Every Tuesday, discriminating viewers are confronted with a flurry of choices: new releases on disc and on-demand, vintage and original movies on any number of streaming platforms, catalog titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This weekly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.
This week, one of the most divisive movies of the holidays hits disc and VOD today, and that’s not all; we’ve got critically acclaimed choices streaming on both Netflix and Hulu, plus a quartet of catalog classics on disc from Criterion and KL Studio Classics.
Let’s settle in; none of us are going anywhere for a loooooooooooooong tiiiiiiiiiiiime.
ON NETFLIX:
“Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution”: It was, as one of the participants puts it, “a summer camp for the handicapped, run by hippies.” Up in the Catskills, not too far from Woodstock, Camp Jened was fueled by a similar ideology and idealism; it was a place where these kids could just be themselves, and make the kind of place they wanted to the world to be. But even more than their counterparts at Yasgur’s Farm, these kids did, in fact, change the world, and this moving, informative, and funny documentary is ultimately less about the camp itself the activism it inspired. Crisply interweaving crackerjack archival footage and recent interviews, it’s a detailed and inspiring of a movement and the tough battles it not only fought but continues to fight.
ON HULU:
“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”: There’s so much to praise about Céline Sciamma’s masterful period romance (new this week on Hulu), and that’s the main thing to praise: her attentiveness to detail, to every look, to every pause, so that there’s no such thing in its leisurely yet somehow fleeing 121-minute runtime that feels thrown away. She tells the story of a young painter (Noémie Merlant) on a one-week assignment to capture the visage of an aristocrat (Adèle Haenel), but it’s a film less about its story than about a feeling – the feeling of looking, really looking, at another person, and the feeling of truly, for the first and possibly last time, being seen.
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker”: Let’s just say it and get it out of the way: the degree to which director J.J. Abrams and his co-writer Chris Terrio attempt to walk back the elements that so upset the anti-“Last Jedi” brigade would be loathsome if they weren’t so comically transparent (I mean, they literally reassemble the mask). The Palpatine business is next-level dumb, and the degree to which Abrams wastes Keri Russell and Richard E. Grant is prosecutable. But all of that said, the ninth “Star Wars” adventure is diverting enough; it’s got some great moments and clever sequences, the cast remains charismatic, the return of Billy Dee Williams is delightful, and while the little curtain calls from the departed elders are clumsily choreographed, they land anyway. Does it offer the exhilarating reinvention of its predecessor? No. But it’s fine? (Includes full-length documentary and featurettes.)
ON BLU-RAY:
“The Prince of Tides”: “All this was a long time ago,” he explains in an early voice-over, “before I chose to have a memory.” Barbra Streisand’s film version of Pat Conroy’s bestseller (new to the Criterion Collection) wisely uses the device of narration to preserve the lyricism of the prose, but that line isn’t just scene-setting; this is a story of the things we choose to remember and the things we try to forget. Nick Nolte turns in perhaps his finest performance as Tom Wingo, a broken and angry man who hides his pain behind the mask of a somewhat jovial Southern cynic. Streisand is the New York psychiatrist who finally brings him out of his shell, and the scene in which she does so, when he finally tells her his darkest secret and crumbles to pieces after, is still a gut-punch. The film also boasts some of Streisand’s most formally dazzling filmmaking – her use of rockabilly music in that flashback, the way she intermingles past and present through the narrative – and if its turn to conventional romance in the third act is disappointing, what comes before renders that shift forgivable. (Includes audio commentary, deleted scenes and alternate takes, alternate end credits, audition and rehearsal footage, costume and make-up tests, archival interviews and featurettes, gag reel, trailers, and an essay by Bruce Elder.)
“Show Boat”: Criterion has quietly, carefully carved out a new specialty: releasing important and even entertaining movies of Hollywood “Golden Age” that also traffic in the in horrifyingly racist tropes of the day, and placing (often with the help of critics of color) those sequences into their proper context. Last year they gave us a memorable release of the glorious (except for that one scene) “Swing Time”; now it’s James Whale’s 1936 adaptation of the stage smash, dramatizing the backstage drama and intrigue of a traveling theatrical company, whose show includes, yes, a big blackface number. Yet the picture is potent and powerful anyway, thanks to the love/hate chemistry of Hattie McDaniel and Paul Robeson, and especially for Robeson’s deservedly iconic performance of “Old Man River.” In his performance of that song, and Whale’s staging and cutting of it, we see the pain, resignation, and hopelessness that even the film’s aw-shucks minstrelsy cannot minimize. (Features audio commentary, new interviews, “Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist” documentary, excerpts from the 1929 film version, radio adaptations, and essay by Gary Giddins.)
“The Song of Songs”: There is a scene, fairly early in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1933 adaptation of Herman Sundermann’s novel, when Marlene Dietrich is posing (nude!) for a sculptor, and he’s molding her counterpart by rubbing its shoulders, and if you needed to sum up what “Pre-Code” Hollywood was in one scene, well, you could do worse. Mamoulian was a stylist of the highest order (his “Applause” is one of the few early talkies where they didn’t just shut the camera in a booth, and it’s exhilarating for it), and his work here is breathtaking; he also did uncredited work on the screenplay, a heightened melodrama with lust, fear, and deceit ladled on hungrily. The main attraction, though, is Dietrich, who smolders and sizzles, playful and sexy and semi-tragic; she makes us wait the whole movie for her song and damned if it’s not worth it. (Includes audio commentary and trailer.)
“Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife”: Ernst Lubitsch directs, Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett write (their first collaboration), Claudette Colbert and Gary Cooper co-star, David Niven plays the heel – look, I don’t know what exactly you want from a motion picture, but if it’s not one of those things (much less all of them), I’m not sure how to help you. Colbert in particular is an absolute delight as Nicole de Loiselle, who sets her sights on a many-times-married millionaire (Cooper) and decides to take him for a ride, resulting in a frenetic battle-of-the-sexes farce. Oh, it also runs all of 80 minutes. Not sure how else to sell you on this one. (Includes audio commentary and trailer.)
