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.

Off-Broadway Musical Review—“Girl, Interrupted” at the Public Theater

Girl, Interrupted

Music and lyrics by Aimee Mann

Book by Martyna Majok, based on the book by Susanna Kaysen 

Choreography by Sonya Tayeh; directed by Jo Bonney

Performances through July 12, 2026

Public Theater, New York, NY

publictheater.org

Juliana Canfield and the cast of Girl, Interrupted (photo: Joan Marcus)

Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir Girl, Interrupted—an unflinchingly honest account of her time in a Massachusetts psychiatric hospital in the 1960s—was first turned into a 1999 film, directed by James Mangold, notable for its two central performances: Wynona Ryder as Susanna and Angelina Jolie, who won an Oscar for the showy role of Lisa, one of Susanna’s fellow patients.

The new stage adaptation, a world-premiere production at the Public Theater—which has introduced new musicals for decades, from Hair, A Chorus Line and Hamilton to the more recent Suffs and Hell’s Kitchen, all of which went to Broadway—has an equally impressive pedigree. The book is by playwright Martyna Majok, whose incisive drama Queens was done off-Broadway earlier this season; the show is staged by Jo Bonney, one of our most inventive directors; and the music and lyrics are by Aimee Mann, a master of intimately ironic songs about miscommunication and broken relationships, from her 1985 debut with ‘Til Tuesday through her decades-long solo career.

But Mann’s songs—which made their debut on her stunning 2021 album, Queens of the Summer Hotel—are almost too confessional for the stage, even a small off-Broadway one. What sounds so achingly poignant on Mann’s album loses that poignance when sung by different characters, despite nearly identically restrained and small-scale accompaniment by acoustic guitar, bass, violin and piano. 

When Susanna (a restrained but powerful Juliana Canfield) sings “At the Frick Museum,” a deceptively intricate song that manages to encompass Vermeer—one of whose paintings at the Frick gives the memoir and the show their title—and male predation, her vocal is harrowingly understated, but lost is Mann’s world-wearily forthright voice. The same goes for most of the other songs, especially when they’re performed by more than one character. Another problem is that Mann does not write showstoppers; this works on Queens of the Summer Hotel, where the accumulation of her soulful, incident-filled songs grabs the heart. Yet onstage, though beautifully crafted and orchestrated by Todd Almond, the piling up of these same songs is far less memorable.

Majok’s lively book captures sympathetic snapshots of these misunderstood (and misdiagnosed) women, while Bonney’s precise direction helps smooth over the unavoidably episodic nature of the material. She also effectively uses the conceit of performers playing instruments onstage. Alongside the always authentic Canfield is a captivating cast, although such a forceful singer as Emily Skinner is unfortunately relegated to a small role as one of the hospital’s doctors. 

June '26 Digital Week III

In-Theater Release of the Week 

Disclosure Day 

(Universal)

In Steven Spielberg’s latest extravaganza, bits of Close Encounters, E.T. and Minority Report—among others—are put in a blender and chopped up into a surprisingly sloppy mess in David Koepp’s script about a whistleblower and a Kansas City weatherwoman who are threatening to tell the public about alien encounters that a quasi-government agency is murderously trying to keep quiet. The stakes seem less urgent than how it is overdramatized here, and the characters act so stupidly at times that it’s often laughable. Still, Spielberg remains a master at orchestrating everything from car chases to the quiet and tense moments, so even John Williams’ recycled-sounding score and the broad acting of a cast led by Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colman Domingo and Colin Firth don’t fatally damage what is admittedly second-tier Spielberg, which has arresting images in spades—even the shamelessly manipulative final shot.

Streaming Release of the Week

Easy Girl 

(Omnibus Entertainment)

German writer-director Hille Norden fearlessly explores the fascinating and carefree Nore, who’s seemingly in a different acquaintance’s bed each night, showing how her sexuality has shaped her very existence. There are many intense and difficult to watch sequences of consensual and abusive sex, often seen through the eyes of Nore’s younger self, as Nora and her closest (only?) friend Jonna watch past episodes of her life play out. Luna Jordan’s Jonna is subtly enacted, but it’s Dana Herfuth’s ferociousness as Nore—in an emotionally and physically naked portrayal—that reverberates in a frank film that has no easy answers to weighty moral questions. 

4K/UHD Releases of the Week 

Eraser 

(Warner Brothers)

In this 1996 by-the-numbers Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle—he’s a U.S. marshal in the federal witness protection program who protects a high-value witness—director Charles Russell stages a couple of amusing action sequences: one in the alligator enclosure in the Central Park Zoo and another in midair as a parachuting Arnold does battle with an oncoming airplane. Also helpful is the supporting cast, including James Coburn, James Caan and Vanessa Williams, whose lively presence makes this forgettable flick somewhat entertaining. There’s an excellent UHD transfer; extras include featurettes containing new interviews with Russell and Williams but not the star.

