April '22 Digital Week IV

Streaming/In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Petite Maman 

(Neon)

The best film at last fall’s 2021 New York Film Festival was, unsurprisingly, French director Celine Sciamma’s emotionally precise and ingenious followup to her brilliant Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the best film of the 2019 NYFF. In this understated but shattering chamber piece, an eight-year-old girl whose beloved grandmother has just died meets and befriends a familiar-looking young girl while accompanying her parents to clean out the grandmother’s house. Sciamma, probably the most accomplished and confident filmmaker working today, has created a movie that’s almost impossible to describe: The Twilight Zone meets Ponette gives a broad outline, but Sciamma works on such a fragile, delicate canvas that the effect is of a master miniaturist working at the very height of her powers, like a Vermeer or a Fauré, one with insights into the thinking of children of all ages—as well as their parents.

Anaïs in Love 

(Magnolia)

In a lesser actress’ hands, the character of Anaïs—a fluttery millenial who is perpetually late, perpetually self-centered, and perpetually on her own wavelength—would be pretty much unwatchable, but Anaïs Demoustier’s charming, winning onscreen presence compels the viewer to root for her even as she does the most insensitive, selfish, immature things like start sleeping with an older, married man, then make a beeline for his wife, a famous novelist, and begin an affair with her. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet has written and directed a self-aware romantic comedy that follows its heroine with alternating amusement and bemusement, but thanks to Demoustier’s magnetism, it remains buoyant throughout.

The Duke 

(Sony Pictures Classics)

Don’t let the dullish title put you off: this beguiling film by director Roger Michell—who died last year at age 65—tells one of those “stranger than fiction” true stories that only needs a guiding directorial hand to put it through its immensely entertaining paces. In 1961, 60-year-old British retiree Kempton Bunton said that he stole Francisco Goya’s Duke of Wellington portrait from the National Gallery in London, keeping it hostage in exchange for the government ended the TV license fee to elderly pensioners. Michell’s light touch, Richard Bean and Clive Coleman’s witty script, and the enormously appealing and sympathetic performances by Jim Broadbent as Bunton and Helen Mirren as his put-upon wife add up to a splendidly diverting tale.

The Earth Is Blue as an Orange

(Film Movement)

The members of the Trofymchuk-Gladky family in Krasnohorivka, a town in the war-torn Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, decided to record themselves—they all love cinema—to show their everyday existence during frequent periods of bombing by Putin’s Russia. Iryna Tsilyk won the best director award at the 2020 Sundance Festival for this moving portrait of survival and creativity, focusing on a single mother and her four children, who have made their home a safe haven from the outside mayhem that has defined their lives for several years. 

4K/UHD Release of the Week 

Singin’ in the Rain

(Warner Bros)

Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s 1952 musical is a joy from start to finish: no one’s been able to equal Kelly’s extraordinarily cinematic choreography—with the possible exception of Bob Fosse—and Kelly’s co-stars Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds are unmatched, even by their directors’ exacting standards. This all-time classic looks quite luminous in its new UHD transfer; extras comprise a 50-minute documentary ported over from the 60th anniversary Blu-ray edition (too bad nothing else from that stacked release was included) and an audio commentary by Reynolds, Donen, Donald O’Connor, Cyd Charisse, Betty Comden, Adolph Green and others.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Cosi fan tutte 

(Naxos)

Mozart’s delectably comic chamber opera for six characters, which follows two couples that after many trials and tribulations are finally reunited, is distinguished by Mozart’s masterly music and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s witty libretto, both of which remain front and center in director Sven-Eric Bechtolf’s impressive staging last year in Florence, Italy. Of course, a terrific cast helps immeasurably, particularly the trio of delightful women, Valentina Nafornita, Vasilisa Berzhanskaya and Bendetta Torre; the agless American Thomas Hampson holds it all together as the regal Don Alfonso. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio. 

