February '26 Digital Week II

4K/UHD Releases of the Week 

All the President’s Men 

(Warner Bros)

Alan Pakula’s classic 1976 paranoia thriller is scarier than his earlier The Parallax View because it’s true! Pakula’s low-key documentary style perfectly fits this look at Woodward and Bernstein doggedly pursuing the Watergate story no one cared about, eventually toppling Nixon’s White House. Of course, since the current administration engages in Watergate-style corruption on a regular basis, this story now seems sadly quaint. There’s superb acting by Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Robards, Martin Balsam and Hal Holbrook down to the tiniest parts. The UHD transfer retains the grain that underscores the film’s effectiveness as a shadowy mystery. Extras include several vintage featurettes but, strangely, Redford’s commentary from an earlier Blu-ray edition has not been included. Who knows why? 

Ben-Hur 

(Warner Bros)

William Wyler’s costume epic swept the 1959 Oscars with 11 wins, more than any other film before or since. Despite stretches of clunky exposition and dull characterizations, there are many breathtaking moments, like that still heart-stopping chariot race. Charlton Heston won Best Actor for his solid, workmanlike performance, but it’s the color photography, sets, costumes, editing and Miklos Rosza score that make it memorable. Warner has given this jewel another deluxe treatment, with a splendid UHD transfer (smartly spread out over two discs) that features a Heston commentary and music-only track; a Blu-ray disc of extras includes two new featurettes along with a vintage full-length Heston documentary, making-of and screen tests. 

In-Theater Release of the Week 

By Design 

(Music Box)

In Amanda Kramer’s tedious one-note movie, Juliette Lewis plays Camille, a middle-aged woman with a couple of good friends, Lisa (Samantha Mathis) and Irene (Robin Tunney), whose obsession with a chair at a consignment shop has unintended consequences. It’s as bizarre and enervating as it sounds, and Kramer’s single-minded direction heavy-handedly underlines (and undermines) her metaphor of objectification. Lewis is game but overwhelmed, and the supporting cast—the always reliable Mathis, Tunney, Betty Buckley, Udo Kier and Melanie Griffith as narrator—can’t help making this any less wooden.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Lubitsch Musicals 

(Criterion/Eclipse)

Early in director Ernest Lubitsch’s Hollywood career, he made charming pre-code musicals that still (mostly) hold up, as this compilation of four entries, made between 1929 and 1932, starring luminaries as Jeannette MacDonald (all four), Maurice Chevalier (three) and even Claudette Colbert (who brightens The Smiling Lieutenant with her presence) shows. The other titles—The Love Parade, Monte Carlo and One Hour With You—have that distinctive Lubitsch touch, even if there’s occasional creakiness, especially in the overlong Parade (which was Lubitsch’s first sound picture). The films look decent for being nearly a century old. Too bad Eclipse sets still have no contextualizing extras. 

Heaven 

(Lightyear)

The untimely recent death of Diane Keaton at age 75 started an evaluation of her legendary screen career, from her indelible Woody Allen collaborations to her powerful performances in Reds and Shoot the Moon. But Keaton was also an idiosyncratic filmmaker, and her first feature—this weirdly beguiling 1987 documentary—shows off her singular style in ways that are equally affecting and annoying. The 75-minute Heaven rounds up interviews with people (including members of Keaton’s family) who discuss their ideas of an afterlife alongside dozens of carefully chosen clips from movies including Metropolis and A Matter of Life and Death. The film looks fine on Blu, although the old film clips still look ancient.

Song Sung Blue 

(Universal/Focus)

The true story of Mike and Claire, aka Thunder and Lightning, a Neil Diamond tribute duo who went through personal tragedies, was the subject of Greg Kos’ tidy 85-minute documentary in 2008. This new biopic, directed with a sledgehammer by Craig Brewer, lumbers on for 133 minutes with Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson as the couple—both are persuasive, but only Jackman transcends the shopworn material to be heartrendingly real. At least Brewer doesn’t condescend to these characters, but he piles on enough melodramatic sappiness and awful dialogue to sabotage his own film. Kudos also to Ella Anderson and King Princess, both excellent as Claire’s and Mike’s daughters from previous marriages. The film looks fine on Blu; extras are extended musical performances, featurettes and interviews.

Trifole 

(Cohen Media)

What starts as an absorbing and insightful character study of Igor (Umberto Orsini), a lone elderly man who lives in the Piedmont region of Italy and digs for truffles with Birba, his trusty little dog, and the slow maturation of his relationship with Dalia (Ydalie Turk), his visiting grown granddaughter, morphs into something completely different when Dalia takes Birba to find a fabled truffle—and what was a realistically melancholic drama becomes a bizarre fairy tale. Director/cowriter Daniele Fabbro and cowriter Turk—who makes a sublime Dalia—cannot satisfactorily control their tonal shift, but the first hour remains memorable. Brandon Lattman’s glistening photography shimmers on Blu; extras comprise a making-of featurette and interviews with Fabbro, Turk, Orsini and composer Alberto Mandarini.

CD Release of the Week

Ethel Smyth—Der Wald

(CPO)

I was predisposed against this one-act opera, written in 1902 by English composer Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), since her full-length opera The Wreckers was so middling when I saw it at Bard Summerscape in 2015. But maybe because Der Wald is more compact—barely over an hour—the intimacy of the drama and the Wagnerian and Brahmsian musical touches hit harder than in the other, more sprawling opera. Of course, this rendition helps too: a top cast of vocalists and the Wupperthal Symphony Orchestra and chorus under the baton of conductor Patrick Hahn provide a solid grounding for this terse, tense work. Fun fact: Der Wald was the first opera by a woman composer to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera, in 1903—it took more than a century for another woman to have an opera staged at the Met: L’amour de loin by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho.