October '26 Digital Week I

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Case 137 

(Film Movement)

The great French actress Léa Drucker adds another sharply etched characterization to her résumé as Stéphanie, an internal-affairs investigator in the Paris police force on a case of police brutality during the “yellow jacket” protests of 2018 in Dominic Moll’s low-key procedural that persuasively encompasses the complicated political aspects of class and race hanging over the investigation. Drucker is unwaveringly good whether subtly taking the temperature of those she’s looking into or handling her skeptical ex-husband (a fellow cop), loving young son, and cantankerous mother. A top-notch supporting cast and Moll’s documentary-like visuals also strongly contribute to this deeply moral, unnerving drama. 

My Undesirable Friends, Part II: Exile 

(Film Forum, NYC)

Following up on her original monumental five-plus-hour documentary about the state of opposition journalists in Russia, director Julia Luktov returns with an even more mesmerizing six-hour chronicle that shows most of the same journalists leaving Russia as soon as Putin’s Ukraine invasion begins. We follow them as they head to places as far flung as Prague, Amsterdam, and New York City to continue their reporting on Putin’s authoritarianism in overdrive—which also takes the form of some of them being tried in absentia for treason. Their bravery in the public sphere is often infused with sadness or anger in private as they discuss their fears of wondering whether there will ever be a different Russia to return home to. Luktov’s extraordinary document of the precarious state of journalism—not just in Russia, but by design here too—is even more urgent than the first film.

Trust Me, I’m a Doctor 

(Briarcliff Entertainment)

The story of model Anna Nicole Smith’s 2007 death from an overdose of painkillers and the trial of her prescribing doctor Sandeep Kapoor is recounted in this scruffy but glib dramatization by writer-director Thane Economou, who relies on cutesiness and rib-nudging (direct address to the camera, TMZ recreations) instead of concentrating on the colorful personalities on hand. Kal Penn is a sympathetically goofy Kapoor and Linda Hamilton is solid as his attorney Ellyn Garofalo, but Abbie Cornish steals the film by humanizing instead of caricaturing Smith—she should have been given her own starring vehicle instead.

Winter of the Crow 

(Cohen Media)

Based on the succinct short story “Professor Andrews Goes to Warsaw” by Olga Tokarczuk, this tense, terse drama stars Lesley Manville as Joan Andrews, a British scholar who arrives in Poland for a conference the day before Russia cracks down with martial law, in 1981—and after she witnesses (and photographs) an extrajudicial killing, she finds that she is also in danger. Kasia Adamik directs persuasively from Sandra Buchta’s savvy script about the quotidian lunacy of authoritarianism through minions taking orders, and Manville’s tremendous performance of subtlety and strength climaxes with her suggestive glare at the camera.

Streaming Release of the Week 

Melt 

(Icarus Films)

Austrian director Nicholas Nikolaus Geyrhalter has been making rigorous documentaries about how humans are affecting the natural world for a few decades, and his latest, which showcases stunning and, at times, shocking glimpses at areas of the planet where snow is either melting too much or not enough, continues his streak of unsettling visual essays. Geyrhalter (who is also his own excellent cinematographer) visits Japan, Canada, France, Switzerland, Iceland, his native Austria and Antarctica to record proof in real time of how man-made climate change has changed these places irrevocably; he also allows local inhabitants to state their cases plainly and powerfully. 

4K/UHD Release of the Week

Little Shop of Horrors 

(Warner Bros)

Frank Oz helmed this alternately silly and inspired adaptation of the off-Broadway musical, itself based on the schlocky 1960 Roger Corman quickie; man-eating plant Audrey II grows and becomes ravenously hungry for human flesh as the flower shop’s workers, Seymour and Audrey, engage in a budding relationship. The musical numbers are well-staged, Audrey II is a true scene-stealer (thanks to Lyle Conway’s awesome puppetry and Levi Stubbs’ one-of-a-kind voice) and Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene are delightful as our couple. Too bad Steve Martin did his lunatically evil character better in the infamous Sgt. Pepper movie. The film’s colors pop beautifully in 4K; extras include an Oz commentary, deleted and extended scenes with optional oz commentary, two featurettes with Oz and Greene and two vintage featurettes.

