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.

April '26 Digital Week II

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Hamlet 

(Vertical Releasing) 

Updating Shakespeare has become such a mania that it’s rare to find an adaptation that takes the text at face value—unfortunately, director Aneil Karia and writer Michael Lesslie’s modern take, set among London’s South Asian upper-crust, is not that adaptation. If English colonial history of subjugation over South Asia is a subtext, it has little to say about it, while eye-rollingly literal tropes like our hero (a game Riz Ahmed) speeding on a highway in his sports car while contemplating the suicidal “To be or not to be” are misguided. Morfydd Clark makes a perfectly pitiable Ophelia, but her sincere performance might have had greater resonance in a better film. 

Fiume o morte! 

(Icarus Films)

In this endlessly fascinating history lesson, Igor Bezinović’s documentary about Italian fascist writer Gabriele D’Annunzio’s year-long occupation (1919 to 1920) of what is now the Croatian city of Rijeka. Actually, the irony is that most of those who live there today barely know anything about D’Annunzio and what ideas and actions wrought. So Bezinović tells the whole cautionary tale through their eyes—locals reenact the takeover and its aftermath with a combination of bemusement and good humor, which is what Bezinović has said he was looking to do, present history in an entertaining but not dumbed-down way.

Steal This Story, Please! 

(Elsewhere Films)

Journalist Amy Goodman has been fighting the good fight for decades as founder and main face of Democracy Now, one of the few self-sustaining news organizations grappling with tough issues here and abroad. Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s rage-inducing documentary portrait shows that Goodman’s doggedness and fairness are being increasingly marginalized by a hostile media environment. Several well-chosen clips include one that shows Goodman’s legendary ability to remain independent and hold leaders’ feet to the fire: then-President Clinton is so upset by her tough questions that he stays on the phone talking to her but his team blames her for ambushing him. Of course, the Trump administration’s assault on all norms sweeps away all who came before, but Goodman will continue to fight.

Blu-ray Release of the Week

Macbeth 

(Dynamic)

Giuseppe Verdi’s first adaptation of a Shakespeare play came in the middle of his career, and although it’s a tautly told operatic transposition, it’s nowhere near the later masterpieces Otello and Falstaff. Pierre Audi’s absorbing production, from Parma, Italy’s Verdi Festival in 2024, uses the 1865 French version that’s more spectacular and includes ballet music that are among the opera’s highlights. Ernesto Petti is a fine Macbeth but Lidia Fridman steals the show as Lady Macbeth—hers is the juicier role, of course, but Fridman is gripping every time she appears onstage. Roberto Abbado persuasively conducts the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini and Parma Teatro Regio Chorus; hi-def video and audio are well-done. 

DVD Release of the Week 

The Divine Sarah Bernhardt 

(Icarus Films)

The famous French dramatic actress Sarah Bernhardt was a larger-than-life character, and Guillaume Nicloux’s frisky biopic has an actress equal to the task: Sandrine Kiberlain, who hams it up mightily but—crucially—always in character, so her Sarah is not simply a blustering diva but a woman who loved the spotlight even when it came to her own offstage relationships (which were legion). There are many entertaining gossipy moments like her love affair with actor Lucien Guitry and the appearance of his son Sacha, who would later become a great theater and film director in own right. Nicloux also gets credit for well-chosen music of the era by the likes of Chopin, Franck, Ravel and Debussy, which appropriately underscore Kiberlain’s boisterous scenery-chewing.

March '26 Digital Week IV

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Project Hail Mary 

(Amazon MGM)

Based on the novel by Andy Weir—whose first bestseller, The Martian, was turned into a pretty good 2015 Ridley Scott movie with Matt Damon as a lonely man trying to survive in a brand new world—this saga about Ryland Grace, a brilliant science teacher finding himself the lone astronaut on a spaceship heading for a distant star and trying to survive in a brand new world (of course) shows that lightning does not always strike twice. Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (and writer Drew Goddard) take Weir’s goofy premise way too seriously, and their 156-minute behemoth sags throughout—most damagingly in the middle hour, when too many flashbacks show how Grace got here and his cutesily budding friendship with an alien he names Rocky. It’s certainly watchable, thanks mainly to Ryan Gosling’s effortless star power and awesome-looking effects, but it drips with sappiness along with the most strangely literal use of a Beatles song ever on the soundtrack.