Scream 4 

(Lionsgate)

For the third sequel (released in 2011) in the Scream franchise—there have been three more as of this writing—creator-writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven returned, along with the leads from earlier incarnations, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette, for more Ghostface murders in the anything but bucolic town of Woodsboro. Too bad that the twists and turns are obvious and eye-rolling, as usual, especially in the ludicrously conceived character played by Emma Roberts. The 4K transfer is impressive; extras include a commentary with Craven and cast members, deleted/extended scenes with commentary, a making-of featurette and a gag reel.

Blu-ray Release of the Week 

Mozart—Così fan tutte 

(C Major)

Mozart’s classic comic opera (the English title is Women Are Like That) introduces two couples and puts the females through their paces to see if they will cheat on their partners, and in Barrie Kosky’s clever 2024 Vienna State Opera staging, they are rehearsing for a film directed by Don Alfonso, with the maid Despina as a stagehand. Although the conceit doesn’t entirely work, it’s sung and acted persuasively by Federica Lombardi (Fiordiligi), Emily D’Angelo (Dorabella), Filipe Manu (Ferrando), Peter Kellner (Guglielmo), Kate Lindsey (Despina) and Christopher Maltman (Don Alfonso). Philippe Jordan deftly conducts the state opera orchestra. The hi-def video and audio are first-rate; too bad there are no contextualizing extras like a Kosky interview.

DVD Release of the Week

The Most Precious of Cargoes 

(Distrib Films US)

Michel Hazanavicius won best picture and best director Oscars for his charming but slight 2011 paean to silent movies, The Artist, while most of his other films have rarely been seen hereabouts. His latest, an ambitious animated feature about the Holocaust based on an admired novel by French author Jean-Claude Grumberg (who cowrote the script), is another example of the French director’s interesting but lightweight filmmaking. There’s an admirably restrained visualization of the concentration camps, but sentimentality outweighs any nuance in this story of a woodcutter’s wife who rescues and raises a baby girl thrown from the train to Auschwitz by her doomed father. The usually dependable Alexander Desplat’s score is far from his best, but Hazanavicius did get legendary actor Jean-Louis Trintignant to record the narration before his death in 2022.

CD Release of the Week 

Weinberg—String Quartets, Volume 6 

(Chandos)

Russian composer Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-96) sadly never witnessed the renaissance of his strikingly original music that began after his shattering Holocaust opera The Passenger started being performed worldwide; since then, dozens of CDs of his varied orchestral and chamber music have been recorded. His 17 string quartets make up a formidable body of work on their own, and this final volume in a terrific series of discs recorded by the gifted Arcadia Quartet showcases the middle and late periods of his career. Included are the impassioned 10th quartet (1964); the expansive 12th (1969-70), with its gorgeously unusual Moderato final movement; and the 17th (1986)—Weinberg’s final quartet—which is among his most compact and musically eloquent. Rounding out the CD are a couple of attractive early miniatures.

Shakespeare in the Park Review—“Romeo and Juliet” at the Delacorte Theater

Romeo and Juliet

Written by William Shakespeare; Spanish translations by Alfredo Michel Modenessi

Choreography by Mayte Natalio; directed by Saheem Ali

Performances through June 28, 2026

Delacorte Theater, Central Park, New York City

publictheater.org

Ra’Mya Latiah Aikens in Romeo and Juliet (photo: Joan Marcus)

At the Delacorte Theater every summer, the play’s usually not the thing. Instead, Shakespeare is often secondary to the busyness onstage, as director Saheem Ali’s Romeo and Juliet vividly demonstrates. In Ali’s staging, Verona, Italy, is now Nueva Verona, a bilingual town on the U.S.-Mexico border where the Capulets and the Montagues live and where a wall has been built on which protestors from the Montague clan spray paint anti-ICE slogans (the Capulets are pro-ICE, natch).

Against this artificially heightened backdrop, the doomed romance of our star-cross’d lovers is rather uneventful, even trivial. The director must also sense this, since he has also rather desperately added a portentous trio of masked spectres who represent death as they hover about the denizens and gravestones strewn about Maruti Evans’ spooky cemetery set. (Also hovering, somewhat more pretentiously, are outsized statutes of what looks to be Jesus’ mother Mary as well as a skeleton behind the large onstage wall.)

Ali’s direction can’t overcome the inherent contradiction of stuffing extraneous bits into the play yet not trusting those additions enough to embrace a true reimagining. Some of the text is spoken in (unsubtitled) Spanish, which may be authentic to the changed setting and the unbridgeable chasm between the two families—the lower-class Montagues speak it, the upper-class Capulets don’t—but having the two lovers speak Shakespeare’s most elevated love language in another language erases the original poetry’s beauty.

Juliet’s nurse is played by the capable Dierdre O’Connell as an unwanted mugging in the park, which Ali surely was after—so is the audience, which hoots and hollers at her every raised eyebrow. There are a few performers, like Francis Jue (Lawrence), Caleb Joshua Eberhardt (Mercutio) and Lachanze (who gets to sing as Lady Capulet), who are better at balancing the overacting that Delacorte audiences respond to with slightly more nuance. 

This bloodless Romeo and Juliet comes to intermittent life through the chemistry of the leads. Daniel Bravo Hernández is a dashing Romeo and Ra’Mya Latiah Aikens believably makes Juliet a giggling teen and a maturing young woman. Both also speak fluent Spanish (in Alfredo Michel Modenessi’s translation) so they can often convey Shakespeare’s emotions without subtitles—but even they are defeated by Ali’s lazy direction of the famous balcony scene, the most forgettable I’ve yet seen. 

As so often at the Delacorte, what’s most memorable is not from Shakespeare: Oana Botez’ dazzling costumes, especially in the pivotal ball sequence; Christopher Akerlind’s canny lighting; and Mayte Natalio’s energetic choreography. But the messy ending, in which the two grieving families agree to drop their long-standing differences (even though the wall still sits imposingly behind them), makes little sense in this context. That may be why each Delacorte performance ends with a real-life wedding led by Jue, who is an ordained officiant of the Universal Life Church: witnessing an actual celebration of marriage might help audiences forget that Shakespeare’s teenage newlyweds die onstage. 

June '26 Digital Week II

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Honeyjoon 

(Collective)

Young, single June goes to the Azores with her mother Lela on the first anniversary of June’s father’s death in Lilian T. Mehrel’s psychological drama laced with humor and eroticism about the different forms that grief can take. Anchored by buoyant performances from Ayden Mayeri (June) and Amira Casar (Lela), Mehrel’s film is an occasionally meandering but touchingly observed look at how a seemingly unbridgeable generation gap between mother and daughter can be tentatively but optimistically bridged. 

Promised Sky 

(Film Movement)

Tunisian-French director-cowriter Erige Sehiri examines the intertwined lives of several females in Tunisia, including an orphaned young girl who was the lone survivor of a sunken refugee boat in this humane study that skirts—but never succumbs to—melodrama. Although there’s inevitably an anecdotal feel as we jump around among these characters as they navigate the difficulties of being outsiders that includes racism from the top down, Sehiri’s perceptive eye is sure and real, as are the authentically lived-in performances by the entire cast.

This Tempting Madness 

(Vertical Entertainment)

After a horrific incident lands her in the hospital, Mia awakes from a coma physically and emotionally scarred in Jennifer E. Montgomery’s often bluntly obvious but potent psychological study. With her memories jumbled, Mia has to try and piece together what’s happened, including her relationship with her estranged husband Jake. Montgomery (who also cowrote the scattered script with Andrew M. Davis, the film’s inventive cinematographer) can’t thoroughly fight her way past the cliches and tropes of the genre, the intense Mia of Simone Ashley keeps things focused.

Streaming Release of the Week

Changing Lanes 

(First Run Features)

When a beloved local teacher is killed on McGuinness Boulevard, a busy Greenpoint, Brooklyn, thoroughfare, the neighborhood is galvanized to provide more bike lanes and inhibit vehicular traffic in Ben Wolf’s succinct documentary that dramatizes how anger turns to action even as literal roadblocks are thrown up by those against changes. Led by a long-time local business, what began in the DeBlasio administration are slowed to a near-halt by the corrupt Mayor Adams. Wolf packs a lot of info into his 74-minute running time, even though more would have been welcome, especially the asides from long-time bicyclist David Byrne, who extols the virtues of cities that plan for bike lanes as he’s seen while on tours in Europe.

Blu-ray Release of the Week 

VD 

(Cult Epics)

Dutch director Wim Verstappen’s crudely provocative (and rarely seen) 1972 melodrama follows Cornelis, the patriarch of a large and successful company that handles both meat and contraceptives (!), who tries to find an heir who will succeed him at the helm. Like any good soap opera, VD involves incest, adultery, abortion, suicide, orgies—Cornelis and his family are not likable people, and if Verstappen sometimes lays it on too thick with on-the-nose satire and commentary (including several look-away shots of animals being butchered), it remains fascinatingly watchable. There’s a fine restored hi-def transfer; extras include a commentary by film historian Peter Verstraten and Festival of Love, Verstappen’s 1969 short.