September '26 Digital Week V

CD Release of the Week 

The Warning—Everything’s Falling 

(Lava Records)

The fifth album by the immensely talented Mexican hard-rock trio follows four terrifically listenable albums, from the auspicious debut 21st Century Blood and the disturbingly striking concept album Queen of the Murder Scene to the potent post-COVID LP Error and the wide-ranging Keep Me Fed. Too bad Everything’s Falling falls short of the Villarreal sisters’ earlier eclectic but powerful musical statements. It starts off strongly with “Ritual,” one of the band’s heaviest musical and lyrical statements, followed by “Perfect Daughter,” which caustically takes aim at the group’s longtime male fans who still consider them girls (even though the Warning has been a band for 13 years, and guitarist/lead singer Daniela is 26, drummer Paulina is 24, and bassist Alejandra is 21). The title track is powered by one of Daniela’s most impassioned vocals, but that “Comfortably Numb” is namechecked in the lyrics yet there’s no stirring guitar solo from Daniela is a missed opportunity.

“Ego,” the band’s fourth song in its first language, Spanish, hammers away as Daniela brushes off any naysayers of their musical worth. Would that several of the other songs—“Bite My Tongue,” “Bloodsport,” “Break,” “Bruises” (with the sisters’ intoning something that sounds more like “Bruces”)—were more than just catchy three-minute power-pop tunes that are the aural equivalent of B movies, cowritten by the Villarreal sisters, their producer Anton DeLost (whose aural gimmickry often buries the trio’s viscerally powerful sound) and a crew of faceless writers-for-hire. But it’s obviously worked: Everything’s Falling is the highest-charting album of the band’s career, and the first single, the irresistibly propulsive “Kerosene,” was number 1 on the mainstream rock charts. But the overall effect is of a vital hard-rock band chasing after mere pop stardom. No doubt these songs will sound better live, since the sisters are such an energetic onstage force—and I’ll be seeing them for the third time, in Brooklyn next spring—but here’s hoping that the Warning’s next album will not sound so formulaic.

4K/UHD Releases of the Week 

Evil Dead Burn 

(Warner Bros)

The original Evil Dead movies were relatively straightforward horror films with gory passages that cleverly stitched each extermination to the next, but the recent reboots—including the latest, directed with verve if little originality by Sébastien Vaniček—seem to simply revel in ways to be disgusting at the expense of plotting and (dare I say it) characterization. Faces rot away and get split into pieces; this and more are shown in closeups that show off impressive makeup artistry but not much else. On 4K, it looks even more vividly extreme; extras comprise a trio of short making-of featurettes.

Kriminal 

(Cult Epics)

In this 1966 tongue-in-cheek action flick, a masked criminal mastermind is a menace to society through his daring heists and frustrates the detective tracking him after his escape from prison. Italian cult director Umberto Lenzi has made what is thought of as the zenith of pulp adaptations and it remains an entertaining time-capsule of a movie, kind of a 007-adjacent adventure, which looks colorfully eye-popping on UHD. There’s an audio commentary on the 4K disc, and the Blu-ray disc includes the film, a 90-minute doc on Lenzi’s career and legacy, Armed to the Teeth, and interviews with actor Glenn Saxson and archivist Pierpaolo De Sanctis.

Streaming Release of the Week

Kim Novak’s Vertigo 

(Kino Lorber)

Theoretically, a documentary based around an interview with nonagenarian Hollywood legend Kim Novak would seem a no-brainer: think of all her stories and observations about costars, directors—with Alfred Hitchcock front and center—and her decision to leave the movie business behind (for the most part) and take up painting in the Great Northwest. But director Alexandre O. Philippe fumbles this easy assignment, often simply marrying images of her films to her words. There’s a diverting section on Vertigo, of course, but otherwise it’s rarely incisive or illuminating. 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

La Fille mal gardée 

(Opus Arte)

This perfectly charming ballet, wittily choreographed by master Frederick Ashton, has been revived by London’s Royal Ballet, with director Kevin O’Hare restaging Ashton’s original dances and a cast of terrific performers—led by Francesca Hayward and Marcelino Sambé—bringing the requisite energy to the entire proceedings. With attractive music by Ferdinand Hérold, played by the opera house orchestra led by conductor Jonathan Lo, this is a breezy couple of hours. There’s excellent hi-def video and audio; extras include interviews with O’Hare, Heyward and Sambé.

Le Joli Mai 

(Icarus Films)

In Chris Marker and Pierre Llohme’s cinema verité portrait of Paris in May 1962 (post-Algerian War), dozens of Parisians wax philosophically about their lives and where they are headed as a society. But its 145 intellectually packed minutes are an endurance test because only some of the participants’ arguments and opinions are clearly articulated: judicious tightening would make this snapshot even stronger. Unlike the original DVD release, only Simone Signoret’s English narration is heard (Yves Montand’s original French narration and deleted scenes are not included); a 2016 Llohme interview and Playtime in Paris, a 1962 short film by Catherine Varlin.

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 '26 Digital Week II

Streaming Releases of the Week 

Sherman’s March 

(Music Box Films)

Ross McElwee has been making personal chronicles masquerading as documentaries for nearly 50 years, carrying a camera around filming his own life—and those of his loved ones—through several feature films, the most famous of which is this 1986 masterpiece that has been rereleased in a restored version for its 40th anniversary. Ostensibly an excuse for McElwee to follow General Sherman’s infamous Civil War “march to the sea” as Union forces pillaged and burned everything in their path on their way to destroying the Confederates’ spirit, the film is a fascinatingly offbeat glimpse at the director’s own relationships with various young Southern women, all with the then-still horrifyingly real specter of nuclear war hanging over everyone and everything. (The film’s memorably long subtitle is A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation.)

Remake 

(Music Box Films)

Russ McElwee’s new film, coming 15 years after his last feature, Photographic Memory, is his most personal, chronicling his grief after his son Adrian died of a fentanyl overdose on Christmas Eve, 2016, at age 27. Another insightful, self-reflective and even self-lacerating McElwee self-portrait, Remake illustrates a difficult relationship with Adrian, who, as he got older, also became interested in filmmaking and began making visual records of events in his own life. McElwee uses his own voluminous footage along with that shot by Adrian to grab hold of his son’s memory, as he says, to make sure he lived and is now gone. There’s also a parallel plotline as Hollywood comes calling with an absurd request to turn his classic Sherman’s March into a fiction feature. But Remake’s heart is McElwee working out his grief over and pride in his son through footage from his earlier films, where we see his children as youngsters. Touchingly, McElwee gives his mother’s mantra as his own: “Everything begins and ends with family.” 

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

American Summer 

(Blue Harbor Entertainment)

In Michael W. Gray’s comedy-drama, nostalgia becomes sentimentality as young Mikey plays baseball, chases girls, and deals with his absent military dad and harried mom during a tumultuous teenage summer. There’s good acting by Logan Gray as our protagonist and Mia Talerico as Kelly, the object of his teen desire, but Gray also had the not-so-great idea to show older Mikey, played decently by Steve Guttenberg, who’s our onscreen narrator—and when older Kelly shows up at the end, she’s played amateurishly by Christie Brinkley. It would have been better to focus on the kids—Mikey’s friends are a Benetton ad—whose antics are at least diverting.

Barbara Forever 

(Strand Releasing/Film Forum, NYC)

Barbara Hammer, who died in 2019 at 79 of cancer, was a pioneering lesbian filmmaker who made dozens of personal films, from shorts to features, that brought a discerning eye to her challenging explorations of (often explicit) female sexuality. Director Brydie O’Connor’s involving and ultimately moving portrait of this singular artist comprises Hammer’s own archival footage alongside sequences from her films, her own intelligent voiceover and the thoughts of her longtime partner, Florrie Burke.

Blu-ray Release of the Week 

Trial by Jury/A Matter of Misconduct! 

(Opus Arte)

This lively double bill of Gilbert & Sullivan’s first hit operetta, set in a courtroom that pits a jilted bride and her scheming groom, and a new operetta by composer Toby Hession and librettist Emma Jenkins, which takes the pulse of political corruption, mixes frivolousness and seriousness quite entertainingly. This 2025 Scottish Opera production has terrific singing from both casts and choruses, marvelous musicmaking by the Scottish Opera orchestra under conductor Hession, and colorful stagings by, respectively, directors John Savournin and Laura Attridge. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.