Dementia 

Jigsaw 

(Cohen Film Collection)

These low-budget shockers are as different as can be. 1953’s Dementia, by director John J. Parker, is a 56-minute stream-of-consciousness piece of avant-garde juvenilia about a woman who, beset by memories of a damaged childhood, may or may not have committed a murder. It’s scored to Georges Anthieul’s moody music, and its jittery images make an impression, although not what Parker would have wanted. Val Guest directed 1962’s Jigsaw, a minor mystery about detectives looking for the perpetrator in a particularly gruesome killing, which succeeds more atmospherically than as an edge-of-your-seat whodunit. Both B&W films have fine hi-def transfers; the lone Dementia extra is Daughter of Horror, the same film but with added explanatory narration.

DVD Release of the Week

Writing with Fire 

(Music Box Films) 

This bracing if at times tense documentary by writer-directors Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas follows the intrepid journalists in India who run its only women-run newspaper, Khabar Lahariya, which is moving from print to online. These women unflinchingly go into every possible difficult situation, smartphones at the ready, to uncover and report news to an increasingly skeptical public. Seeing the private lives of the women and how their careers affect them beyond the newsroom is eye-opening, especially in times of extreme uncertainty for journalists, even in supposed bastions of free speech. Extras include a making-of featurette and interview with both directors.

Broadway Play Review—Tracy Letts’ “The Minutes”

The Minutes

Written by Tracy Letts; directed by Anna D. Shapiro

Opened on April 17, 2022

Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, New York, NY

theminutesbroadway.com

The cast of Tracy Letts' The Minutes (photo: Jeremy Daniel)

Tracy Letts, our most adventurous playwright, has written everything from his early, creepily incisive character studies Bug and Killer Joe and his Tony-winning dysfunctional family epic August: Osage County to his most recent Broadway play, the lacerating midlife crisis comedy Linda Vista. Through his plays, Letts demonstrates his facility for a wide range of subject matter as well as a cutting sense of humor and a sympathy for all of his characters, however flawed.

And now there is, also on Broadway, The Minutes, Letts’ most political play yet. Although it doesn’t start out that way—at first, members of a small city council engage in amiable pre-meeting chit-chat and their meeting begins fairly innocuously—it soon devolves into in-fighting, backbiting, conspiracy theorizing and closeminded speechifying. In other words, it’s a microcosm of the sad state of democracy in America today.

When Big Cherry council newcomer Mr. Peel (Noah Reid) asks about the mysterious absence of fellow council member Mr. Carp (Ian Barford) from the evening’s meeting—Peel, away the previous week for his mother’s funeral, missed what happened to precipitate Carp’s leaving—the battle lines are drawn and, as Peel further complicates matters by requesting that the minutes from the last meeting be read to the council, the corruption, the graft and the whitewashing of the town’s history move front and center. With every succeeding comment by one of the council members, the meeting goes further off the rails, especially for those hoping to remain in power.

That summary might make The Minutes sound pretentious, but Letts’ playwriting strength is that he doesn’t telegraph anything, instead letting events occur organically from the council’s discussions to the crucial history he’s given the town of Big Cherry (whose very name, we learn, comes from a racial slur). Only at the play’s climax—when The Minutes goes from nasty but necessary political satire to an overobvious metaphor—does Letts make a slight misstep, but even in its overblown ickiness, the unsettling finale perfectly encapsulates the cultification of America in 2022 (and even 2017, when the play premiered).

As always, Letts’ writing perceptively differentiates among his characters: the nine council members and the town clerk are all individualized as much from his sharp dialogue as from the exceptional acting, which director Anna D. Shapiro astutely shepherds on David Zinn’s impressively detailed set. The production also boasts marvelous lighting by Brian MacDevitt, purposeful sound design by Andre Pluess and on-target costumes by Ana Kuzmanić. 

