentieth anniversary just in the rearview, the Oscar winner for best picture of 2002 gets a nice, new Steelbook re-release, and while I’m not sure hardcore packaging is reason enough for an upgrade, it was reason enough for this viewer to give it another spin. Time has been kind to it; what seemed hopelessly, even annoyingly old-fashioned two decades back (particularly against the likes of About Schmidt, Adaptation, and Far From Heaven) now just feels like part of the pantheon of movie musicals. Richard Gere puts on the ol’ razzle-dazzle with skill, Renee Zellweger finds the proper key of attention-hungry bloodlust, and Oscar winner Catherine Zeta-Jones is the MVP, a bubbling cauldron of street smarts and sex appeal. Rob Marshall stages it all well, and he never directed another movie, the end. (Includes commentary, featurette, and extended musical performances.)
Romeo and Juliet: The timing ain’t great (or perhaps it’s just right, depending on how you look at it) for a big, fancy, Criterion-backed reissue of Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic romantic tragedy. But there’s a reason this was – and perhaps still is, depending on where you land on the Luhrmann – the definitive take on the Bard’s tale of star-crossed lovers. Zeffirelli’s staging is impressive, his performers are pitch-perfect, and he manages to capture both the heady freedom and end-of-the-world desperation of one’s first flirtation with true love. (Includes archival interviews, trailer, and essay by Ramona Wray.)
Sorrowful Jones: This 1949 adaptation of Damon Runyon’s 1932 short story “Little Miss Marker” (already shot in 1934 as a Shirley Temple vehicle) opens with a delightful sequence of background on Runyon, the beloved chronicler of life on the margins in Depression-era New York, and Bob Hope makes for an awfully good Runyon hero – a rascal and gambler and nogoodnik, but in a charming way. And the story is built for that, dealing as it does with a shady bookie who’s soft side comes out when a degenerate gambler leaves his lovable moppet daughter (Mary Jane Suanders, a little obnoxious) as a marker for a bet. Lucille Ball is mostly wasted as The Girl – this was pre-TV, so they weren’t letting her be funny yet – but Preston Sturges standby William Demarest absolutely crushes it as Hope’s partner in crime. (Includes trailer.)
Mickey & Minnie – Volume 1: Only Disney math would dictate that we are, per the jacket copy, celebrating “100 magical years” of Mickey and Minnie cartoons with five years to go before the centennial of the first one – “Steamboat Willie,” of course, whose image of our rodent icon, whistling and cranking the steering wheel, opens every new Disney feature. Whatever the reasoning, this collection of ten classic shorts (most from the character’s ‘30s and ‘40s golden era) is a real treat, and if the new introductions are strained at best, that’s a minor complaint – this is a sparkling showcase of the evolution of animation styles (and general sensibilities) within the most influential movie studio on the planet. And, not incidentally, my kids loved it.