CD Release of the Week

Mark Adamo—Lysistrata 

(Pentatone)

American composer Mark Adamo’s 2005 riff on the classic ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes has, in the past 20 years, gained even more relevance in a world riven by ethnic, sexual, gender and identity strife. Although Adamo’s rhyming libretto is quite wordy, it does reach Sondheim-like moments of witty eloquence, especially when married to Adamo’s own melodious music. In this excellent 2025 recording, Boston’s Odyssey Opera gives an enthusiastic performance that doesn’t overdo either the comedy or the politics—the formidable voice cast is led by the terrific soprano Anya Matanovič in the title role and tenor Dominic Armstrong as Lysistrata’s lover, Nico, who leads the men of Athenian men in trying to change the minds of begging Athenian women withholding sex until men stop waging war. Gil Rose adroitly conducts Adamo’s challenging score.

August '26 Digital Week II

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

If These Walls Could Rock 

(Bungalow Media & Entertainment)

The Sunset Marquis, a hotel in Hollywood that’s become a haven and hangout for musicians, takes center stage in Tyler Measom and Craig A. Williams’ documentary in which diverting stories about sex, drugs and rock’n’roll are entertainingly told for 90 minutes. Billy Bob Thornton—who moonlights in a rock band in addition to being an award-winning actor and filmmaker—is our guide of sorts, while we hear priceless anecdotes from legendary music figures Ringo Starr, Bruce Springsteen, Slash, Dave Grohl and Gene Simmons, among others, along with those in and outside the family that’s been keeping the beloved Marquis going for decades. 

Center Stage 

(Film Movement Classics)

Director Stanley Kwan’s restored 1991 epic about Chinese actress Ruan Lingyu—who starred in silent films before killing herself at age 24 in 1935—provides a thoughtful portrait of a long-gone era of cinema history that comprises recreations of her film sets, clips from her final two films and meta-interviews with Kwan, his actors and people who knew Ruan. As the fated actress known as the “Chinese Garbo,” Maggie Cheung gives a colossally charismatic performance, and she’s nearly matched by Tony Leung as Cai Chusheng, one of Ruan’s most notable directors. 

Dead Souls 

(Kino Lorber)

For his first feature in nine years—since his Eastern/Western mashup, 2017’s Tombstone Rashomon—English filmmaker Alex Cox has made a madly offbeat adaptation of Russian Nikolai Gogol’s novel, transposed to the American West circa 1890, with Cox playing Strindler, a man compiling a list of dead Mexican laborers in Arizona. Cox has never been the most subtle director—his best-known films, Repo-Man and Sid & Nancy, are cult items—and Dead Souls follows suit, especially with an in-joke about Strindler’s list (ahem). Otherwise, Cox throws shade at U.S. politics and culture, something that’s surely needed but not, at least in his hands, on target.

Streaming Releases of the Week

Miroirs No. 3 

(1-2 Special)

In the latest from German director Christian Petzold, his muse Paula Beer is Laura, a depressed music student taken in and cared for by a nearby rural woman, Betty, after Laura’s in a car accident that claims her fiancé. As Petzold films go, this one is pretty slight: Laura’s presence makes things uncomfortable for Betty’s husband Richard and son Max, especially when it’s revealed that Laura reminds Betty of her daughter, who recently committed suicide. Beer is riveting, as always, but the familiar plot machinations trip up her writer-director, who only finds his footing at the very end, when Maurice Ravel’s piano piece that’s also the film’s title is heard. 

Silent Friend 

(1-2 Special)

Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi has been making narratively fractured, visually dazzling, thought-provoking films since her stunning 1989 debut, My 20th Century. At the center of her latest is a large ginkgo tree, around which revolve three narrative threads that take place more than a century apart, between 1908 and the COVID year of 2020, all in the college town of Marburg, Germany. Enyedi, together with her magnificent cinematographer Gergely Pálos and editor Károly Szalai, have created indelible visuals to illustrate a meditative exploration of the connection of humans to the natural world, even though we might be unaware of it. The excellent cast, led by Léa Seydoux and Tony Leung, makes this at times inscrutable drama emotionally accessible.

August '26 Digital Week I

CD Release of the Week 

Paul McCartney—The Boys of Dungeon Lane 

(Capitol Records)

Now 84, Paul McCartney has released his first album since 2020’s lively McCartney III, which he recorded during the COVID lockdown. The Boys of Dungeon Lane has gotten some of the best reviews of McCartney’s storied career, although to these ears it’s an unsurprisingly tuneful but often familiar-sounding attempt that doesn’t approach his best work, from Ram and Band on the Run to Tug of War and Electric Arguments. But it sits comfortably ahead of lesser efforts like Wild Life, Pipes of Peace and Off the Ground. 