Letts himself plays the haughty mayor, Superba, with gusto, but he allows the other cast members to shine as well. (Letts has given each character either a blatantly descriptive name or a dull, ordinary one.) The best in the polished veteran cast are the amusingly bemused Austin Pendleton as Mr. Oldfield, the much too senior member of the council; the hilariously deadpan Jessie Mueller as Ms. Johnson, the ultra-efficient town clerk; and the intense Ian Harford, who was also terrific in Linda Vista, and who as Carp makes the most of his short onstage time to thoughtfully focus the themes of the play, which brilliantly paves the way for Letts and Shapiro’s final, disturbing coup de théâtre.

Broadway Play Review—“Birthday Candles” with Debra Messing

Birthday Candles

Written by Noah Haidle

Directed by Vivienne Benesch

Opened on April 10, 2022

American Airlines Theatre, 227 West 42nd Street, NYC

roundabouttheatre.org

Debra Messing in Birthday Candles (photo: Joan Marcus)

We meet Ernestine as she turns 17—then 18, 39, and so on, up to 107. That’s the conceit of Noah Haidle’s Birthday Candles, which in 90 minutes whizzes through 90 years of Ernestine’s life, all on her birthdays, and all while she makes a birthday cake from a recipe which has been handed down in her family as an annual birthday rite. 

So it's surprising that the play isn't titled Birthday Cakes. After all, there’s a running thread throughout the play that Ernestine is always in the kitchen making her own cake, whatever else is happening in her life and who is part of her life at the time—there’s her mom Alice (who dies before her daughter turns 18); Kenneth, a neighbor who keeps dropping in to remind her of his lifelong crush; Matt, whom she marries instead (then divorces); her two children, Billy and Madeleine; grandchildren; and a daughter-in-law.

The gimmickry is all around: in the play itself, from the repetition of Ernestine’s birthdays, of the dialogue, of the actions (annual pin the tail in the donkey, anyone?) to the same actors playing different people in Ernestine’s life; in Vivienne Benesch’s staging, which is always busy—all those characters flitting through Ernestine’s life, moving on and offstage, and that insistently repeated ringing bell that signals another birthday; and in several of the performances, which are pitched too high and too broadly as they all but nudge audience members in their ribcages to remind them of how sweet, substantial, and profound it all is. 

Too bad that it’s mostly sentimental and treacly, much closer to soap opera than it wants to be, and if a stray tear might form while one watches, it’s likely because one or more of the big life events shown or alluded to—a child’s suicide, an ex-husband’s stroke, an senile old woman’s return to the house that used to be her home—hits close to home.

 

Standing tall throughout there is, at least, Debra Messing. For 90 minutes, she is at center stage, with no makeup to easily assist in showing her quickly accelerating age, and she almost manages to make Ernestine into a living, breathing person. She even nearly manages to wring a grain of truth and dignity from the play’s final images, even though she should be the focus, not—as writer and director have it—her mother cradling the baby Ernestine, the final of many missteps in Birthday Candles.

April '22 Digital Week III

Streaming/In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Vinyl Nation

(1091 Pictures)

When CDs were ubiquitous, vinyl record sales fell off to nearly nothing; when streaming became ascendant, CD sales died—but then vinyl took off again, at least for some music lovers. Directors Kevin Smokler and Christopher Boone entertainingly explore why the vinyl niche continues to chug along, interviewing both artists and others in the business alongside fans whose record collections rival those of the biggest collectors in vinyl’s heyday. Even with insane pricing—records cost $30 today, double that of CDs and far more than the cost of streaming—the lovers of vinyl show no signs of slowing down, and, as Vinyl Nation shows, the popularity of the annual Record Store Day is another example of its resilience.

Father 

(Dekanalog)

Serbian director Srdan Golubović’s depressing drama is based on a real-life story of a man who, after his wife has a breakdown, loses his two kids to social services; after much stonewalling from local authorities, he decides his only option is to walk hundreds of miles from his village to Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, to plead his case directly to those in charge. Golubović’s skillful direction makes us believe we’re watching a documentary, so despairingly real is the subject and so truthful is Goran Bogdan’s performance as a loving father who, however imperfect, shines with genuineness and humanity.

