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.
This week’s disc and streaming guide is a real grab-bag, encompassing everything from last year’s Oscar hopefuls to long-forgotten, low-budget British genre cinema, with American indies, Academy Award winners, and recent family favorites to boot.
PICK OF THE WEEK:
Dazed and Confused: One of my deepest, darkest confessions, as a ‘90s Indie Movie Dude, is that I didn’t really love Richard Linklater’s seminal hang-out movie when I first popped its Universal VHS tape into my deck back in 1993. It’s so aimless, I thought, stupidly. There’s barely even a plot! It has, of course, grown in my estimation and imagination in the subsequent decades, for the very qualities that were initially off-putting; in a film culture that is increasingly, and exhaustingly, plot-driven (Sex scenes are bad because they don’t move the story forward; make sure you stay for the mid-credit scene to see what’s going to happen next, etc.), let us give thanks to a filmmaker who lets his characters merely luxuriate in their place and time, and in each other’s company. Criterion’s 4K bump is delicious, while carrying over the copious special features from their previous edition. (Includes audio commentary, deleted scenes, making-of documentary, on-set interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, tenth-anniversary footage, auditions, trailer, and essays.)
ON NETFLIX:
The Woman King: Viola Davis is unsurprisingly magnificent in the title role, as the leader of an army of fierce female warriors defending the West African kingdom of Dahomey, circa 1842. Thuso Mbedu is also excellent as Nawi, the stubborn new warrior; the character is compelling, even when dwelling in a straight-up dud of a romantic subplot, and her dynamic with Davis’s General Nansica is thankfully, potently complicated. Director Gina Prince-Blythwood stages the action sequences with breathless abandon, and more spraying blood and visceral violence than you might expect from the PG-13 rating.
The Founder: This biographical drama about Ray Kroc – who didn’t create McDonald’s but sure didn’t stop people from thinking he did – is a bit wobblier than you might like; Robert D. Siegel’s script is smart, but the corresponding cynical touch seems to (unsurprisingly) elude director John Lee Hancock (Saving Mr. Banks, The Blind Side). Yet there’s much here to recommend, particularly acting-wise: Michael Keaton’s fast-talking and fast-thinking leading turn, Linda Cardellini’s wise other woman, and especially Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch’s inspired two-act as the brothers who started the restaurant, and got screwed out of it.
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
The Inspection: It sounds like Oscar bait, an inspired-by-true-events story of a young gay man, tossed from his evangelical Christian home at 16, who goes into the Marines for the structure, camaraderie, and skills (and, y’know, steady room and board) promised by their ads – only to find that he’s still an outcast due to his sexual orientation. But there’s real blood and life in this one, thanks primarily to the intensity of the performances; Jeremy Pope is both fierce and vulnerable in the leading role, Bokeem Woodbine is downright upsetting as his sadistic drill sergeant, and Gabrielle Union all but disappears into the role of his hard-edged, unforgiving mother; there’s a whole life lived in the way she holds her omnipresent cigarette. (Includes audio commentary, deleted scenes, and featurette.)
The Old Way: After taking in this new Nicolas Cage Western (his first, shockingly), and last year’s Walter Hill-directed Dead for a Dollar, the question must be asked: why do people keep shooting old-school Westerns in the most distractingly contemporary manner imaginable? Why would you go to the trouble to cast, costume, and set-dress an oater, and make it look like it was shot on someone’s iPhone? But as with the Hill, if you can get past that, you’ll find a richly rewarding tale of sins of the fathers, handed down to their sons and daughters. Cage is terrific – particularly in the back half, once he dons his grim reaper death mask – as an ace gunfighter and scoundrel who hands up his pistols, only to pull them back down when his wife is killed years later. The supporting cast is tip-top (particularly Clint Howard in the Walter Brennan role), and the whole enterprise has the stripped-down simplicity but blunt power of a Budd Boetticher picture. (Includes audio commentaries and featurettes.)
Empire of Light: It was Sam Mendes’ rather rotten luck that his latest came out in such close proximity to Steven Spielberg’s “love letter to the movies” / memory play of his teen years, The Fabelmans, though the two pictures’ similarities are mostly on the surface; they both use the love of cinema, to varying degrees, as window dressing, and just as The Fabelmans was more about the dissolution of a family, Empire of Light is chiefly concerned with this romantic relationship that just happens to have occurred in a cinematic workplace. It’s an ambitious, if not quite successful, coming-of-age drama, but there are commendable elements; Olivia Colman is great (duh), as is Toby Jones (see earlier paren), and Mendes’s regular cinematographer, the great Roger Deakins, makes an absolute meal of the ornate movie palace at the story’s center. (Includes featurette.)