The album’s title is a line from “Days We Left Behind,” the most nakedly autobiographical of Paul’s compositions here, a beautifully realized reminiscence of earlier times that uses his aged, cracked but still formidable voice to great advantage. Not far behind in the nostalgia sweepstakes is “Home to Us,” a charming if slight duet with Ringo Starr (who also drums on the track, and whose jam with producer Andrew Watt was the genesis of this song) about growing up in a run-down part of Liverpool, with cute backing vocals from, of all people, the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde and Texas’ Sharleen Spiteri. “Down South,” describing a bus trip out of Liverpool, revisits the observations of two songs from McCartney’s 2013 album New: “On My Way to Work” and “Early Days.” 

It all goes down very smoothly and often indelibly in the mostly one-man-band approach McCartney and Watt employ; the jam on the opening “As You Lie There” is a good example of Paul’s genius at arranging—although, as usual, it’s his effortlessly melodic bass playing on songs as disparate as “Ripples in a Pond,” “We Two” and the insanely catchy “Never Know” that makes The Boys of Dungeon Lane a cut above other legacy artists’ new music. 

When we get to the quartet of melancholic but powerful ballads that ends the album—“Life Can Be Hard,” “First Star of the Night,” “Salesman Saint” and “Momma Gets By”—we realize that, if these are the final songs Paul has recorded in an unparalleled six-decade-plus career, it’s quite an unabashedly emotional statement to go out on.

In-Theater Release of the Week

Late Fame 

(Magnolia Pictures)

Based, of all things, on a posthumously published novella by the great Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler (who also wrote Traumnovelle, which Stanley Kubrick adapted as his last film Eyes Wide Shut), this low-key character study stars a perfectly cast Willem Dafoe as Ed Saxberger, who wrote a forgotten book of poems decades earlier and who’s been an anonymous post office employee since then—until he is recognized by a group of pretentious young artists that want to give him the long-awaited notoriety they think he deserves. Kent Jones directs economically, Samy Burch’s script has finely-etched characterizations and dialogue, and the rest of the cast—especially a dazzling Greta Lee—superbly backs Dafoe. But there’s simply not enough here for a 95-minute feature, which spreads everything—and everyone—thin.

4K/UHD Release of the Week 

Mars Attacks! 

(Warner Bros)

Director Tim Burton could never be accused of coddling the masses, as his cheerfully cheesy 1996 spoof of sci-fi movies—which was released several months after the insipidly self-serious alien invasion blockbuster Independence Day—delightfully demonstrates. In a large and jokey cast, Jack Nicholson shows off his unique ability to be hilariously over the top in the dual roles of the harried U.S. president and a shady Vegas casino owner, while there are also delicious turns by Annette Bening, Natalie Portman, Pierce Brosnan and Michael J. Fox. Even the goofily gory special effects help make this a dopey but hip satire. The film’s bright colors explode in 4K; extras are two new featurettes with screenwriter Jonathan Gems and some of the film’s technical crew.

Streaming Releases of the Week 

The Drama 

(A24)

Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s darkly comic look at Emma and Charlie, an engaged couple navigating pre-wedding jitters, has some insightful and funny moments, but when Emma confesses to the worst thing she’s ever done, contrivance precariously hangs over the rest of the film. Zendaya and Robert Pattinson make this couple charming, vindictive, self-pitying and impassioned, but they fight an uphill battle as Borgli directs with a sledgehammer, making what happens during the preparations and reception more obvious and less pointed as the film goes along. When their photographer keeps saying she’ll “shoot” them or when Emma’s dad gives a reception speech that makes clear he doesn’t know how she became deaf in one ear, you know you’re dealing with a director who stacks the deck, which for a film like this, is fatal.

Blu-ray Release of the Week 

Good Manners

(Distrib Films US)

In Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s disturbing modern 2018 fairy tale, nanny and housekeeper Clara becomes quite close to her boss, single mom-to-be Ana, and as their relationship grows more intimate, she discovers that Ana might have been impregnated by a werewolf. That revelation is the jumping-off point for a film that, after switching gears halfway through, turns out to be startling, unsettling and risible simultaneously. Even though it outstays its welcome—and could be shorn of 20 minutes, particularly scenes like a young boy being stalked as prey—it’s brilliantly done. The film’s colorfully unnerving look shines on Blu-ray; extras are a two-minute making-of featurette; the shorts A Stem (2007), directed by Rojas and Dutras, and Doppelganger (2012), directed by Rojas; and commentary by critics Shelagh Rowan-Legg and Carolyn Mauricette.

