September '26 Digital Week III

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Kwaidan 

(Janus Films/Film Forum)

Japanese director Mitsuo Kobayashi’s 1964 classic is unlike other ghost stories, since he is not concerned at all with actual scares or things that go bump in the night (predating Kubrick’s The Shining), and deliberately has made one-dimensional characters who are lacking in motivation throughout these four weird tales. Instead, Kobayashi concentrates on stylized atmosphere above all else: each story’s setting is brilliantly evoked, beautiful and haunting trappings for these eerie meanderings. Stylishness has never been so spectacular, and Kobayashi’s cinematographer Yoshio Miyajima, editor Hisashi Sagara, art director Shigemasa Toda, costume designer Masahiro Katô and composer Toru Takemitsu are up to the formidable task. 

The Oldest Person in the World 

(Assembly Releasing)

For Sam Green, the premise was simple but daunting—track down and interview the world’s oldest person. But since that person inevitably keeps changing, Green has to keep moving, traveling from Brooklyn to Europe and back to the U.S. to talk with centenarians who hold the Guinness age record, however briefly. But that premise is just the beginning of this beguiling documentary, for Green also discovers that mortality is a large part of a 50-year-old filmmaker’s life as well, when he is diagnosed with multiple myeloma (which has been kept under control so far). But Green never loses his sense of humor: while making the film, he and his partner welcome a baby boy, whom Green slyly calls “the youngest person in the world”—if only for a brief moment, until the next baby is born somewhere else.

On a String 

(Joke Zero)

Isabel Hagen, a Juilliard-trained violist turned comedian and filmmaker, has mined her own experiences for the core of this often amusingly grating glimpse at Isabel, a freelance New York City musician who still lives with her overbearing parents and brother while navigating the cutthroat world of musicmaking, where even a friend will betray you, like a fellow quartet member also going to a New York Philharmonic audition and getting a callback instead of her. Hagen writes, directs and also stars as Isabel—she comes off as a less enervating Greta Gerwig, which works well for her jaundiced semi-autobiographical self-portrait. There are also solid turns by New York acting veterans like Dylan Baker, Eric Bogosian and Fred Weller.

Serpent’s Path 

(KimStim)

Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa remakes his own sinister 1998 thriller, about child exploitation and organ trafficking, in France, and it’s another compelling exploration of grief checkered by revenge and ultimately betrayal. Heroes and villains are a slippery concept in Kurosawa’s hands, and he is masterly at transforming ordinary situations that devolve into chaotic cruelty. It might go on a bit too long, especially in a finale as conventional as it is implausible but, led by an excellent group of French and Japanese actors like Damien Bonnard, Ko Shibasaki, Mathieu Amalric and Grégoire Colin, this is a rough but riveting watch. 

Streaming Release of the Week 

Mutiny 

(Lionsgate)

If there’s a Jason Statham vehicle blueprint, it’s this tautly executed, single-minded action flick in which our hero, who plays Cole Reed, a former commando whose life is in danger after he’s accused of murdering his rich boss and stows away on a ship involved in human trafficking. Director Jean-François Richet and writers Lindsay Michel and J. P. Davis waste no time on niceties like characterization or believable dialogue, but they give Statham—and costar Annabelle Wallis as his unlikely but effective sidekick—the chance to continually overwhelm the dastardly bad guys. Special credit goes to Adrian Lester, whose U.S. military ship captain becomes more entertainingly bemused as he gets a fuller picture of what’s happening aboard the rogue boat.

DVD Release of the Week

Colors of Time 

(Distrib Films)

In French director Cédric Klapisch’s latest drama, four cousins meeting for the first time explore their celebrated ancestor Adèle’s home—we meet Adèle herself (a fine Suzanne Lindon) as she leaves the sticks for Paris at the zenith of the 1890s Belle Époque and befriends artists like Claude Monet, who ends up having more to do with the cousins’ extended family than expected. Typically flavorful and spirited, lavish but not overstuffed, Klapisch’s film might be schematic in how it crosscuts between the present-day cousins’ endless zoom calls about Adèle’s valuables—including a painting that may have a surprising provenance—and her adventures in the dazzling city of lights, but it’s a delight from start to finish. Too bad there’s no hi-def release, since the visual wonders Klapisch conjures aren’t seen to their fullest effect on DVD.

