April '25 Digital Week III

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Pink Floyd at Pompeii MCMLXXII

(Sony/IMAX)

This 1972 concert film of Pink Floyd performing at the ancient Roman amphitheater in Pompeii—with no audience present—has been restored and remixed, giving fans a superior visual and aural experience. Adrian Maben’s documentary is a true artefact of its time, with an hour’s worth of Pompeii footage supplemented by interviews with Gilmour, Mason, Waters and Wright as well as glimpses of them at Abbey Road recording Dark Side of the Moon. There’s a surfeit of crude, cliched visuals (split screens, front projection, superimposition, slow-motion) that haven’t aged well—but the film anticipates the MTV video era and remains an eye- (and ear-) opening document of Pink Floyd right before the group became rock royalty. 

Eric LaRue 

(Magnolia)

The devastating fallout of a school shooting is the subject of this earnest, often static but unsettling drama by actor Michael Shannon, making his feature directing debut; based on a play and script by Brett Neveu, Shannon’s film centers on Janice, mother of Eric, who fatally shot three of his classmates. Her interactions with her husband, pastor, victims’ mothers and her son—both in prison and as a young child in her memories—make up this occasionally piercing but also plodding character study. Unsurprisingly, Shannon’s cast is superb, led by Judy Greer (Janice)—also impressive are Alexander Sarsgaard (husband), Paul Sparks (pastor), Tracy Letts (preacher) and Annie Parisse and Kate Arrington (victims’ moms).

1-800-On-Her-Own 

(8 Above)

The perfect documentary subject—endlessly personable and confessional—is alternative music pioneer Ani DiFranco, the Buffalo-born musician turned entrepreneur (she has her own record label, Righteous Babe) who’s released dozens of albums in the past three decades. In Dana Flor’s intimate fly-on-the-wall portrait, DiFranco—now in her early 50s—must navigate how to remain relevant in a business very different from when she began and how to keep her artistic integrity while raising her two daughters. The film’s title refers to the toll-free phone number for her Buffalo office in the early days; it also describes the fierce independence that’s marked DiFranco’s career.

The President’s Wife 

(Cohen Media)

In director-cowriter Léa Domenach’s feature debut, Catherine Deneuve is a delight as Bernadette Chirac, France’s First Lady from 1995-2007; her deadpan delivery borders on bemusement as Bernadette navigates the tricky journey from being a loyal president’s wife to becoming a cultural icon in her own right. Although Deneuve unsurprisingly wears Karl Lagerfeld’s clothes perfectly—and director Domenach shows cleverness in her tongue-in-cheek use of a church choir—but even superstar Deneuve’s glamour can’t make this light satire more than an amusingly slight concoction.

The Shrouds 

(Sideshow/Janus)

David Cronenberg’s latest is an inert meditation on grief (his wife Carolyn Zeifman died in 2017) that plays like a lumpen parody of a Cronenberg film, with howlers in the dialogue, embarrassingly stiff acting by Vincent Cassel as the director’s stand-in, and a bunch of plot and thematic threads that pile up but go nowehere. Even a bizarrely entertaining turn by Guy Pearce and appearances by the appealing Diane Kruger (in two roles) and the always welcome Sandrine Holt (in a lazily-written part) can’t drum up much interest. Despite Cronenberg’s attempt at dealing with the finality of death in his singular way, his film has the slick look of a feature-length Tesla commercial (Cassel drives a white Tesla throughout), which is the lasting memory of this farrago.

The Ugly Stepsister 

(IFC Films)

If unblinking body horror is your thing, then this twisted take on Cinderella could fill the bill—writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt follows a desperate young woman who has always been second fiddle to her beautiful stepsister and how she takes the ultimate desperate measures to ensure that (of course) the prince’s glass slipper fits her foot—even though her mother already “fixed” her nose, teeth and eyelashes to no avail. Done with a minimum of humor and maximum of nastiness, it’s skillfully, even stylishly, made and enacted with commitment by its cast—too bad the final shot fails at being simultaneously dark and darkly humorous. 