4K/UHD Release of the Week 

Scream 

(Paramount)

Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, along with writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, have successfully rebooted the cult-like Scream series, even though I wasn’t a fan of any of the other four jokey slasher flicks, which were made between 1996 and 2011. I’m also fairly cold toward the returning original cast members (Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox and especially David Arquette), but here they decently balance the innate silliness with a stern sense of purpose. Then there’s Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera (the latter stealing the In the Heights movie), giving this version a needed transfusion of youthful liveliness. The 4K transfer is excellent; extras are filmmakers’ commentary, deleted scenes and on-set featurettes.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Jenufa 

(C Major)

The first of Czech composer Leoš Janáček’s great operas centered around tragic heroines, Jenufa was followed by Kata Kabanova and The Makropulos Case, and they are as triumphant a trio of insightful music dramas as are the Mozart de Ponte works. And in Damiano Micheieletto’s 2021 Berlin staging, Finnish soprano Camilla Nylund plays Jenufa with sensitivity and intelligence, and conductor Simon Rattle leads the orchestra and chorus in an intense account of Janáček’s gripping score. The hi-def video and audio are first-rate.

My Afternoons with Margueritte 

(Cohen Media Group)

At age 77 in 2010, director Jean Becker created this affecting portrait of enduring friendship in this sweetly sentimental tale of two lonely people—a middle-aged, barely literate laborer and an elderly but vigorous woman—who bond over the glories of discovering new worlds through reading. As the mismatched pair, an appropriately downtrodden Gerard Depardieu and Gisele Casadesus are wonderful, with a radiant assist by Belgain singer Maurane as Depardieu’s loving but confused girlfriend. The film gets a first-rate hi-def transfer.

Parsifal 

(C Major)

Richard Wagner’s final opera—a long, solemn, quasi-religious processional composed for his own theater at Bayreuth in Germany—is now seen in opera houses worldwide, including in Palermo, Italy, where Graham Vick’s 2020 staging flouts the composer’s own stage directions by setting the story in a desert where soldiers in fatigues meander around. Despite Vick’s trendy directorial “improvements,” a fine cast, led by tenor Julian Hubbard’s Parsifal and Catherin Hunold’s temptress Kundry, and a capable orchestra and chorus, conducted by Omer Wir Wellber, provide the musical gravitas Wagner’s stately score demands. Hi-def audio and video are first-rate.

CD Release of the Week 

Rautavaara—Lost Landscapes 

(Ondine)

Finnish master Einojuhani Rautavaara—who died in 2016 at age 87—nearly died a dozen years previously when a blood vessel ruptured.  The four violin works on this disc all date from after that life-changing event, and they make up a lovely autumnal phase of the great composer’s career. Although the three violin works were written for other soloists—Fantasia for Anne Akiko Meyers, Deux Serenades for Hilary Hahn and Lost Landscapes for Midori—Dutch violinist Simone Lamsma displays so much sheer emotional power in her playing that she makes each her own. Lamsma is beautifully accompanied by the Malmö Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Robert Trevino; the orchestra and Trevino also give a robust reading of In the Beginning. Lamsma and Trevino have given Rautavaara a radiant musical epitaph.

Off-Broadway Musical Review—“Suffs” at the Public Theater

Suffs

Book, music and lyrics by Shaina Taub

Directed by Leigh Silverman; choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly

Performances through May 29, 2022

Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, NY

Publictheater.org

Phillipa Soo (left) in Suffs (photo: Joan Marcus)

Suffs wants so desperately to be like Hamilton—an explosive show that tackles American history through a unique musical and dramatic prism—that it forgets to be Suffs. The story of women suffragists and the 19th amendment giving them the right to vote is not that well known and could have been the basis of a great, truly original musical. Too bad Suffs is not it.