September '23 Digital Week III

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

Early Short Films of the French New Wave 

(Icarus)

This valuable two-disc set collects short films from French directors of the New Wave and surrounding names from the fertile 1950s, in which big shots like Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol and Varda are represented (including A Story of Water, a collaboration between Godard and Truffaut). The highlights are two Alain Resnais classics—All the Memory in the World and Le Chant du Styrene, masterpieces in miniature—and a pair from Maurice Pialat, Love Exists and Janine. All 19 films have been restored and look magnificent on Blu, even though several (including the Resnais films) are available elsewhere on other releases, so your mileage may vary.

Cobweb 

(Lionsgate)

In director Samuel Bodin’s eerie but clumsy debut feature, eight-year-old Peter doesn’t think his parents are what they seem and, after hearing the voice of someone behind his bedroom wall, he’s even more suspicious. The first half of this 90-minute movie is creepily effective but once Bodin and writer Chris Thomas Devlin decide to overload on obvious jump scares, it becomes impossibly risible. Woody Norman is a properly intense Peter, but the gifted and usually impressive Lizzy Kaplan is hampered by a clichéd mom role that she can do nothing with. The film looks good on Blu; extras are three short making-of featurettes.

L’Immensita 

(Music Box)

In Emanuele Crialese’s precisely observed character study, Penelope Cruz plays Clara, a harried Spanish mother with three kids and a philandering husband in 1970s Rome who tries her best to deal with Adriana, her oldest child, who identifies as a boy named Andrea: Clara and her child, both outsiders, form an even closer bond, as does Andrea and Sara, a young Romani girl who’s also an outsider. Although Crialese’s elaborate musical numbers that comment on the characters’ psychology are superfluous, he gets wonderful acting from the entire cast, especially the subtle portrayal of Andrea by Luana Guiliani. There’s an excellent hi-def transfer.

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week

Condition of Return 

(Stonecutter Media) 

After Eve Sullivan shoots up a church during services, Dr. Donald Thomas interviews her to find out her motive—and her story makes up the bulk of this confused and gratuitous melodrama about how someone good can do something evil. Hint—it’s a deal with the devil. Although AnnaLynne McCord persuasively plays Eve, she’s pitted against an unrecognizably bloated Dean Cain as Dr. Thomas (he phones in his performance) as well as director Tommy Stovall and writer John Spare, who cram so many unlikely contrivances and banal “ironic” twists into the plot that they must have come up with their own deal with the devil to get this made. 

Neither Confirm Nor Deny 

(Greenwich Entertainment) 

Director Philip Carter’s fascinating documentary chronicles the last word in subterfuge from the CIA—with help from major misdirection in the form of a cover story from none other than reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes—as it raised a stricken Soviet nuclear sub from the ocean depths over a six-year period (1968-74), during the heart of the Cold War. Through vintage footage and interviews with many of the principals—including the agency’s own David Sharp, prime mover behind the operation—this incisive portrait of a real-life government espionage also plays out like an urgent, nail-biting thriller—which, in some sense, it is. 

The Trial/El Juicio 

(Film Forum)

Ulises De La Orden’s engrossing three-hour documentary exclusively comprises videotape footage of the trials in Argentina of the leaders of the military junta who spearheaded the “disappearing” of thousands of individuals considered enemies of the government from 1976 to 1983. Leftists and other democratic sympathizers were tortured and often murdered, and the men responsible for the coup and systematic annihilation of so many of their fellow countrymen are given the opportunity to defend themselves, unlike their victims. Whittling down hundreds of hours of footage from the courtroom into three fascinating, enraging, often breathless hours, de la Orden allows those who were affected and survived to speak for both themselves and those who never returned. As the prosecutor says at the end of the trial, “Nunca Más” (never again).