July '26 Digital Week IV

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

I Want Your Sex 

(Magnolia Pictures)

Gregg Araki has been making weirdly off-kilter sex comedies-cum-dramas for more than three decades, and his latest shows that, for better or worse, he’s still at it, combining trenchant social commentary and crude sexual antics, all wrapped in sentimentality. Olivia Wilde is intoxicating as Erika, a performance artist and dominatrix who makes her latest assistant, young and naïve Elliott (a well-cast Cooper Hoffman), her sexual slave. But that’s the only the tip of this provocatively ridiculous satire of sexual consent, modern art, social media and whatever else Araki and cowriter Karley Sciortino toss in—including possible murder. In the end, it’s both too much and not enough, its bullseyes weighed down shallow silliness. But Wilde gives an eye-opening performance that helps negotiate the bumpy parts.

Lost Chapters/Los capítulos perdidos 

(Several Futures)

This modest but affecting documentary/fiction hybrid was made by Venezuelan Lorena Alvarado, who cast her grandmother Adela, her father Ignacio and her sister Ena as versions of themselves to tell a poignant family-history story that is both introspective and universally accessible. The 67-minute feature shows the beauty in the everyday alongside the attempt to hang onto one’s cultural history, with neighborhoods of Caracas shown lovingly by Alvarado and her cinematographer José Ostos. (Alvarado also shot parts of her film, and she’s responsible for the subtle editing as well.)

Brunello—The Gracious Visionary 

(Blue Fox Entertainment)

While watching this hagiography of Italian designer Brunello Cucinelli by director Giuseppe Tornatore—best known for his Oscar-winning foreign film Cinema Paradiso—I kept thinking that there’s material for a decent documentary, but since Brunello is the producer as well as the “star,” there’s no way Tornatore had free rein to show the warts and all of Brunello’s life and career. There are beautifully cinematic moments, notably when Tornatore visualizes the world of the young Brunello through the older’s memory, but this basically sanitized look at a genial billionaire celebrity relies too heavily on reenactments and fawning interviews with family and celebrity cheerleaders like Oprah.

4K/UHD Release of the Week 

Mortal Kombat II 

(Warner Bros)

Based on the hugely popular video-game series comes a sequel to the 2021 reboot that, despite its overlength (it’s nearly exhausting two hours), has some excitement in its well-paced martial-arts battle sequences, which help keep the dreary melodramatics among its characters to a minimum. Director Simon McQuoid (who also directed the reboot) and writer Jeremy Slater balance the inherent self-seriousness with a cleverness that makes it watchable and entertaining. The film looks fantastic in 4K; extras include several making-of featurettes.

Streaming Release of the Week 

Due West 

(Cineverse)

This earnest to a fault melodrama stars an appropriately stern-looking Adrianne Palicki as a bartender who desperately tries to have an abortion in one of the most repressive places on earth for women: rural West Texas. She asks for monetary help from her brother and gets a visit from the bothersome Pastor Mike, played by a game Henry Thomas, but the deck is stacked against her and even the very air carries around an aura of stifling masculinity. Director Evan Miller and cowriter Hardy Janson shrewdly underplay their heroine’s dilemma in a place where politics is never brought up, it’s Palicki’s memorably no-nonsense portrayal that makes this more than mere propaganda.

July '26 Digital Week II

4K/UHD Release of the Week 

They Will Kill You 

(Warner Bros)

Zazie Beetz makes a formidable protagonist as Asia, a young woman at a mysterious Manhattan high-rise who skillfully fights for her life while searching for her younger sister, a maid there—Asia soon finds that the building and its inhabitants are part of a sacrificial satanic cult. If this sounds insane, then wait until you watch it, as director-cowriter Kirill Sokolov piles on geysers and geysers of gore along with tongue-in-cheek battles royale that start to wear out their welcome. But it’s bizarre enough to stay with, and Beetz has the making a great action hero—although would anyone really want a sequel? It all looks even more blood-spatted in UHD; extras include on-set featurettes and interviews.