Two Prosecutors 

(Janus Films)

Adapting an obscure novella by Soviet author Georgy Demidov that’s set during the Stalinist purges, Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa vividly dramatizes the visit of young prosecutor Kornyev to a Soviet prison where he talks with a jailed elderly Bolshevik, Stepniak—after witnessing evidence of torture, the idealistic Kornyev goes to Moscow as a whistleblower, but he’s pleading to the wrong man: Andrey Vyshinsky, the mastermind of the great purge. Loznitsa has made the slowburn to end all slowburns, demonstrating how the banality of bureaucracy hides the evil lethality underneath; but if the denouement is too patly predictable, the journey to arrive there is quietly, spellbindingly unnerving.

Streaming Releases of the Week 

Blue 

(Breaking Glass Pictures)

When her shady boyfriend owes a lot of money to even shadier characters, bright college student Luce decides that the only way she can help him financially (after her strict father tells her no) is to become a cam girl for the night, so with help from Vittoria—already making a healthy amount of cash with her online exploits—Luce transforms herself into a sexy character named Blue, which triggers a lot of unintended consequences. Eleonora Puglia writes and directs in a lively manner, which helps this sordid, sometimes plodding morality tale go down easier than it should. Alexia Cozzi, a winning actress I’ve not seen before, makes the clueless Luce sympathetic. Italian porn legend Rocco Siffredi, of all people, decently plays Luce’s dad.

Mr. Nobody Against Putin 

(Kino Lorber)

This intensely personal film, which won the best documentary Oscar this month, introduces Pavel Talankin, a mild-mannered teacher at a Russian school who is affronted when Putin invades Ukraine and an edict comes down that students must be indoctrinated into being patriotic. Co-directed by Talankin and David Borenstein, Mr. Nobody is the ultimate David vs. Goliath story, as Talankin records the absurdities of forced political allegiance with bemusement, anger and humor, although it must be said that making the invasion of Ukraine the red line to finally oppose Putin’s encroaching totalitarianism feels less than authentic. But, with similar political situations occurring elsewhere, that may be the point. And Pavel’s bravery cannot be dismissed: he left Russia in 2024 with his film footage on seven hard drives, and now lives somewhere in Europe.

4K/UHD Release of the Week 

The Key 

(Cult Epics)

In Italian erotic master Tinto Brass’ 1983 comedy, superstar Stefania Sandrelli plays Teresa, whose impotent older husband nearly pushes her into an affair with their son-in-law Laszlo. This is typically effervescent Brass filmmaking (with the usual softcore sex scenes and clinical crotch shots) that has a bona fide movie legend at its center, often in the altogether. As always, Brass is closely attuned to female sexuality and has a willing participant in Sandrelli, who has never been more sexually charged. The UHD transfer looks immaculate; extras are an audio commentary and (on the accompanying Blu-ray disc) interview with actor Franco Branciaroli, who reminisces about his intimate scenes with Sandrelli; a vintage Brass interview; featurettes on the Venetian locales and Ennio Morricone’s score; and an isolated Morricone audio track. 

Blu-ray Release of the Week

Wagner—Der Ring des Nibelungen 

(C Major)

Richard Wagner’s classic operatic tetralogy about gods, dwarves, nymphs and humans predates Tolkien’s Middle Earth by decades—the first opera, Das Rheingold, premiered in 1869 and the last, Götterdämmerung, first appeared in 1876—but it remains thrilling and even relevant, as directors and opera houses find new ways to stage this mammoth masterpiece. In Dmitri Tcherniakov’s 2022 Berlin State Opera production, the disharmonious setting is an antiseptically modern office building that removes the grandeur from Wagner’s meticulously worked-out conflicts among gods and humans. But there’s first-rate music making—by the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin conducted by Christian Thielemann—and splendid performances by a cast led by Michael Volle’s supreme Wotan; Rolando Villazón’s mischievous Loge; and Anja Kampe’s powerhouse Brünnhilde. Hi-def image and sound are first-rate; disappointingly, there are no extras.