ON 4K:
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Some of us snickered when Dark Sky Films announced a 4K edition of Tobe Hooper’s seminal 1974 fright-fest (or groaned while glancing at our wallets; how many times are we gonna buy this one?). After all, this was a low-budget, shot-on-16mm affair – it’s not like it’s going to glisten in HD. Turns out, the opposite is true, to its benefit; the razor-sharp transfer captures all of the grit, grime, and grain of this terrifyingly visceral experience, and Hooper’s home-movie (or, perhaps, snuff film) aesthetic makes this Massacre feel captured rather than staged, the tension and power of its scares still landing like the slam of that giant, metal door. Even after the corruption of its characters and iconography in countless sequels, remakes, and reboots, it remains one of the most visceral, harrowing horror films of the 1970s—an era that didn’t exactly treat its audience with kid gloves. (Includes audio commentaries, deleted scenes and outtakes, feature-length documentary, conversation between Hooper and William Friedkin, interviews, featurettes, blooper reel, trailers, TV spots, and radio spots).
Training Day: The truly great movie stars are often more than just skilled actors. They also have a keen understanding of exactly what an audience expects of them – when to accommodate that, and even better, when to subvert it. Denzel Washington spent the 1990s playing a series of heroes, sometimes flawed but always virtuous, and building a persona of steely righteousness. So when he played a gleefully villainous, unapologetically corrupt cop in Antoine Fuqua’s uncommonly intelligent and tense policier, it packed an extra punch; audiences weren’t used to seeing Denzel play the bad guy, much less play one with such relish. He turns the warmth and trust of his typical screen work inside out, to create an all but unrecognizable snapshot of everyday evil. (Includes audio commentary, additional scenes, alternate ending, featurette, music videos, and trailer.)
The Remains of the Day: This Oscar-nominated drama was released in 1993, when the moniker of its makers – Merchant-Ivory – was as much a recognizable brand in the art house as Marvel or Pixar today. Reuniting Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, who’d starred in the previous year’s Merchant-Ivory pic Howard’s End, it finds the duo (and frequent screenwriter Ruth Prawler Jhawbvala) doing what they do best: telling a story of repressed emotion in the midst of a world in turmoil. This is arguably the team at its apex, thanks to Hopkins’ finely-tuned portrait of a duty-bound invert, Thompson’s earthy work as the subject of his quiet desire, a pre- (but just barely) fame Hugh Grant, and Christopher Reeve in perhaps his best non-Superman performance. (Includes audio commentary, deleted scenes, featurettes, and trailers.)
Marathon Man: One of the most famous stories about “the Method” occurred during the making of this 1976 thriller from director John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy), and if you know a thing about the movies, or acting, or its participants, you know the words and the music: Dustin Hoffman, between scenes, explaining to co-star Laurence Olivier that he stayed up all night and gone for several runs in order to accurately capture the exhaustion of his character in their scene together, Olivier bemusedly replying, “Dear boy, why don’t you try acting?” or something to that effect. It may well be apocryphal, but if it isn’t true it should be, so neatly does it summarize the growing schism between generations of actors. But that disparity is also present on screen, as Schlesinger deftly intermingles Hoffman’s hyper-naturalistic approach with Olivier’s florid theatricality, finding (gasp) that a skilled director can pluck the best of both. (Includes audio commentary, new and archival featurettes, rehearsal footage, and trailer.)
The Boxtrolls / Kubo and the Two Strings: Shout Factory is no slouch when it comes to 4K upgrades, but they’ve even topped themselves with these steelbook editions of LAIKA’s third and fourth feature films. Their stop-motion animation technique really shines in HD, which picks up not only the beauty of the detail work but the subtlety of the movements (big and small); these two efforts also spotlight distinct varieties of storytelling; the charming Boxtrolls is an eccentric, character-driven comedy (and yes, the title creatures are fully-drawn and well-developed characters, with individual quirks and memorable voice performances, while Kubo is a good, old-fashioned adventure, complete with dark caves, magic swords, and thrilling battles. But both are loaded with stunning images and breathtaking set pieces, taking risks and flights of fancy that most modern movies, family-targeted or otherwise, barely contemplate. (Both include audio commentary, featurettes, and storyboards.)