CD Release of the Week

Aribert Reimann—Ein Traumspiel 

(Wergo)

German composer Aribert Reimann (1936-2024) wrote thorny, 12-tone music he memorably used to underpin the often radical-sounding operas he adapted from prestigious literary sources: Lear, written for legendary German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Diskeau, is his greatest musical triumph, and he also wrote operas based on Kafka’s The Castle and August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata. Ein Traumspiel, Reimann’s first opera, was composed in 1965; based on Strindberg’s A Dream Play, it’s dramatically riveting but a little diffuse, as if Reimann was still grasping with setting such challenging material to his idiosyncratic music. This compelling 2018 performance was recorded at Bavaria’s Theater Hof in Germany—Walter E. Gugerbauer conducts the orchestra, chorus and a cast led by mezzo Franziska Rabl in the vocally taxing role of the god Indra’s daughter. Also included is Reimann’s monodrama, Denn bleien ist nirgends (For to Stay Is to Be Nowhere), based on an elegy by Reiner Maria Rilke, superbly performed by speaker Martin Engler.

Broadway Play Review—David Auburn’s “Proof” with Ayo Edebiri and Don Cheadle

Proof

Written by David Auburn; directed by Thomas Kail

Performances through July 19, 2026

Majestic Theater, 245 West 44th Street, NYC

proofbroadway.com

Kara Young and Ayo Edebiri in Proof (photo: Matthew Murphy)

David Auburn’s Proof—which won pretty much every award after its 2000 premiere—is the rare play that tackles complex issues accessibly but intelligently. Very funny and profoundly moving in its examination of the fraught intersection between genius and mental imbalance, Proof centers on Catherine, who dropped out of college to care for her beloved father, the mathematical wizard and esteemed professor Robert. Auburn shrewdly opens his play with a witty but thoughtful scene between daughter and father, where we discover the layers of their knotty relationship as well as the fact that he has recently died. 

Catherine navigates complicated feelings about her father as Hal, a young professor whom Robert mentored, is in the house going through the voluminous papers Robert left behind; and Claire, her pragmatic older sister who wants to take Catherine back to New York to start a new life away from Chicago, has arrived for the funeral. Although Catherine has inherited her father’s math genius, when Hal discovers a brilliantly argued proof among the papers, he assumes it’s Robert’s and hesitates to believe Catherine when she says it’s hers. For her part, Claire tends to share Hal’s skepticism. 

When Proof premiered a quarter-century ago, Mary Louise Parker played Catherine with her usual effortless mastery, by turns depressed and buoyant, ironical and sentimental. Surprisingly—or maybe unsurprisingly, considering it’s Hollywood—in the 2005 screen adaptation, Parker was bypassed for Gwyneth Paltrow, whose paltry portrayal irrevocably damaged the film. 

In Thomas Kail’s absorbing new production, Ayo Edebiri plays Catherine quite differently than Parker and Paltrow but is happily closer to the former. Edebiri is less obviously assertive than Parker was, but her bemused, Zen-like calm is another valid way to show Catherine dealing with both her father’s legacy and the possibility that she may have inherited both his genius and his madness. Don Cheadle is a charmingly low-key Robert, Kara Young reins in her innate dazzlingness to make Claire a practical but smothering sister, and Jin Ha’s Hal amusingly fumbles about while revering Robert’s legacy and falling in love with Catherine. 

Kail’s sturdy direction is fortified by Amanda Zieve’s canny lighting, Justin Ellington and Connor Wang’s clever sound design and Theresa L. Williams’ colorful set design. But centering it all is David Auburn’s foolproof script, which is mathematical in design but humane in execution.

June '26 Digital Week I

Film Series of the Week 

Louis Malle: Portraits of America 

(Metrograph, NYC)

French director Louis Malle (1932-95) was best known for intelligent and provocative films like his incest comedy Murmur of the Heart and two Nazi Occupation dramas, Lacombe, Lucien and Au Revoir, Les Enfants, but he was also a heartfelt chronicler of an America that could only be seen by an outsider. This series includes several such films, including his 1978 “success de scandale” Pretty Baby, with a 12-year-old Brooke Shields as a child prostitute, and his witty Atlantic City, with an excellent Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon, from a scabrously funny John Guare script. 