Suffs centers on Alice Paul, who shook up the staid women’s movement by pushing for and organizing the Woman Suffrage Procession, a large parade in Washington DC the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in 1913. Along with the planning for this event, there is enough rousing history and vivid characters to make Suffs a necessary addition to the small but formidable canon of musicals based on our fraught history. 

Unfortunately, Shaina Taub—who wrote the book, music and lyrics and stars as Alice—is at the helm. Taub has definitely bitten off more than she can chew by cramming so many characters and incidents into Suffs’ 2-1/2 hour running time that we want to pause, catch our breath and refer to a scorecard to see who’s who and what’s what. Paring down the story and focusing on fewer women—as hard as that would have been, since Taub obviously bled sweat and tears creating the show from scratch—would have made Suffs a living, vital work rather than a messy, sometimes tedious history lesson.

Taub’s tunes and lyrics are lacking in originality and variety. Moments where the songs coalesce into something more than simply musical pastiches are few and far between, and mostly because of a trio of magnetic performers in the cast: Jenn Collella, Phillipa Soo and Nikki M. James all do wonders with the material. 

But all three Broadway veterans are shortchanged by Taub’s book: Collella’s Carrie Chapman Catt (president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association), Soo’s Inez Milholland (the charismatic labor lawyer who led the Procession while riding a white horse) and James’ Ida B. Wells (legendary journalist, educator, and a founder of the NAACP) all deserve to be lead characters in their own shows, but here, they simply appear, reappear, then disappear into the ether. 

The only others who make much of an impression are Hannah Cruz as the witty and sardonic Polish activist Ruza Wenclawska and Nadia Dandashi as the naïvely earnest student-turned-chronicler Doris Stevens. The talented Grace McLean makes Woodrow Wilson into a ridiculous caricature, which is Taub’s obvious point, but it’s also an unilluminating cheap shot compared to the humorously pompous King George in Hamilton. That Suffs directly descends from Hamilton is undeniable, but the all-female, colorblind casting here comes off as less purposeful than merely willful.

Mimi Lien’s set of massive white marble columns and stairs perfectly represents the metaphorical—and literal—journey the women must take, while Leigh Silverman’s adroit direction and Raja Feather Kelly’s clever choreography keep things moving briskly—sometimes too much so, as scenes get shortchanged while we move onto another set piece. 

The ultimate failure of Suffs to illuminate the women at its center and their history-making accomplishments shows that Shaina Taub did have her shot—but misfired. 

April '22 Digital Week II

Streaming/In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Cow 

(IFC Films)

British director Andrea Arnold, who to her credit has never made the same film twice—from Fish Tank to Wuthering Heights to American Honey—now tackles the nature documentary in the form of a dairy cow named Luma whose existence on English farm is followed by Arnold’s probing camera. The mind-numbing sameness of Luma’s life, giving milk, calving, and finally—shockingly—dying, is recorded by Arnold and her cinematographer Magda Kowalczyk with clinical precision but not much clarity; even at a fleet 90 minutes, the sense of repetition, of going over the same ground, as it were, is strong, and the ending is not as powerful as it wants to be.

¡Viva Maestro! 

(Greenwich Entertainment)

Gustavo Dudamel went from being the whiz kid conductor from Venezuela who took the classical music world by storm to the 40-year-old not-quite-elder statesman who is classical’s ambassador and superstar, making the L.A. Philharmonic into a force to be reckoned with. Theodore Braun’s documentary provides inside access over the course of a season as Dudamel rehearses in L.A., returns to his home country to work with young musicians of the Simón Bolivar Symphony Orchestra that he founded, and even—against his nature—gets involved politically when Venezuela is taken over by an authoritarian government. It’s all exciting and fascinating, both musically and as a portrait of the artist as a not-so-young man.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