ON BLU-RAY:
Hollywood Shuffle: Robert Townsend’s low-low-low-budget satire of the life of a Black film actor—where every role is a pimp or a gangbanger, and every casting agent is looking for an “Eddie Murphy type”—was an indie sensation when it hit theaters in 1987, sparking (alongside Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It) the so-called “Black New Wave.” Separated from its plucky making-of story, it has some problems; it lays on the message a bit too thick in spots, and some of the bits run long. But its loose, sketch-like structure allows Townsend to take on plenty of targets, and much of it is not only still funny, but (sadly) still accurate. Townsend’s bigger-budget follow-up, The Five Heartbeats, remains wildly underappreciated; here’s hoping Criterion has their eye on that one as well. (Includes audio commentary, interviews, trailer, and essay.)
The Hunter: Steve McQueens’ final film is a fascinating peek at what his career might have become in the 1980s, had he not passed three months after its release. It feels less like a McQueen vehicle than a Clint Eastwood movie, with McQueen as a bounty hunter who’s seen better days (he’s busted down and tired and his back hurts, and at one point, he literally says, “I’m gettin’ too old for this shit”). In spots, it seems to be running on the fumes of ‘70s action pictures – the subway/car chase is straight out of The French Connection – but also plays like a hinge movie, calling upon both the shagginess of a ‘70s flick and the cynicism of an ‘80s star vehicle. It’s not McQueen’s best, by any stretch, but watch his helpless little shrug after he smashes a car to smithereens, and try not to think about what he, and he alone, had onscreen. (Includes audio commentary and trailer.)
Requiem for a Heavyweight: Ralph Nelson’s 1962 boxing drama feels like a spiritual sequel to the previous year’s The Hustler, down to the powerhouse work of Jackie Gleason in a serious supporting role. But its roots predated that film’s, beginning as a live drama for Playhouse 90 back in 1956, with screenwriter Rod Serling and director Nelson (but not the original cast) returning. Nelson clearly relishes the opportunity to revisit his work; the filmmaking here is wildly impressive, particularly an astonishing POV shot near the top of the film, of the end of a title fight and moments just after (and featuring a wonderful appearance by “Cassius Clay” as himself), which clearly inspired Scorsese’s shooting of Raging Bull. Anthony Quinn is heartbreaking as the titular pugilist, and the chemistry between him, Gleason, and Mickey Rooney as his corner man is lived-in and dynamic.
For the Plasma: Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan’s low-budget, low-fi sci-fi brain-teaser (new on Blu from Factory 25) is easy to connect to the likes of Primer and The Endless – films that understand that science fiction doesn’t have to be shiny and sparkly and expensive, because their most striking asset is good ideas, and those are free. This one feels older than its 2016 vintage, thanks to the chunky 16mm cinematography and the proudly analog props (and, frankly, narrative), which means it’s not for everyone. But if you like that kind of thing, this will scratch that itch aggressively. (Includes audio commentary, short film, and essays.)
GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling / Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows: Maybe it’s just coincidence that two of the Vinegar Syndrome-affiliated OCN Distribution partner labels put out wrestling documentaries in such close proximity – GLOW from AGFA, Hitman Hart from Canadian International Pictures – but they make for a fine double-feature on the sport, in all its glamour and sleaze. The latter is of particular interest in the wake of the (late, lamented) Netflix series, and fans of that show will have a good time spotting the various avatars and inspirations within the true story of the all-women wrestling show of the late 1980s. Most of its participants are accounted for, and they spill some great stories about their odd moment of niche fame; additionally, the footage from their first-ever reunion is genuinely, surprisingly moving. Hitman Hart is a more complicated affair, almost like a confessional monologue, with Hart walking through a career that veered from straight-forward “good guy” into something darker and stranger, thanks to the peculiar politics of that particular business. Both films make one thing abundantly clear: professional wrestling may be scripted, but in terms of its effect on audiences and its toll on participants, it’s anything but fake. (GLOW features audio commentary, film fest Q&A, outtakes, trailers, and show clips; Hitman Hart features audio commentary, new and archival interviews, and additional film The Life and Death of Owen Hart.)
Magic, Myth & Mutilation: The Micro-Budget Cinema of Michael J. Murphy, 1967-2015: Here’s the thing about Powerhouse Films’ Indicator series: they do not believe in half-measures. So if they’re going to elevate a heretofore all-but-unknown low-budget British genre filmmaker, they’re not going to do it with some double-disc set or something – they’re going to put together a full ten-disc, multi-film retrospective, featuring not only films you’ve never heard of, but alternate versions and unreleased oddities and surviving fragments and the whole nine yards. I won’t even pretend to have watched the entire thing – there are only so many hours in the day – but Murphy is clearly a singular artist, his films fusing the working class concerns of the Angry Young Man era with supernatural elements and a punk sensibility. They’re well worth your attention, and kudos to Powerhouse for preserving them in such an impressive fashion. (Bonus features too numerous to summarize; check them out here.)