Also included are Malle’s sympathetic documentary portraits of his adopted country during the Reagan presidency that show those left behind: 1985’s God’s Country (farmers) and 1986’s And the Pursuit of Happiness … (immigrants). There’s also a new doc, Louis Malle, Le Révolté (Louis Malle, The Rebel) by Claire Duguet, which—though too short (75 minutes)—effectively hits on the major themes of Malle’s life and career. This essential series was curated by Malle’s daughters Chloé and Justine. (metrograph.com)

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Carolina Caroline 

(Magnolia Pictures)

If it wasn’t for the winning presence of Samara Weaving—an actress who always seems to elevate the lame movies she’s usually stuck in—as Caroline, a young woman who falls for the charming but dangerous Oliver and follows him on a deadly Bonnie and Clyde-like excursion across Texas, then Adam Carter Rehmeier’s derivative drama (the obvious script is by William Thomas Dean IV) would be even less palatable. Routine and predictable for much of its length—even Kyle Gallner’s charismatically villainous Oliver is unoriginal—this is yet another film that wastes poor Weaving.

The Currents 

(Kino Lorber)

After successful designer Lina impulsively leaps from a bridge into icy Swiss waters, upon her return home to Buenos Aires she finds it difficult to return to normal life in Argentine-Swiss writer-director Milagros Mumenthaler’s sometimes opaque but mostly trenchant character study. Although a few moments of fantasy and surreal touches aren’t always successful, the director’s intimate glimpse into this fragile woman’s psyche is greatly assisted by Isabel Aimé González Sola, a bracingly natural actress who makes Lina an elegantly empathetic protagonist.

Forastera 

(Grasshopper Film)

Teenager Cata’s beloved grandmother Catalina dies, and Cata herself discovers her body—this leads to her trying to deal with her grief in ever more confusing ways in Lucía Aleñar Iglesias’ achingly intimate chamber drama. Anchored by Zoe Stein’s magnificent and moving performance, Iglesias’ film shows how those we loved and lost are still among us in different ways, whether in our memories or otherwise, as her infinitely suggestive final shot underlines.

Streaming Release of the Week 

Blum: Masters of Their Own Destiny 

(Icarus Films)

The fascinating true story of Emerik Blum, a Bosnian-Jewish businessman whose Yugoslav company Energoinvest was successfully run as a socialist collective of sorts (women workers were paid the same as men), is recounted in Jasmila Žbanić’s concise but often illuminating documentary. The film is structured from valuable archival footage and interviews with many of those involved, including Blum and several colleagues, but it would have been even more interesting if Žbanić had given more time to delving into Blum’s personal history—his family was murdered during the Holocaust, which is mentioned but not gone into in any depth. 

CD Release of the Week

Thomas de Hartmann—Esther 

(Pentatone)

Thomas de Hartmann (1884-1956) was a Ukrainian composer who composed this neglected opera—based on the Biblical story of Esther, who saved the Jewish people from annihilation—in Paris during World War II, which also threatened the very existence of the Jewish people. This world-premiere recording displays the de Hartmann opera’s strengths, notably the lyrical vocal writing, although it also brings its static nature to the fore. Still, it’s a treat to be able to hear this valuable work in its entirety, and it’s performed superbly by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under conductor Kirill Karabits and sung beautifully by a top cast led by American soprano Corinne Winters as Esther.

Film Series: Open Roads—New Italian Cinema 2026

Open Roads—New Italian Cinema 2026

Through June 4, 2026

Film at Lincoln Center

165 West 65 Street, New York, NY

filmlinc.org 

Benedetta Porcaroli and Lucrezia Guglielmino in The Kidnapping of Arabella

This year’s Open Roads—the 25th edition of the series that imports new films from Italy—opened with The Kidnapping of Arabella, the second feature by Carolina Cavalli. It stars the winning and gifted actress Benedetta Porcaroli as Holly, a bored 28-year-old who meets the eponymous 8-year-old and is convinced that this precocious youngster is her as a child. Although Porcaroli and Lucrezia Guglielmino (Arabella) have a believable older-younger sister vibe, Cavalli wastes a lot of screen time with their meandering and their meeting a collection of faux-Fellini stereotypes. It’s too bad that Chris Pine, who gives a committed performance—complete with serviceable Italian—as Arabella’s put-upon father, seems adrift in this context. 

Barbara Ronchi in Elise

Some of Italy’s best actresses populate several of this year’s Open Roads entries, starting with Elise, in which the fiery Barbara Ronchi—who was so unforgettable as the tragically sorrowful mother in Marco Bellocchio’s masterly 2023 Kidnapped—ratchets up her intensity level as a woman who is imprisoned for killing her sister without any motive, and who agrees to be subjected to a visiting criminologist’s study. Director Leonardo Di Costanzo intelligently explores thorny questions of morality and memory, and Ronchi’s emotionally bare acting provides the necessary grounding.