Streaming Releases of the Week

Corporate Retreat 

(Western Film Service)

What starts as an obvious but effective satire as a group of tech company employees get together for a retreat soon devolves into a pointlessly ultraviolent screed that makes no sense and relies on unimaginative torture as it lumbers to its blood-soaked finale. Director-writer Aaron Fisher and cowriter Kerri Lee Romeo seem to think that rewatching the same torture scenes will magically create some sort of blackly comic masterpiece; instead, I often thought about bailing altogether. Alan Ruck as an insane former CEO and Odeya Rush as one employee’s innocent girlfriend who turns out to be more resourceful than anyone else are the sole reasons to watch, if you can stomach the eye gougings, self-impalings, etc.

The Get Out 

(Vertical Entertainment)

In Derrick Borte’s diverting action flick, Albanian nightclub owner Kapak is held up by Jeff, a desperate college professor, who is then joined by bank teller (!) Carrie to hold him up again—and that’s not even mentioning the corrupt cop and undercover fed who are hovering around. Forget the plot: what makes this watchable is the entertaining cast, led by the hilarious Nina Dobrev as Carrie, Aaron Paul as Jeff, Russell Crowe as the heavily accented Kapak, the always underrated Teresa Palmer as Kapak’s girlfriend and Luke Evans as the fed. 

In-Theater Release of the Week

Mary Oliver—Saved by the Beauty of the World 

(Kino Lorber)

American poet Mary Oliver’s journey into literary history is chronicled in Sasha Waters’ absorbing and sympathetically documentary, which takes her more seriously than the literary establishment did once she became the most popular poet in the country. Waters marshals the forces in the pro-Oliver (who died in 2019 at age 83) camp, including celebrity friends and admirers like John Waters, Oprah Winfrey, Helena Bonham Carter and even Stephen Colbert, the latter who is so taken with Oliver’s poetry that he cannot get through reciting it twice without getting emotional and stopping.  

Blu-ray Release of the Week 

Eagles of the Republic 

(Cohen Media)

When Egypt’s most famous actor George Fahmy is forced by the regime to star in a propaganda film, he finds himself in even more danger when he starts an affair with the gorgeous wife of the general who is producing the project in director-writer Tarik Saleh’s often amusingly jaundiced satire. It’s a film that’s only hamstrung by its length—a good 20 minutes could have been shorn, especially when toward the end it starts to repeat itself. Still, it’s well-acted by a large cast led by Fares Fares as Fahmy and makes pointed observations about cinema and politics throughout. The film looks good on Blu; unfortunately, there are no extras.

CD Release of the Week

Mel Bonis—Orchestral Works 

(CPO)

French composer Mel (Mélanie) Bonis (1858-1937) is one of those musical names that’s rarely heard, since her contemporaries were men (of course) like Fauré, Debussy, Chausson, and César Franck—but the latter was impressed with her enough to teach her privately. Bonis left behind a huge catalog of more than 300 works in every genre, and this excellent disc consists of nine of her many works for orchestra. Leading off with the atmospheric Trois femmes de légende—brief musical portraits of Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s Ophelia, and Salome—the disc also includes several attractive suites and dances and ends, appropriately, with three lovely songs for female voices, including the final one for soprano, mezzo and women’s choir. Joseph Bastian leads the WDR Symphony Orchestra in sensitive readings of these unfairly obscure works.

July '26 Digital Week I

In-Theater/Streaming Release of the Week 

Obsession 

(Universal)

The biggest surprise at this year’s box office so far has been this low-budget horror black comedy, written and directed by comedian/YouTuber Curry Barker, who turns a decent premise for a Twilight Zone episode into an interminable feature that is far less clever than it thinks. When music-store employee Bear makes a wish that his attractive coworker Nikki will fall for him, it leads to crudely shocking but entirely predictable consequences. There are a couple of cheap jump scares, including one telegraphed so blatantly I’m surprised anybody fell for it, while the haphazard plotting and nonexistent characterizations don’t help. Michael Johnston makes a one-note Bear, while Inde Navarrette’s shrill Nikki scores mainly because her opposite number is so invisible. Here’s hoping we don’t get a run on even worse low-budget horror comedies as producers attempt to chase box-office glory. 