Blu-ray Release of the Week 

In Custody/The Proprietor 

(Cohen Film Collection)

Ismail Merchant (who died in 2005 at age 68) was the producer of his professional and personal partner James Ivory’s films, including the award-winning A Room With a View and Howards End. But Merchant also directed his own features, including this pair of very different character studies. While In Custody is rather stuffy and clunky as it explores the clash between a skeptical interviewer and a famous Urdu poet in India, The Proprietor showcases a wonderful Jeanne Moreau as a French Holocaust survivor who leaves Manhattan to return to her Parisian childhood home—along with its attendant ghosts. Both films have good hi-def transfers; extras include interviews with Ivory and Merchant; a commentary on The Proprietor; and Merchant’s 1974 short film, Mahatma and the Mad Boy.

CD Releases of the Week

Tamara Stefanovich—Organized Delirium

Pierre Boulez—Live pour Quatuor

(Pentatone)

Pierre Boulez (1925-2016)—theorist, conductor, activist—was a formidable composer who never held to a rigid orthodoxy as he became one of the most uncompromising modernist composers of the 20th century. These two discs provide a window into his chamber music—his astonishingly complex Piano Sonata No. 2 and the equally challenging Livre pour quatuor (Book for Quartet). 

Boulez was notorious for not “finishing” his pieces—he would tinker over the course of years, even decades. That wasn’t the case with the sonata, which Tamara Stefanovich (who collaborated with Boulez) plays with passion and conviction on her new CD—along with tackling other important 20th century sonatas by Hans Eisler, Bela Bartok and Dmitri Shostakovich. 

Livre pour quatuor is another story; the bulk was written in 1948-49, but Boulez rewrote sections and never completed the fourth movement. The Diotima Quartet—whose members worked with Boulez on his final revisions before he died—plays this cerebral hour-long work with clarity and muscle, even premiering the reconstructed fourth movement on this recording. 

April '25 Digital Week II

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

One to One—John & Yoko 

(Magnolia Pictures)

John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1972 One to One benefit concert at Madison Square Garden culminated months of left-wing activism after they moved to NYC, as per Kevin Macdonald’s both enlightening and frustrating documentary (showing in IMAX), which alternates restored video and audio from Lennon’s final full live concert performance with archival footage from that era. Macdonald uses vintage clips to provide political and cultural context for the couple’s wide-ranging activism, although the many references to notable names and events overstuff this 100-minute film. As for the music, Macdonald takes John and Yoko’s powerful performances and adds (you guessed it) archival video to comment on—at times forcefully and at others in a strained manner—what was going on. John’s propulsive “Instant Karma” features scenes of destruction in Vietnam and the U.S., while his raucous heroin-habit tune “Cold Turkey” includes glimpses of the 1972 Republican Convention. Even the finale, “Give Peace a Chance,” showcasing a joyful Stevie Wonder scat-singing over the familiar chorus, is only excerpted—maybe upcoming streaming and Blu-ray releases will include all the full performances as important additions to Beatles history.

Coastal 

(Trafalgar Releasing)

Actress Daryl Hannah followed husband Neil Young around on his 2023 solo tour of the West Coast, and the resulting B&W documentary is the last word in self-indulgence: watching Neil chat up his bus driver gets old quickly—although driver Jerry Don Borden is interesting enough to deserve more screen time—and the dullness of being on the road is conveyed all too well. Luckily, Hannah smartly shoots most of the concert footage up-close—the intimacy suits Young’s performance, which consists of him, his acoustic guitar, harmonica and an old grand piano. But don’t expect hits: aside from “Mister Soul” and “Comes a Time,” casual fans won’t know songs like the recent “Love Earth,” which gets a half-hearted call-and-response from the audience.

Julie Keeps Quiet 

(Film Movement Plus)

Director-cowriter Leonardo Van Dijl’s engrossing exploration of an elite teenager at a Belgian tennis academy and how she deals with—or not—the dysfunctional, woefully unbalanced power dynamics with her coach is grounded by the astoundingly subtle performance by Tessa Van den Broeck as Julie. Van Dijl and Van Den Broeck (who’s a tennis player, not an actress) team up for a superbly detailed study of the painful sounds of silence—and how the “thwack” of a racket hitting a ball has metaphorical reverberations that can be heard far from the court.