American Flyers 

(Warner Archive)

It’s Kevin Costner week at Warner Archive as two of his early starring roles from 1985—also see Fandango, below—are given belated Blu-ray releases. John Badham directed this meandering, at times silly but heartfelt sibling rivalry drama as Costner plays a doctor who reunites with his distant brother to enter a bike race in an attempt to bond after their father’s death from a congenital heart defect that could reappear in them. Steve Tesich’s snappy dialogue hides the fact that this is a lesser cousin to Breaking Away (also penned by Tesich), but attractive performances by Costner, David Grant (brother), Janice Rule (mother), Rae Dawn Chong (Costner’s GF) and Alexandra Paul (Grant’s GF) make this an appealing watch. But, oh, that synth-heavy mid-'80s score—ugh!

Fandango 

(Warner Archive)

Kevin Reynolds’ 1985 road movie expands his USC film-student short, Proof, which was seen by Steven Spielberg and who financed the feature through his Amblin Entertainment.  Set in 1971, Fandango follows a group of Texas college students who go off on a wild road trip before the inevitable events that will soon overtake them—graduation, marriage and possible draft for the Vietnam War. The cast is led by Kevin Costner, charmingly boisterous, but the movie, scruffy and likeable, stops dead several times, notably during an extended skydiving sequence that’s basically Proof dropped into the longer movie. Still, it’s watchable throughout, and has a poignant final shot that hints at more gravitas than it has. There’s a first-rate hi-def transfer.

Oranges and Sunshine 

(Cohen Media)

The shocking true story of thousands of British children being sent to new, orphaned lives in Australia was brought to the screen in 2010 with the humane anger of a Ken Loach film—not surprisingly, since Jim Loach, the brilliant director’s talented son, directed this. As his father does, Loach fils smartly casts his central role, as Emily Watson (one of those rare actresses believable in anything) beautifully plays the woman who helps the now grown-up adults discover—or at least find out about—their real families. This nicely understated drama delivers an emotional punch in the usual Loach tradition. There’s a sturdy, understated hi-def transfer; extras include interviews with Loach, Watson, writer Rona Munro and other actors.

CD Release of the Week

Francis Poulenc—Complete Chamber Music 

(Naxos)

One of my favorite composers, Frenchman Francis Poulenc created music of elegance and delicacy, from his masterly opera Dialogues des Carmelites and his melodious keyboard concertos to his dozens of gorgeous songs and his voluminous chamber output, the latter of which is included in a welcome Naxos boxed set of five discs, performed with understated eloquence by a variety of musicians, particularly pianist Alexandre Tharaud, in performances recorded between 1995 and 1997. Many of Poulenc’s sonatas are short, compact and lovely works: disc one’s sonatas for oboe/piano and flute/piano are prime examples of such beguiling virtuosity. And throughout the set are other magnificent works, like the sonatas for violin/piano and cello/piano, as well as the playful vocal pieces Le Bal masqué and Le Bestiaire. But there are gems everywhere in this set.

April '22 Digital Week I

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Aline 

(Roadside Attractions)

Céline Dion becomes Aline Dieu (“dieu” means God in French) in this weird biopic by director-writer-star Valérie Lemercier, who not only plays the Quebecois singer from childhood until superstardom but also imbues her film with a slippery mixture of adoration and condescension, which makes it a chore to sit through after the first hour. Director Lemercier’s uncertain tone—which switches from mocking to affectionate to self-pitying to distanced, sometimes within the same sequence—doesn’t help actress Lemercier’s performance, which is technically agile but emotionally chilly. More on-target is Sylvain Marcel, who plays Aline/Celine’s much older manager/Svengali/husband with an authenticity missing from the rest of the film.