In-Theater Releases of the Week

Couture 

(Vertical Releasing)

French director Anna Winocour’s new film brings together intimate stories of three women during Paris Fashion Week: Maxine, an American director making a video; Ada, an African model who’s left home to make her mark; and Angèle, a local makeup artist. As she jumps around this trio’s personal stories, there are moments of insight, but when Maxine gets a cancer diagnosis, the film gets knocked severely out of whack, and the travails of Ada and Angèle come off as relatively trivial. Still, it’s beautifully shot and acted, especially by Angelina Jolie, whose Maxine has a cancer scare that recalls her own decision to have a double mastectomy. It’s almost exploitative, but in Winocour and Jolie’s hands, it’s emotional without becoming melodramatic.

For the Love of a Woman 

(Panorama Films)

In this heavyhanded if earnest drama set in the 1970s, Esther travels to Israel after her mother dies to learn about a closely held family secret, which involves a free-spirited woman named Yehudit, a settler in a rural village in 1930s who affects the live of three local men. Director Guido Chiesa awkwardly handles the film’s flashback structure, and his and Nicoletta Micheli’s script injects sentimentality into what should have been a straightforwardly incisive study of hidden truths. Still, the performances of Mili Avital as Esther and Ana Elaru as the tough-as-nails Yehudit make this watchable throughout.

4K/UHD Release of the Week

Maurice 

(Cohen Film Collection)

Following their international breakthrough, 1986’s A Room with a View, the next year director James Ivory and producer Ismael Merchant daringly tackled another Forster novel (with a script by Ivory and Kit Hesketh-Harvey), this one about the intimate relationship between Maurice and Clive, two young men in the stiflingly repressive culture of Edwardian England. The leisurely 140-minute film drags at times but the atmosphere and details are unerringly right. So is the acting from James Wilby (Maurice) and Hugh Grant (Clive) as well as Rupert Graves, Denholm Elliott, Simon Callow and Billie Whitelaw, among others in a superb supporting cast. The film looks ravishing in 4K; extras include a commentary on the 4K disc and, on the accompanying Blu-rays, the film, alternate takes/deleted scenes with Ivory commentary, interview/Q&A with Ivory and cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, making-of featurette and a conversation between Ivory and director Tom McCarthy. 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

Don’t Play With Fire 

(Cult Epics)

Hong Kong master Tsui Hark’s bleak 1980 drama follows three nihilistic teens who are blackmailed by a cunning young woman into committing further acts of violence after she witnesses them set off a bomb in a movie theater. And that’s just the beginning: be warned that there are scenes here that might make some viewers close their eyes, from the opening images of a mouse to a cat being thrown off a balcony—but Hark’s fast-paced immersion in this sordid world is ultimately impossible to look away from. Alongside the uncensored international version, this set includes the banned Chinese version and English dubbed version, a commentary, and interviews with Hark, two actors, an assistant director and Hark’s cowriter.

A Game for Six Lovers 

(Icarus Films)

Jacques Doniol-Valcroze’s 1960 roundelay, which follows three mostly mismatched couples at an imposing French chateau, proves that not all French New Wave directors were masters of their craft:  the director-writer crafted a dull-edged, often tone-deaf film that wavers between comedy and tragedy and wastes a game cast (especially Bernadette Lafont, Alexandra Stewart, and Francoise Brion, who was also Doniol-Valcroze’s wife), Roger Fellous’ lovely B&W cinematography and Serge Gainsbourg’s attractive score. The film looks great in hi-def; lone extra is a 1965 short also starring Lafont, The Botanical Avatar of Mademoiselle Flora, directed by Jeanne Barbillon.

CD Release of the Week 

Nadia Boulanger—La ville morte 

(Pentatone)

Although French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger was an important teacher to countless prominent European and American composers, she was also a composer (as was her talented sister, Lili, whose death at age 24 in 1918 is one of the great tragedies in music history). Nadia—who died at age 92 in 1979—wrote this opera between 1909 and 1913 with fellow French composer Raoul Pugno (who may also have been her lover), based on the text of a play by Gabriele D’Annunzio. The opera follows an archeologist, his wife, his sister and a colleague amid Greek ruins—with more than a little thematic (and musical) resemblance to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Since the orchestration did not survive, it’s been reconstructed, and this world-premiere recording by the Talea Ensemble led by Neal Goren gives a good sense of its intimacy and restraint. The impassioned vocal performances by the quartet of soloists—soprano Melissa Harvey, mezzo Laurie Rubin, tenor Joshua Dennis and baritone Jarell Williams—are unimpeachable.