Jasmine Trinca in The Eyes of Others

In The Eyes of Others, Andrea De Sica’s at times perceptive but often jumbled satire about the corruption of power among the ultra-rich, Jasmine Trinca is magnificent as an enigmatic woman whose arrival on a private island turns heads as well as leads to duplicity and ultimately murder. The film looks gorgeous, and there are some truly shocking moments, but De Sica is unfortunately more interested in stylishness than depth.

Jasmine Trinca in La Gioia

Valeria Golino impressively transforms into the dowdy, repressed high school teacher Gioia, who lives with her elderly parents and falls into an unlikely relationship with a mysteriously slippery student Alessio in Nicolangelo Gelormini’s leaky but watchable La Gioia. Although little of it is plausible—at least as presented by Gelormini—the actors are enough of a reason to watch: alongside Golino, Saul Nanni makes a charismatic Alessio and Jasmine Trinca (again!) does wonders in a largely thankless role as Alessio’s needy mother Carla. 

Tecla Insolia in Primavera

Ludovica Rampoldi’s script for Primavera—first-time director Damiano Michieletto’s tantalizing fictional biopic about Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi’s stormy relationship with a young orphan musician named Cecilia—smartly places maestro and student at the center of what is after all a Baroque melodrama. It looks and sounds sumptuous, of course, and Tecla Insolia gives a remarkable performance as Cecilia, making her far more than just another female footnote in a male-dominated artistic era.  

Valeria Golino and Pilar Fogliati in A Brief Affair

Rampoldi also wrote and directed A Brief Affair, a one-note comedy-drama about two people who meet cute one night and reluctantly fall into an adulterous affair, managing to keep their illicit encounters secret—at least until a couple of unsurprising plot twists end up bringing everything into the open. It’s all attractively acted by Pilar Fogliati, Adriano Giannini, Andrea Carpenzano and Valeria Golino (again), but Rampoldi’s derivative script and direction keep this from becoming a true guilty pleasure.

May '26 Digital Week II

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

The Wizard of the Kremlin

(Vertical)

The relationship between incoming Russian president Vladimir Putin and advisor Vadim Baranov (based on the real-life Vladislav Surkov) during the bumpy beginning of the Russian Federation is dramatized with his usual rigor by French director Olivier Assayas. The political chicanery and media spin at the heart of Putin’s burgeoning autocracy is always enticing, but Assayas and cowriter Emmanuel Carrère stay mostly on the surface, rarely diving into the tantalizing complexities involved. Paul Dano makes a one-note Vadim, Jude Law is an effective Putin and Alicia Vikander gives a stellar turn as Ksenia, a woman with whom Vadim gets entangled, but the film never really gains any dramatic or satiric steam, stopping and starting lethargically until the startling if unsurprising final shot.

In the Grey 

(Black Bear)

Eiza Gonzalez shines as Rachel, a stealthy and glamorous lawyer who takes the assets of corrupt billionaires with the help of her reliable sidekicks Sid (Henry Cavill) and Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal) in Guy Ritchie’s silly but entertaining adventure that traverses New York, the Canary Islands and Saudi Arabia. Although there’s not much at stake here—even when Rachel gets abducted by her latest mark, Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem), we know she’ll be extracted by Sid and Bronco’s team—Ritchie paces his lark spiffily enough to get this to the finish line in a tidy 97 minutes.

Ask E. Jean 

(Abramorama)

E. Jean Carroll initially appeared on most people’s radars a few years ago when she accused Donald Trump of sexual abuse in a department store changing room and successfully sued him for defamation when he stupidly—but unsurprisingly—said he couldn’t have done it because she wasn’t his type. In Ivy Meeropol’s concise documentary, Carroll becomes more than just her run-in with Trump: she’s also an accomplished editor, writer, advice columnist and even television host who was called the female Hunter S. Thompson for her no-nonsense style. Indeed, she comes across in interviews both new and old along as other video footage as an intelligent and unafraid, the kind of woman who is Trump’s worst nightmare—which she is.

Forge 

(Utopia)

When sister and brother art forgers Coco and Raymond start working with Holden, a young heir who wants his grandfather’s ruined artworks to be repainted and sold as genuine, their suddenly big-time operation enters the purview of Emily, an FBI agent who has befriended their mother in Jing Ai Ng’s fascinating study of the complicated ethics and morality of such partnerships. Although the film’s ending is a bit rushed, the writer-director shows off a sure hand with his complex characters, all of whom are persuasively brought to life by Andie Ju (Coco), Brandon Soo Hoo (Raymond), Edmund Donovan (Holden) and Kelly Marie Tran (Emily).

