The Best Movies to Buy or Stream This Week: We Live in Time, Here, Jackie Brown, and More

very 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: 

Jackie Brown: Quentin Tarantino’s long-awaited, much anticipated 1997 follow-up to Pulp Fiction would’ve had a hard time topping that film’s quotability, inventiveness, and pop culture ubiquity; smart guy that he is, he didn’t even try. Instead, he made a laid-back adaptation of a marvelous, late-period Elmore Leonard novel, and handed the leading roles to Pam Grier and Robert Forster, at a moment when he was about the only director who could get a studio to go for casting either actor in a leading role. They generate genuine warmth and affection as a put-upon airline stewardess and the bail bondsman who falls for her; Samuel L. Jackson turns in one of his most chilling performances as the bad guy who first wants to use them, and then wants to kill them. Most of Tarantino’s films have aged just fine, but Jackie Brown’s mellow vibe and preoccupation with mature characters make it quite possibly the only one that’s getting better with each passing year. It’s making its 4K UHD debut via Lionsgate, with a new transfer that captures the picture’s ageless look and fine grain beautifully. (Includes featurettes, interviews, deleted and alternate scenes, trivia track, marketing gallery, and Siskel & Ebert review.) 

ON NETFLIX:

You Hurt My Feelings: A decade after their career-highlight collaboration with Enough Said, writer/director Nicole Holofcener and producer/star Julia Louis-Dreyfus reteam for another story of a somewhat neurotic woman struggling with information she wishes she didn’t have. This time around, JLD is a writer who accidentally overhears her seemingly supportive spouse (Tobias Menzes) trashing her latest book, and subsequently finds herself questioning everything about her marriage—and her life. That’s heady subject matter, but Holofcener exhibits the right, light touch to the material, speaking to universal truths in a manner both wildly funny and undeniably identifiable.

ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:

We Live in Time: At risk of sounding like a cinematic Scrooge, there is something undeniably been-there-done-that about a story of a couple who find that their perfect love is no match for a cancer diagnosis. Thankfully, the inventive structure deployed by screenwriter Nick Payne and director John Crowley helps paper over that familiarity, as they use a non-linear chronology to make the picture a puzzle that we have to piece together as we go. The other saving grace is the considerable chemistry between stars Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, whose every interaction vibrates with a genuine affection that goes a long way towards carrying off the personal tragedies of their tale. (Includes audio commentary and featurettes.)

Here: You’re always kinda grading on a curve with late-period Robert Zemeckis, whose weird swerve into technological navel gazing over narrative coherence (circa The Polar Express) has resulted in, save Allied, movies that are baffling at best and terrible at worst. But his most recent picture is both a fascinating experiment and an occasionally compelling narrative, with its entire, centuries-spanning story told in front of a locked-down camera in the living room of a suburban house (or the ground where it would eventually stand). The big news is the reunion of Zemeckis with his Forrest Gump writer Eric Roth and stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, who are impressively de-aged and serve as the emotional center of the story, which sparks to life when they appear (and slows considerably when they’re gone). Some of it plays as obvious boomerism, but it builds an emotional head of steam going into the final scenes, resulting in a gimmick movie that pays off, just like his films so often used to do. (Includes deleted scenes and feagturette.)

ON 4K:

Kill Bill Vol. 1: Until Tarantino gets around to releasing that “Whole Bloody Affair” cut he screened at Cannes over a damn decade ago and at the New Beverly in 2011, we’re just gonna have to keep putting it together ourselves, I guess. His 2003/2004 grindhouse-inspired double feature also gets the 4K treatment from Lionsgate, and while the image isn’t quite as jaw-dropping, it’s still a fine presentation of his most action-packed pictures. Uma Thurman is terrific as The Bride, a retired assassin left for dead by her former teammates, who survives a years-long coma and goes looking for her revenge. The setpieces are dynamic, the dialogue is memorable, and it goes with the headlong momentum of a freight train. And yes, that really was a Hattori Hanzo sword. (Includes featurettes, musical performances, and trailers.)

Kill Bill Vol. 2: The second half of Tarantino’s rampage of revenge is slightly superior, in that it augments the killer action beats with genuine emotional heft; David Carradine finds and sounds just the right notes as the titular target, and the beats surrounding he and the Bride’s long-lost (to her) daughter echo the warm feelings of Jackie Brown. But there’s still plenty of action here, most notably in a memorable sequence of hand-to-hand combat in one of the most confined spaces imaginable: a cramped trailer home. (Includes featurette, deleted scene, and musical performance.)

Winchester ’73: Anthony Mann’s 1950 Western, a new addition to the Criterion Collection, is a tight, sharp oater filled with memorable dialogue and inventive sequences. Its structure is ingenious, following James Stewart’s stolen rifle from person to person; it’s also a bit of a problem, as it keeps Stewart out of the picture for long, sometimes pokier sections in which he’s badly missed. But it’s still tremendously entertaining, and a wildly important film, marking not only the beginning of Mann and Stewart’s long collaboration, but the shift in the genre from black-and-white to shades of grey. (Includes audio commentary, interview, featurette, radio adaptation, and essay by Imogen Sara Smith.) 