Mothering Sunday 

(Sony Pictures Classics)

In Eva Husson’s precise, humane character study of a storied author who looks back at life-changing events in her own life, Odessa Young gives a supremely intelligent and emotionally fearless performance as Jane, who is a lowly chambermaid before events transpire to transform her into an artist of substance. There’s impeccable support from Josh O’Connor as the young man whose destiny dovetails with Jane’s own as well as Colin Firth and Olivia Colman as the couple whose home she works in, but Husson keeps the focus on Young, who gives such subtle shadings to Jane that we watch her growth in stature, maturity and artistry right in front of our eyes.

The Rose Maker 

(Music Box Films)

Director-cowriter Pierre Pinaud’s charmingly low-key comedy-drama about Eve, an eccentric boutique rose creator trying to keep her cherished father’s business afloat against imposingly large-scale corporations, gets the energy it needs from Catherine Frot’s exquisite portrayal of a woman used to doing things her way who slowly shifts her outlook after a trio of convicts arrives from a local rehab program to help out with her floundering business. There’s nothing surprising about anything that happens among this mismatched quartet (quintet, actually: Olivia Côte winningly plays Eve’s exasperated assistant), but it’s done so effortlessly by Pinaud, Frot and the rest of the cast that the movie’s uplift is genuine, with no schmaltz or excess.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Siberia (Dynamic)

Idomeneo (Unitel)

Italian composer Umberto Giordano’s Siberia is a true rarity from a composer best known for Andrea Chénier: its drama might be strained at times, but the music is lovely, and—in this 2021 performance from Florence—our heroine and hero, Stephana and Vissili, are brought to vivid life by Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva and Georgian tenor Giorgi Sturua. Mozart’s pageant opera, Idomeneo, is not the popular success that The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro are, but its stately musical procession has its adherents; this 2019 Vienna staging gives a good sense of what works, especially in the playing by the Vienna State Opera orchestra and choir under conductor Tomas Netopil and the elegant singing of Rachel Frenkel as Idamante and Valentina Nafornita as Ilia. Both operas have excellent hi-def video and audio.

The Long Night 

(Well Go USA)

If only it wasn’t made so derivatively, Rich Ragsdale’s would-be thriller about a young woman, Grace, returning to her family’s home only to find herself and her boyfriend in the middle of a lethal battle with supernatural forces might have been truly terrifying. But nearly everything has been done better in other films: using Krzysztof Penderecki’s unsettling musical work The Awakening of Jacob (which Stanley Kubrick appropriated so famously in The Shining) is only one example. Sherri Chung’s music is otherwise properly eerie, but neither Scout Taylor-Compton nor Nolan Gerard Funk can make anything out of their cardboard characters, and Deborah Kara Young barely registers as a pivotal character in Grace’s return.

DVD Release of the Week

CSI: Vegas—Complete 1st Season 

(CBS/Paramount)

The ratings juggernaut that is the CSI franchise on CBS—which began in 2000 in Las Vegas, then went to Miami, New York City, and Washington DC over the next couple decades—now ends up in its original location, heralding the return of William Petersen and Jorja Fox as forensic experts Gil and Sara, who come out of retirement to help solve weekly crimes. The series’ 10 episodes provide the usual dose of dramatics that CSI fans have come to love (or at least tolerate after all this time); three making-of featurettes and several deleted scenes round out the package.

CD Release of the Week 

Debussy—Pelléas et Mélisande 

(Harmonia Mundi)

Claude Debussy’s impressionistic masterpiece—which turned the opera world on its head when it premiered in 1902—is the ultimate tragic fairy tale and a romantic triangle that is both bracing and disturbing. And this latest recording, performed on instruments of the early 20th century by the adventurous ensemble Les Siècles and beautifully conducted by François-Xavier Roth, creates a spellbinding musical effect while spinning Debussy’s gossamer musical web. The exquisite singers are soprano Vannina Santoni (Mélisande), tenor Julien Behr (Pelléas) and Alexandre Duhamel (Golaud). All that’s missing are the visuals, but I don’t know if this audience-less staging was filmed for posterity.