Magic Hour 

(Greenwich Entertainment)

There seems to be something wrong with married couple Erin and Charlie’s relationship—and we find out early on exactly what it is in this at times risible and always maudlin melodrama that approaches the subject of loss with tired visual tropes and dated emotional cues. Although director Katie Aselton utilizes Sarah Wheldon’s cinematography to inject freshness into California’s overphotographed Joshua Tree, nothing can escape the banality of Aselton’s and husband Mark Duplass’ script. Aselton acts up a storm as Erin, and David Diggs is in fine form as Charlie, but it’s all for naught and feels overlong, despite its brief 80-minute running time.

Streaming Release of the Week

The Propagandist 

(Icarus Films)

Luuk Bouwman’s savage documentary focuses on Jan Teunissen, a Dutch filmmaker who became a major Nazi party supporter, for which he spent time in prison but afterward never expressed any regret for what he had done all while saying that he didn’t really anything that awful. Rolf Schuursma, as part of an oral history project, interviewed Teunissen and others about being willing propagandists for Hitler’s regime, and Buowman introduces devastating evidence that Teunissen was far more than simply Nazi-adjacent. It’s an explosive if unsurprising portrait that demonstrates how collaboration is as damaging as being a true believer—and when it came to Teunissen, they overlapped.

CD Release of the Week 

East Meets West—Anne-Sophie Mutter 

(Alpha Classics)

When master violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter—who’s been performing in the international spotlight for about half a century—collaborates with some prominent contemporary composers on new works for her instrument, the result is unsurprisingly eclectic and often bracing. The album title comes from the composers and their cultural diversity: Aftab Darvishi (Iran), Unsuk Chin (South Korea), Jörg Widmann (Germany) and Thomas Adès (England). They all reach into different musical pasts and a shared present to create commissions that Mutter beautifully makes her own, from Darvishi’s affecting solo piece, Likoo, to Chin’s colorful Gran Cadenza for two violins, Widmann’s sixth string quartet, a pensive Beethoven study, and finally Ades’ Air—Homage to Sibelius, a soaring concerto in all but name.

Broadway Musical Review—“Beaches” with Kelli Barrett and Jessica Vosk

Beaches

Book by Iris Rainer Dart and Thom Thomas

Music by Mike Stoller, lyrics by Iris Rainer Dart

Directed by Lonny Price, co-directed by Matt Cowart

Opened April 22, 2026

Majestic Theater, 245 West 44th Street, NYC

beachesthemusical.com

Kelli Barrett in Beaches (photo: Marc J. Franklin)

Most people remember Beaches as the aggressively sentimental 1988 movie starring Bette Midler. But it was originally a novel by Iris Rainer Dart, who cowrote the book and lyrics for the Broadway musical version based on her book, not the film. Whether this was to avoid comparisons with the beloved screen tearjerker or not, the result is stilted and mawkish.

Beaches follows the lifelong friendship of extroverted Cee Cee Bloom and introverted Bertie White (Hillary in the movie) from the time they meet cute as kids on an Atlantic City beach until the moment Cee Cee drops her show-biz career to look after Bertie when she falls deathly ill. If the movie relied on Midler’s charisma and Barbara Hershey’s weepiness, the musical doesn’t do enough with its two stars. Jessica Vosk plays Cee Cee to the hilt, but she’s been directed to storm around like Midler, even though in interviews she has said she’s definitely not doing that.  

Then there’s Kelli Barrett, one of our most winning and talented musical actresses, who plays Bertie. After making a superb Sherrie in the Off-Broadway musical Rock of Ages, Barrett was bypassed when the show first went to Broadway and then was made into a movie. Since then, she’s been in duds like Getting the Band Back Together and Doctor Zhivago. But Barrett is a trooper, and she makes Bertie a far more complete character than she deserves to be. The performers who play Cee Cee and Bertie as young girls (Samantha Schwartz and Zeya Grace) and teenagers (Bailey Ryon and Emma Ogea) are solid, and the number where all three pairs of friends are together onstage—“Show the World Who You Are”—is the most appealing in the entire show. Otherwise, the co-direction of Lonny Price and Matt Cowart is as uninspired as the lazily minimal sets by James Noone.