The Truth About Dolce Vita 

(Film Movement) 

The background of Fellini’s classic film La Dolce Vita comes alive through this engaging documentary portrait of one of its producers, Giuseppe Amato, who not only had to fight the director himself about its length, editing and premiere, but also the film’s distributor Angelo Rizzoli. Director Giuseppe Pedersoli’s reenactments fall flat, as doc reenactments almost always do, but his interviews with key characters in the story, including Amato’s widow, colleagues and film historians, present a key glimpse into Italian cinema that’s worth watching.

Wild Beauty—Mustang Spirit of the West 

(Gravitas Ventures)

Ashley Avis, who directed the 2020 Black Beauty remake, has made an urgent and timely documentary plea for the wild horses that roam across America’s western plains who are in danger of disappearing thanks to the government’s heavy-handed policies that are anything but humane. Avis surreptitiously films the Bureau of Land Management’s barbaric culling episodes and unapologetically gets into the faces of the bureau’s spokespeople to discover what’s really going on. There’s a lot of justified anger and emotion underlining Avis’ stunningly photographed film, which shows the natural beauty of these majestic animals, who are shortsightedly under siege.

CD Release of the Week 

Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! 

(Chandos)

It’s hard to believe that one of the great Broadway musicals, beloved and worshipped since its 1943 Broadway premiere and the classic 1955 film with Gordon MacRae as Curly and Shirley Jones as Laurey, has never before been heard in its entirety in a recording but that’s what this new release screams on the front cover: “world premiere complete recording.” In their first collaboration, Rodgers & Hammerstein outdid themselves with so many memorable and hummable songs, from the opening “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” to the climactic title tune. The Sinfonia of London, led by conductor John Wilson, gives Richard Rodgers’ glorious score a high polish, while the cast—including a formidable chorus—sings Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics beautifully. Best of all is Sierra Boggess, who may be the most pure-voiced Laurey that I’ve yet heard. This Super Audio CD has, unsurprisingly, wonderfully spacious sound.

Film Series Review—“Jeanne Moreau, Cinéaste” at Film Forum

Jeanne Moreau, Cinéaste

Through March 23, 2023

Film Forum

209 West Houston Street, Manhattan

filmforum.org

The series Jeanne Moreau, Actrice, at Film Forum for the past two weeks, was a superb reminder of how seminal Moreau was onscreen, playing so many memorable roles in films by Francois Truffaut (Jules and Jim), Luis Bunuel (Diary of a Chambermaid), Louis Malle (The Lovers, Elevator to the Gallows), and Michelangelo Antonioni (La Notte). The quintessential French woman onscreen, Moreau was sophisticated and sensible, intelligent and sensual. But her brilliance wasn’t relegated to merely acting, as Film Forum’s current series, Jeanne Moreau, Cineaste, collects the trio of films she directed between 1976 and 1984 to give viewers the opportunity to watch her develop her own directorial voice.

Lumière

The three films are features Lumière (1976) and The Adolescent (1979) as well as a documentary, Lillian Gish (1984). Her first film, Lumière, stars Moreau as a middle-aged actress relaxing at her rural estate with three good friends, also actresses. Gentle and modest, the film at times is too casual in its observation of the intersecting relationships and attendant rivalries, affections and jealousies. But Moreau, thanks to excellent acting from her quartet and the judicious use of flashbacks, creates an insinuating portrait of the complications of womanhood.

The Adolescent

The same could be said for The Adolescent, another low-key character study about complex female relationships. The protagonist, Marie, is a 13-year-old who spends the summer of 1939 with her parents at her beloved grandmother’s home in a rural village. Moreau the writer and director sympathetically shows Marie’s childish nature, budding sexuality and the growing rift between her father and mother—who soon begins an affair with the local doctor, whom Marie also has an unrequited crush on. Although the great Simone Signoret is the grandmother, the astonishing young actress Laetitia Chauveau is rightly the focus of Moreau’s camera throughout.

Lillian Gish

Moreau’s interview with a movie legend makes up the entire running time of Lillian Gish, a touching portrait of old Hollywood that also includes clips from Gish’s silent-film career—including D.W. Griffith’s early epics Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. Moreau’s warmth and Gish’s very presence make this a nice hour of nostalgia for film buffs.