CD Release of the Week 

Youth—Krása Quartet 

(Animal Music)

Early works by a trio of composers whose artistry and actual lives were forever changed by the Nazi regime in Germany make up this excellent new disc by the enterprising Krása Quartet, which unsurprisingly begins with a couple of works by its namesake, the Czech composer Hans Krása (1899-1944), who was murdered at Auschwitz. His String Quartet No. 2 (1921) is a delight, while the scarcely more somber Theme and Variations for String Quartet (1936) was premiered in the Terezin concentration camp during WWII. Karel Ančerl (1908-73) was a notable conductor, but he penned a pair of short fugues while a student. The last work is by Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942), who died of tuberculosis after being deported and imprisoned. His Divertimento for String Quartet (1914) is quite an achievement, even if it’s somewhat more conventional than his more musically progressive later works. The members of the Krása Quartet perform impressively throughout.

February '26 Digital Week I

In-Theater Releases of the Week

Send Help 

(20th Century Studios)

In Sam Raimi’s slickly effective thriller, Rachel McAdams sinks her teeth into one of her juiciest roles yet as Linda, a frumpy tech-firm genius bypassed for a promotion who ends up on a deserted island with her boss after a plane crash and who turns the tables on him with her unknown survival skills. Raimi shows he hasn’t lost his directorial chops, especially in the terrifying but tongue-in-cheek crash sequence and the teasing way he builds to a violent and ironic conclusion. The director has a superb foil in McAdams, whose convincing physical performance also drips with dark  humor. 

The President’s Cake 

(Sony Classics)

In 1990s Iraq, poor 9-year-old Lamia is chosen to make a cake for President Saddam’s birthday—she goes off to find ingredients with her grandmother and soon find herself befriended by an equally adventurous boy who becomes her partner in (literal) crime as they brush up against several (mostly) unsavory characters. Director Hasan Hadi’s fleet-footed drama shows a complex society that most think of oppressively monolithic, but even though it skirts melodrama in our young heroine’s journey, the remarkable performance of Baneen Ahmed Nayyef as Lamia always keeps it humorously and humanely grounded.

Streaming Releases of the Week 

Acts of Love 

(Breaking Glass Pictures)

The complicated relationship of Hanna, a woman living in a cult, and Jakob, her younger brother who visits her for the first time in years, is the focus of Jeppe Rønde’s tense but self-consciously provocative character study, in which the vices and abuses of their childhoods return and their incestuous tendencies become too much even for a cult that revels in reliving past traumas. Despite the committed performances of Jonas Holst Schmidt as Jakob and especially Cecilie Lassen, who brings a fiery aliveness to the troubled Hanna, Rønde’s film only skims the depths of their abusive connection, ending with the predictable result of their physical intimacy.

Misdirection 

(Cineverse)

Poor Olga Kurylenko has been stuck in B movies for awhile, including this by-the-numbers entry, and it shows in her lackluster performance as Sara, one half of a couple trying to pay down a massive mob debt by executing a string of heists, only to meet their match in their latest victim, David (Frank Grillo), a defense attorney who causes a rupture between the couple. Director Kevin Lewis tries desperately to elevate what’s simply a mechanical cat-and-mouse game, but since it plays out almost exclusively in David’s bedroom, it remains static, and Grillo, Kurylenko and Oliver Trevena (as Jason, Sara’s other half) are unable to help.

Blu-ray Release of the Week 

Gounod—Faust 

(C Major)

French composer Charles Gounod, best known for his opera Roméo et Juliette, has made his adaptation of Goethe’s famous Faust more romantically melodic but less memorable than Ferruccio Busoni’s take on the same subject, Doktor Faust. Still, Gounod’s version is easier to stage, as director Àlex Ollé’s sparkling 2018 production at Madrid’s Teatro Real demonstrates. The cast comprises a bunch of persuasive singers and actors, led by Pcaiotr Beczala (Faust), Luca Pisaroni (Méphistophélès) and Marina Rebeka (Marguerite), while the orchestra and chorus—conducted by Dan Ettinger—provide trenchant musical accompaniment. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.

CD Release of the Week

Esther Yoo—Love Symposium 

(Deutsche Grammophon)

American violinist Esther Yoo’s creatively curated recital disc is, as she calls it, “a reflection of love in all its guises.” To that end, she has taken violin works that run the gamut from the familiar to the relatively obscure and infused them with the passion and emotion they require; the yearning violin line of Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending has never sounded so heartbreaking. The centerpiece is Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade, a violin concerto in all but name and one of Bernstein’s most personal works—Yoo makes it her own with her beautifully precise playing. Gustav Mahler’s heartfelt Adagietto from his fifth symphony and short pieces by Edward Elgar and the duo of Pasek and Paul (the latter a song from the film The Greatest Showman) round out this unusual but intensely personal journey, deftly accompanied by conductor Long Yu and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

October '25 Digital Week I

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Are We Good? 