Beaches could have been a jukebox musical, since the movie was crammed with period-specific pop songs; instead, Dart has written lyrics for a bunch of unmemorable songs to which vet Mike Stoller has supplied routine melodies. The elephant in the theater is the soaring ballad “Wind Beneath My Wings,” which became a Midler concert staple after it went to number one on the charts in 1989. But it’s used here in the most middling (or Midlering) way: after Bertie’s offstage death (poor Barrett doesn’t even get a good dying scene!), it’s the obvious 11 o’clock number—but since it seems so obviously tacked on, it doesn’t have the emotional weight as it should. 

Botching its biggest hit is an “oof” moment for a show with more than a few of them. On that score, Beaches ends up out of tune.

May '26 Digital Week I

4K/UHD Release of the Week 

“Wuthering Heights” 

(Warner Bros)

In Emerald Fennell’s latest pseudo-provocation—following Promising Young Woman and Saltburn—Emily Bronte’s classic novel has been transformed into an often limp romance that drags along for more than two hours: if Margot Robbie (as Cathy) and Jacob Elordi (as Heathcliff) remain watchable, it’s due more to their movie-star magnetism than Fennell’s labored direction and soggy writing. The kids playing the star-crossed couple as youths— Charlotte Mellington and Owen Cooper—are quite natural and might come across better in a less obvious context, but we’re stuck with Fennell’s muddy visuals, choppy editing, on-the-nose symbolism and a score that’s not so much played as smeared over every frame. The film does look eye-popping on UHD; extras include Fennell’s commentary and three brief featurettes (23 minutes total) that include interviews with Fennell, Robbie and Elordi.

In-Theater Reviews of the Week

The Last One for the Road 

(Music Box)

Italian director-cowriter Francesco Sossai’s scrappy comic drama tells the endearing if not poignant story of two drifting, alcoholic con artists who go on what they swear is a final bender, bringing with them a wide-eyed architectural student. Sossai makes up for what he lacks in originality with shrewd observations and a real sense of camaraderie that’s not forced. The acting trio of Filippo Scotti, Sergio Romano and Pierpaolo Capovilla is impeccable, the smaller parts are all well-taken, and Sossai shows a relaxed style that might bode well in the future. 

Our Land 

(Strand Releasing)

The 2009 murder of Indigenous protestor Javier Chocobar in Argentina and its complicated legal and moral aftermath is the center of this enraged documentary by Lucrecia Martel, who has been making provocative features for more than a quarter-century. Martel follows the tense courtroom drama—which plays out nearly a decade after the killing—but more importantly gives voice to the heretofore unheard Chuschagasta community, up against wanton corporate racism and destruction, all set in gorgeous landscapes stunningly rendered by Martel’s camera. 

Two Pianos 

(Kino Lorber)

Iconoclastic French director Arnaud Desplechin—whose My Sex Life and A Christmas Tale are remarkably cutting portraits of messy relationships—returns with another skewered tale of screw-ups: classical pianist Mathias returns to his hometown Lyon from Japan, where he’d been teaching, to perform with his mentor, Elena. Butting heads with her during rehearsals, he finds himself drawn back into the life of his ex, Claude, whose husband has just died—Mathias befriends her young son, who looks strongly like him. Desplechin revels in throwing these characters into highly emotional moments to navigate, and if he sometimes veers into melodramatic territory—Mathias feints when he first sees Claude upon his return—the observations are deeply felt, as are the performances by François Civil (Mathias), Charlotte Rampling (Elena) and Nadia Tereszkiewicz (Claude).

DVD Release of the Week 

The Ties That Bind Us 

(Distrib Films US)

In Carine Tardieu’s sensitive drama, the death of young mother Cécile in childbirth is the catalyst for several people—her shattered husband Alex, her confused young son David, their middle-aged (and childless) neighbor Sandra and young doctor Emillia—to deal with the tragedy in myriad ways, from disbelief and anger to healing and newfound love. Although she skirts sentimentality throughout, Tardieu weaves very human responses into an emotionally stirring portrait of several different forms of parenting. The superlative cast includes Pio Marmaï (Alex), Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (Sandra), César Botti (David) and Vimala Pons (Emillia). 

CD Release of the Week

Hidden Legacies—Weinberg & Korngold 

(Delos)

When Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg died in 1996, he was a relatively unknown composer; three decades later, his musical renaissance is in full swing, and this disc highlighting two of his significant works for cello and orchestra is an example. The Cello Concerto is one of Weinberg’s most eloquent large-scale pieces, while the Fantasia is less weighty but still enchanting. Rounding out the disc is the one-movement Cello Concerto of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who was more famous for his film scores but also more than capable of this short but enticing orchestral work. Cello soloist Kristina Reiko Cooper, who plays exquisitely, is given solid backup by the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra under conductor Constantine Orbelian.