The Grifters: Stephen Frears’s 1990 adaptation of Jim Thompson’s novel (also new to Criterion) stars John Cusack as a second-tier con artist, Annette Bening as the femme fatale who can’t wait to get her hooks into him, and Anjelica Huston as the mother he’s a little too close too. Frears has always been a journeyman director, serving the story rather than any particular style, but he’s having a great time making an unapologetically nasty little crime movie, getting career-best work out of his trio of stars, and bopping it all along with the Elmer Bernstein’s brassy score. It stands alongside The Last Seduction and Red Rock West among the best of the 1990s neo-noirs, plus it’s got one of the all-time great Martin Scorsese voice-overs. (Includes audio commentary, new and archival interviews, featurettes, trailer, and essay by Geoffrey O’Brien.)

Sea of Love: Believe it or not, there was a time when Al Pacino’s career needed saving, his damn near unparalleled run of iconic ‘70s performances grounded by a spectacularly bad streak in the following decade. He became bankable again, oddly enough, thanks to an erotic thriller: this tight little 1989 item from director Harold Becker, which paired the aging leading man with the heart-stopping Ellen Barkin, fresh off a startling breakthrough turn opposite Dennis Quaid in The Big Easy. The mystery that cop Pacino (and his partner, a wonderful John Goodman) are out to solve is nothing to write home about, but that’s not what the movie’s about anyway; it’s about the chemistry between Pacino and love interest/suspect Barkin. Watch their first love scene, and the incredible moment when Barkin pulls away from him, stalks around him like a jungle cat sizing up her prey, and then goes in for the kill. That is the kind of thing these movies did well. KL Studio Classics’ 4K upgrade is appropriately moody, dwelling in the shadows without washing out. (includes audio commentaries, deteled scenes, featurette, and trailers.)

April Fool’s Day: This 1986 horror-comedy famously infuriated filmgoers at the time, who came out for a traditional slasher and felt short-changed by the comic tone and twist ending. Their complaints are perhaps understandable; it feels much more like an ‘80s sex comedy than an ‘80s scary movie, and the twist is a big one. But it’s also a clever one, turning all that’s come before inside out in a manner that’s frankly refreshing, and the performers are all engaging—particularly Back to the Future’s Thomas F. Wilson, in prime douche mode, and the always delightful Valley Girl star Deborah Foreman (who goes brunette for the role, gasp) in the leading role of a popular girl who invites her friends on a Spring Break trip to her private island, which is all good, sexy fun until they start disappearing. (Includes audio commentary, interviews, TV spots and trailer.) 

Murder by Decree: What a weird career Bob Clark had, wildly swerving from slashers (Black Christmas) to sex comedies (Porky’s) to family films (A Christmas Story) to prestige dramas (Tribute), an honest-to-goodness journeyman director who seemed up for just about anything, as long as he hadn’t done it before. So this is his period thriller (a 4K upgrade from KL), in which Sherlock Holmes (Christopher Plummer) and Dr. Watson (James Mason) investigate the most perplexing mystery of the period: the murders of Jack the Ripper. Clark gets into some wild and occasionally gruesome territory – it is, after all, a Jack the Ripper movie from the director of Black Christmas – and the pacing is a little lumpy. But he dons the cloak of respectability nicely, and the picture boasts crisp production and costume design, a superb cast, and evocative, foggy London photography. Best of all, it explores the Holmes and Watson relationship with welcome nuance, jettisoning the bumbling sidekick dynamic of the Basil Rathbone / Nigel Bruce films for one of genuine warmth and respect. (Includes audio commentaries and trailer.)

The Cell: Everyone’s fallen in love with Tarsem again, thanks to last fall’s splashy restoration and re-release of his long all-but-unavailable passion project The Fall, but he got the blank checks to make that movie thanks to this 2000 hit, out in a new 4K edition from Arrow Video. Jennifer Lopez stars as a child psychologist involved in an experimental virtual reality treatment who is asked to enter the mind of a comatose serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio, acting up a storm) before the automated death of his latest victim. If you were to merely listen to The Cell, you could easily mistake it for a boilerplate, Seven-style serial killer thriller. But the look of the picture is astonishing, a jolting whiplash between images of overwhelming beauty and stomach-churning horror, with (miraculously) neither detracting from the other. (Includes theatrical and director’s cuts, alternate theatrical version, new and archival audio commentaries, deleted and extended scenes, new and archival featurettes, video essays, and trailers.)

ON BLU-RAY:

Fade-In: Here’s a charming little obscurity, a romantic drama starring Burt Reynolds and Barbara Loden (Wanda) that was shot in 1968, disowned by director Jud Taylor (it was one of the first films released with the “Allen Smithee” pseudonym), and left to languish on the Paramount shelves for five years before being unceremoniously dumped onto The CBS Late Movie. It deserved better than that; sure, it’s a little dated (with a few too many Semi-Obligatory Lyrical Interludes), but Reynolds and Loden generate palpable sparks as a Utah rancher and a Hollywood editor who fall in love while she’s in town on a location shoot. It’s pretty pat, corny even, but the editing is inventive, the behind-the-scenes peeks are fascinating (it was shot concurrently with the 1968 Western Blue, whose star Terrence Stamp appears here as well), and Reynolds’s aw-shucks shirtless-cowboy appeal and Loden’s lived-in authenticity pair nicely. (Includes audio commentaries.)

Jason Bailey is a film critic and historian, and the author of five books. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Playlist, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Rolling Stone, Slate, and more. He is the co-host of the podcast "A Very Good Year."

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