(Utopia)

Comedian and podcaster Marc Maron finds most of his material from his own life, however personal and tragic, and Steven Feinartz’s fly-on-the-wall documentary follows Maron during the COVID lockdown and tentative steps back onstage. Informed by the biggest tragedy of his life, the sudden and unexpected death of his partner, director Lynn Shelton, at age 54 of leukemia in May 2020, Maron is shown at his most vulnerable—that is, if he can be even more vulnerable than he is onstage. This is a remarkably candid film about a remarkably candid man.

Bone Lake 

(Bleecker Street)

What begins as an unoriginal but enticing roundelay of two couples staying at a secluded B&B they apparently reserved at the same time soon devolves into a risible thriller comprising sex, jealousy, betrayal and survival after it’s revealed one couple is definitely not whom they seem. Director Mercedes Bryce Morgan and writer Joshua Friedlander rely too much on cleverness, but right from the opening—the grisly killing of two nude people in the woods in what turns out to be a visualization of a character’s novel—they pile on lazy horror-flick clichés, which hampers the otherwise able acting by Maddie Hasson, Alex Roe, Andra Nechita and Marco Pigossi.  

The Ice Tower 

(Yellow Veil Pictures)

Not much happens in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s visually luminous but dramatically opaque drama about the unusual relationship between famous actress Cristina (the enchantingly chilly Marion Cotillard) and teenage orphan Jeanne (the excellent Clara Pacini) after they meet on the set of a new adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen. As in her earlier films, Hadžihalilović psychoanalyzes her characters in symbolic surroundings; Jonathan Ricquebourg’s exquisite photography, Nassim Gordji Tehrani’s razor-sharp editing and Julia Irribarria’s alluring production design fill in the blanks in Hadžihalilović and Geoff Cox’s script. Admittedly, the final momentous shots say more in their brevity and silence than the previous 110 minutes.

Jacob’s Ladder 

(Rialto Pictures)

The combination of Bruce Joel Rubin’s script laden with Christian symbolism and director Adrian Lyne’s visuals that toggle between tantalizing and turgid makes this often soggy 1990 drama about a Vietnam vet whose postwar existence in New York City may or may not be real creepily effective. The special effects have an old-school feel, Maurice Jarre’s score worms its way into your unconscious, Tim Robbins is a properly intense hero, Elizabeth Pena (who sadly died in 2014 of alcoholism at age 55) is perfectly cast as his uncomprehending girlfriend, and there’s a solid (and surprisingly uncredited) appearance by a pre-Home Alone Macaulay Culkin as Robbins’ son. It’s basically a 105-minute Twilight Zone episode with an unsurprising but potent twist.

Ju Dou 

(Film Movement Classics)

This 1990 collaboration between Chinese master Zhang Yimou (who codirected with Yang Fengliang) and his then-muse Gong Li is an erotic, authentically grimy adaptation of a Liu Heng novel that nods to The Postman Always Rings Twice in its story of a young wife, saddled with an old and impotent husband, whose affair with one of their farm workers has moral and mortal repercussions. Shot in the square Academy ratio that provides an ideally claustrophobic atmosphere, this blunt morality tale might be too on the nose in its color symbolism, but the magnificent presence of Gong Li as the title character is prime compensation. 

The Librarians 

(8 Above)

Kim A. Snyder’s timely exposé shows how fascist organizations like Moms for Liberty are destroying our country from within: under the guise of protecting kids, these groups—funded by dark right-wing money—are taking over school boards and helping ban books about subjects they don’t like, like LGBTQ+ and slavery, from school library shelves. If there weren’t so many heroic librarians fighting back—including several who appear on camera, a couple of them anonymously—however pyrrhic some victories are, then this battle would have already been lost. But it might be too late, since Trump 2 is becoming even worse than Trump 1. 