Sacramento 

(Vertical)

Coming so soon on the heels of A Real Pain, with Jesse Eisenberg and Oscar winner Keiran Culkin as estranged cousins on a road trip to explore their Polish ancestry is this diffuse and blurry buddy flick about estranged childhood friends who forego their own adult responsibilities by taking a car ride from Los Angeles to central California. The problem is that neither character is individualized enough for us to care about their journey, their friendship or the people they meet along the way. Michael Cera has played this kind of jittery character many times already, while writer-director-costar Michael Angarano’s manipulative liar is not as witty or charming as he thinks; and their leading ladies—Kristin Stewart, Maya Erskine (Angarano’s real-life wife), AJ Mendez and Iman Karram—are given short shrift, when any of them could be the center of a less one-dimensional character study.

Streaming Releases of the Week 

Count Me In 

(Level 33)

This 2020 documentary celebrating the art of drumming hears from an impressive cross-section of rock and pop drummers like the Police’s Stewart Copeland, Deep Purple’s Ian Paice and Queen’s Roger Taylor to Steven Perkins (Jane’s Addiction), Cindy Blackman (Santana) and Samantha Maloney (Hole). Director Mark Lo’s fleet, short film is informative and surprising in equal measure, with appropriate stops for the great drummer forerunners like Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich to the earliest rock masters (Ringo, Charlie Watts, Keith Moon, Ginger Baker) to the ultimate hard-rock drummer, John Bonham. Clips of them performing are always welcome, while the thoughts of some interviewees, particularly Copeland, Perkins and Maloney, come across strongly. Of course, things are missed—no mention of Phil Collins’ gated drum sound that dominated the ‘80s or any prog drummers, notably Rush’s Neil Peart—but then it would have been much longer. And RIP to Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins and Blondie’s Clem Burke, both included here.

Her Way 

(Film Movement Plus)

In what may be the quintessential French movie, Laure Calamy plays a prostitute desperate to get her ne’er-do-well teenage son into a famous cooking school—so she debases herself by working for a tough pimp at a sleazy German nightclub while dealing with her son’s laziness and later ungratefulness. Director-writer Cécile Ducrocq doesn’t so much wallow in the sexual underground as record it passively, while Calamy—always a magnetic presence—is reduced to striking poses that alternate between sexy and tired. But there’s a nagging question: however well-intentioned, should we care about a mother who needs to raise 50,000 Euros so her son can go to a posh school he’ll probably flunk out of anyway?

4K/UHD Release of the Week 

Antiviral 

(Severin Films)

Writer-director Brandon Cronenberg is a chip off the old block with his 2012 debut film, as unpleasant and sour as advertised: it follows a sales rep for a clinic that harvests celebrities’ infections to inject into their most maniacal fans. Although his film is cleverly constructed, Cronenberg has an eye based on other clinical directors like his dad to Kubrick, and there’s no one onscreen worth getting involved with. The visuals look impressively steely in UHD; extras—on a separate Blu-ray disc that also includes the film—comprise Cronenberg and director of photography Karim Hussain’s commentary; Cronenberg’s short, Broken Tulips; interviews; featurettes; and deleted scenes with optional commentary.

CD Release of the Week

Shostakovich—Suite on Verses of Michelangelo/October 

(Alpha Classics)

Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75) originally wrote his Suite on Verses of Michelangelo—a dramatic setting of 11 poems of the great Italian artist translated into Russian—for baritone and piano, but his gripping orchestrated version, one of the composer’s final works, is far more celebrated; Shostakovich himself reportedly told his son he considered it his 16th (and final) symphony. On this recording, Matthias Goerne’s stentorian baritone also nails the intimate passages Shostakovich has written into the score, as does the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, which delivers powerfully under conductor Mikko Franck, who also leads his instrumental forces in an equally compelling reading of the symphonic poem October.