Streaming Release of the Week 

Stella—A Life 

(Film Movement)

Stella Goldschlag’s story is sobering: a German Jew who first used forged documents to help her family escape Nazi prosecution, she soon discovered survival depended on turning in Jews herself to keep the Nazis at bay. This sordid tale, dramatically and morally complicated, needs a subtle hand to explore its terrible but all too human consequences. Yet director-cowriter Kilian Riedhof and cowriters Marc Blöbaum and Jan Braren only skim the surface of this rich ore; there’s a complexity and richness that’s missing, which makes the admittedly striking final image less powerful that it should be. Paula Beer’s tremendously nuanced portrayal of Stella—she is impossible to look away from—helps ground the drama in her flawed but fascinating humanity.  

Blu-ray Release of the Week

Lohengrin 

(C Major)

Though German composer Richard Wagner (1813-83) was best known for his Ring cycle, this earlier opera is among his finest—it follows Lohengrin, a mysterious knight, who defends Elsa when she’s under suspicion for her brother’s death in a town rent by political upheaval and hostility. In this 2024 Vienna State Opera staging by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, Elsa is not the innocent love interest Wagner created her as. But even a risible ending doesn’t ruin a magisterial music drama, with supple orchestra and choral work under Christian Thielemann’s baton and accomplished lead performances by British tenor David Butt Philip (Lohengrin), Swedish soprano Malin Byström (Elsa), German baritone Martin Gantner (villain Telramund) and Italian soprano Anja Kempe (Telramund’s wife Ortrud). There’s topnotch hi-def video and audio.

CD Release of the Week 

Bach Cello Suites—Anastasia Kobekina 

(Sony Classical)

The cover of Anastasia Kobekina’s superb new disc of the complete Bach unaccompanied cello suites—whose towering influence has only grown in the three centuries since they’ve been written—sums up how she performs these works: she sits holding a camera as if about to take a selfie. That’s how she approaches the six suites, as a self-portrait, since playing them tells as much about the performer as about the master who created them. And it tells us that the 31-year-old Russian cellist is the perfect artist to both draw out the mysteries at the heart of these suites as well as leave their ultimate interpretations to the listener.

September '25 Digital Week III

4K/UHD Releases of the Week 

Superman 

(Warner Bros)

James Gunn has rebooted the man of steel for a new generation, but it’s pretty much the same old, with many CGI sequences that become enervating of Superman fighting various foes (even a prehistoric monster of sorts) while trying to regain his rep—he’s considered a traitor to America since he’s (of course) an illegal alien—thanks to a devious Lex Luthor (an hilariously hammy Nicholas Hoult). It’s choppy and diffuse as if Gunn makes it up as he goes along, climaxing with an anticlimax. David Corenswet is an OK if cardboard Superman/Clark Kent, while Rachel Brosnahan is a fiery Lois Lane—but even the appearance of superdog Krypto is more saccharine than saucy. The film looks great in UHD; extras are an hour-long making-of and other featurettes.

The Last of Us—Complete 2nd Season 

(Warner Bros)

The first HBO series that’s based on a video game, this often morbid dystopian thriller is filled with too-familiar visuals of a post-pandemic civilization destroyed by a too-familiar infection that begat hordes of too-familiar zombie-like victims. If the directing often leans into survivalist drama clichés, the often clever writing and solid performances by the likes of Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, Gabriel Luna and Isabella Merced provide the sprinkling of humanity the show thrives on. There’s an excellent UHD transfer; extras comprise making-of featurettes, interviews and on-set footage.

M3GAN 2.0 

(Universal)

Did we need a sequel to M3GAN, the forgettable evil AI doll flick from a few years ago? Writer-director Gerard Johnstone thinks so—just turn her from a program that went rogue to an ally of sorts of creator Gemma (a game Alison Williams) and teenage niece Katie (an enjoyable Violet McGraw), as reprogramming sets her up to take down a new, far more malevolent program called AMELIA. It’s pretty ridiculous and unnecessarily convoluted—its two hours could be shorn of 20 minutes—but it is kind of fun watching M3GAN become good, kind of. It all looks great on UHD; extras comprise making-of featurettes and interviews.

In-Theater Releases of the Week

Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round 

(Ruby Pictures Inc.)

A little-known but transformative protest at the dawn of the civil rights movement is chronicled in Ilana Trachtman’s documentary, triggered by five Black students from Howard University who decide to ride the carousel at a segregated Maryland amusement park, Glen Echo, in 1960. Trachtman (who uses a 1942 Langston Hughes poem for her evocative title) insightfully explores how local and college-student Blacks along with a group of progressive Jews from a nearby neighborhood made common cause to pressure authorities into desegregating the park. Along with illuminating interviews with those who took part and much archival footage, Trachtman also uses voiceovers from Mandy Patinkin, Bob Balaban and Jeffrey Wright on the soundtrack. 

Andrea Bocelli—Because I Believe 

(Trafalgar Releasing)

This endearing 105-minute portrait by director is not exactly a hagiography, even though it shows beloved Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli as someone just short of an angel on earth—of course, with a heavenly singing voice. It’s also a thoughtful look at a man who followed his dream and his talent assiduously after a horrible accident robbed him of his sight at age 12. There are intimate glimpses of Bocelli at home, backstage and onstage with his wife, young daughter (who also sings), family and horses as well as wonderful musical interludes even nonfans might welcome.

Another End 

(Vertigo Releasing)

Director-cowriter Piero Messina’s dour, self-serious exploration of grief about a company named Aeternum that lets survivors say goodbye to their dead loved ones in a way that keeps their spirits “alive” is expertly done but bafflingly distant. Sal, who’s mourning his lover Zoe’s death in a car crash, is resisting attempts by his sister Ebe (who works at Aeternum) to submit to this last interaction with the love of his life. Even such excellent actors as Gael García Bernal (Sal) and the luminous Bérénice Bejo (Ebe) can do little with a soppy script Messina and three others concocted.

My Sunshine 

(Film Movement)

In this gentle character study, mediocre young hockey player Takuya notices figure skaters at the rink and is soon paired with Sakura, a competitive skater, by her sympathetic but competitive coach Arakawa, and their relationship on and off the ice deepens. Director-writer Hiroshi Okuyama’s drama has a surfeit of acute observation, subtle humor and sentiment that doesn’t fall into sticky sappiness—even Debussy’s overplayed Clair de Lune hits the right notes—and the two leads, Keitatsu Koshiyama (Takuya) and Kiara Nakanishi (Sakura), give lovely portrayals. 

Queen of Manhattan 

(Level 33 Entertainment)

Surprisingly, ‘70s porn star Vanessa Del Rio hasn’t gotten the biopic treatment until now—maybe because it’s a difficult role for an actress to pull off, as the voluptuous, sassy and seductive New Yorker needs to be believable or it falls apart. Luckily for director-writer Thomas Mignone, Vivian Lamolli is sexy, funny, and totally persuasive—but the problem is she must carry an otherwise routine biopic, even with the vibe of the grimy ’70s sex-film industry present and decent support from Drea de Matteo, Taryn Manning and Elizabeth Rodriguez as the women in Del Rio’s life.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

Dakota 

(Cult Epics)

The life of a Dutch pilot who flies a small plane filled with contraband in the Caribbean islands is dramatized in this intriguing 1974 film by Dutch director Wim Verstappen. There’s a lot of local color alongside humorous and tense moments in an effective if bumpy exploration of a man and his plane, centered by a nicely-shaded performance from Kees Brusse. The film’s gritty look, by cinematographers Jan de Bont and Theo van de Sande, is retained on Blu-ray; extras include a commentary and vintage featurettes.

Prokofiev—The Gambler 

(Opus Arte)

Sergei Prokofiev’s opera, based on Dostoyevsky’s novella, makes for riveting drama—filled as it is with the composer’s blistering orchestral barrage and memorable melodies—and its hard musical and histrionic edge matches the obsessives at the center of its story. Too bad that Peter Sellars’ 2024 Salzburg production lacks definition, stranding a formidable cast led by Asmik Grigorian as Polina and Sean Panikkar as Alexey as well as the propulsive musicmaking of the Vienna Philharmonic and Choir under Timur Zangiev’s baton. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio. 

CD Release of the Week 

Boris Papandopulo—Hrvatska Misa (Croatian Mass) 

(BR Klassik)

Croatian composer Boris Papandopulo (1906-91) wrote this mass, which premiered in 1942, as a sacred work that nodded to the style of historical Croatian music as an a capella piece suitable for amateurs (and was actually composed for the Croatian Choral Society Kolo, which he led twice from the 1920s to the 40s). With the chorus and soloists singing a Croatian translation of the Roman Catholic mass, it’s a full-throated vocal work that—especially in this superlative recording by the Bavarian Radio Chorus and a quartet of Croatian soloists, all under the direction of conductor Ivan Repušić and chorus master Tomislav Fačini—is often hair-raisingly thrilling in its simplicity and power.

June '25 Digital Week I

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Ghost Trail 

(Music Box Films)

French writer-director Jonathan Millet makes his feature debut with this tense, intelligent slow-burn thriller about a Syrian refugee in France who one day notices a man who looks like the person who tortured him in the infamous Sednaya Prison in Damascus. Hamid (a remarkable portrayal by Adam Messa) works as a construction worker in Strasbourg, but once he sees his adversary, he is obsessed with plans for revenge—how that plays out, and how it affects his life and those around him, is dramatized with finesse by Millet, who demonstrates his sympathy for migrants and others marginalized by society without becoming strident.

Ron Delsener Presents 

(Abramorama)

Anyone who went to rock concerts in the New York City area since the late ’60s has probably noticed “Ron Delsener Presents” on the ticket—and this entertaining documentary, directed by Sting’s son Jake Sumner follows Delsener’s storied career as a concert promoter, from his early days working on the Beatles’ 1964 appearance in Forest Hills, through concerts at the Fillmore and the Palladium until today: he was 85 and still going strong when this was filmed a few years ago, attending shows and keeping up with whatever he could. Sumner not only speaks with Delsener, his wife and children—and shows copious archival footage from many iconic concerts—but also colleagues and an array of stars who touchingly remember his guiding hand, from Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel to Patti Smith and Paul Simon.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

Pink Floyd at Pompeii MCMLXXII 

(Sony Music)

Pink Floyd’s 1972 performance at the ancient Roman amphitheater in Pompeii (sans audience) is folded into Adrian Maben’s documentary that’s an artifact of its time, with the Pompeii concert 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 the band right before becoming rock royalty. The Blu-ray release includes the 85-minute film and the 62-minute concert separately; the hi-def video looks good and the superb audio remixed by Steven Wilson is available in Dolby Stereo, 5.1 TrueHD Surround and ATMOS.

Ann Wilson and Tripsitter—Live in Concert 

(Mercury/Universal)

In this 2023 concert, Heart lead vocalist Ann Wilson leads her solo band Tripsitter—with which she released an album, Another Door—through a deftly-balanced set of solo songs, well-chosen covers and classic Heart tunes, including the vigorous opener, “Crazy on You,” the band’s first hit. The 16-song set shows that Wilson, even in her mid ’70s, still sings impressively and with little vocal strain. Heart’s brooding, mystical “Mistral Wind” and John Lennon’s biting “Isolation” let her alternate between lung-shredding power and exquisite delicacy. Of course, Led Zeppelin, one of Ann and Nancy Wilson’s biggest influences, is never far away: Ann pairs the Heart hit “Alone” with “Going to California,” while a powerhouse “Immigrant Song” is Ann at her vocal best. The hi-def video and the audio are excellent, although only a stereo mix is included.

Prokofiev—War and Peace 

(Bayerische Staatsoper)

Sergei Prokofiev’s operatic masterpiece distills the essence of Leo Tolstoy’s massive novel about the 1812 war between Napoleon and Russia into an expressive, emotional 3-1/2-hour music drama. Director and set designer of this 2023 Munich production, Dmitri Tcherniakov, nods to the present conflict between invading Russian forces and defending Ukrainian patriots, but that layer doesn’t detract from the powerful musical storytelling at the heart of Prokofiev’s work. Vladimir Jurowski deftly conducts the Bavarian State Opera Orchestra and choruses, while the lead roles of Prince Andrei, Natasha and Pierre are strongly embodied by Andrei Zhilikhovsky, Olga Kulchynska and Arsen Soghomonyan. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio; extras are an interview with Tcherniakov and Jurowski as well as a short featurette.

DVD Release of the Week

The Drew Carey Show—The Complete Series 

(Warner Bros)

Standup comic Drew Carey’s eponymous sitcom ran for nine seasons, from 1995 to 2004, giving audiences an alternative version of his real-life persona as an everyman working a menial job in middle America (in this case, Cleveland). Carey and the large cast—including Christa Miller, Kathy Kinney, Craig Ferguson and Ryan Stiles—project a warm appeal that underlines the mild jokes audiences could identify with. All 200-plus episodes are included (excepting four “special” episodes), with some music cues different from the original broadcasts; lone extra is the featurette Life Inside the Cubicle.