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 twice-monthly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.
Some of this month’s big Oscar contenders make their way to disc and streaming in this week’s round-up, alongside a couple of splashy fall star vehicles, a cornucopia of Romanian cinema, and some juicy genre cinema. But let’s start out with a new restoration of a knockout ‘70s indie:
PICK OF THE WEEK:
“Hester Street”: The great Joan Micklin Silver (“Crossing Delancey,” “Between the Lines”) made her feature directorial debut with this delicately beautiful, black-and-white period immigrant story. Carol Kane – an Oscar nominee for Best Actress, and a deserving one – is a shy young wife and mother who arrives on the Lower East Side after her husband (Steven Keats, an excellent cad) has arrived, assimilated, and begun an affair. Initially alienated, she begins an American journey of her own, and Silver’s sensitive direction, along with Kane’s quietly devastating playing, makes this one of the most astonishingly confident debuts of the 1970s. (Includes audio commentary, new and archival interviews, deleted scene and outtakes, and trailer.)
ON HULU:
“Benedetta”: Paul Verhoeven cooks up a truly strange brew, coupling probing, thoughtful questions of faith and religion with the kind of sexual ribaldry and scatological humor you’d expect from, well, a modern-day “nun-spoloitation” movie. Yet the picture poses more serious questions of faith than we might expect from a heaving-bosom Sapphic melodrama – of divine visions, faith, and doubt, and how those might (or might not) intertwine with pleasures of the flesh. The material is provocative, and Verhoeven loves being such a provocateur; he’s playing with dynamite, toying with the most loaded of symbols and ideas, casting them as both divine and dirty.
ON HBO MAX:
“Drive My Car”: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami‘s short stories is a big-time Oscar contender – it’s up for not only the expected Best International Feature prize, but Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. That much heat is a little surprising for such a seemingly modest picture, its conflicts and payoffs coming in conversations that rarely raise in temperature, or in moments of solitude. But there are storms of great magnitudes happening under its calm surfaces, and it’s a film about those storms, the secrets we all carry, as well as the shame, and regret, and the ways we learn to cope with them all.
ON 4K / BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
“The Matrix Resurrections”: “Nothing comforts anxiety like… a little nostalgia.” So says Morpheus – well, the new one – in this fourth installment of the “Matrix” saga, this time directed solo by Lana Wachowski. And she finds a clever way to reboot the series, pulling out and re-contextualizing the original trilogy in a manner both funny and surprising; there is something fundamentally thrilling about not knowing, early on, where this is going. But she also wrestles with the typical sequel conundrum: much of what works is riffing on the earlier movies, and for all of their flaws, the one thing the earlier sequels didn’t do was the kind of beat-for-beat recreation that this one falls into in its second half. But the picture finds its way out by finding its heart, focusing on the relationship between Neo and Trinity, and thus the warmth between Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss (his “It’s my turn to believe in her” may be his loveliest line reading of the series). It’s frequently silly, dazzlingly inspired, occasionally ponderous, and often thrilling. In other words, it’s a “Matrix” sequel.
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
“House of Gucci”: Ridley Scott’s second big movie of 2021 falls apart a bit after a strong start; it’s hampered by a Jared Leto performance with all the subtlety of a character in an “SNL” sketch cut after dress, and is weirdly bereft of an emotional through-line, never really figuring out how it feels about these characters (and thus, how it wantsus to feel about them). But it has some electrifying individual moments, most of them provided by Lady Gaga, who turns the picture into a full-throated tribute to her considerable chemistry. She and Adam Driver have a sexy, easy chemistry, and it’s entertaining to watch her turn into Lady Macbeth, even if she’s ultimately all dressed up with nowhere in particular to go. (Includes featurettes.)
“Belfast”: It’s easy to dismiss Kenneth Branagh’s Best Picture nominee as “White ‘Roma,’” and that’s not an inaccurate description; a quick glance at Branagh’s recent filmography shows a director who is chasing trends far more than he’s setting them. But there’s much to recommend here: Oscar-nominated performances by the always reliable Ciarán Hinds and Judi Dench (as well as the un-nominated Caitríona Balfe and Jamie Dornan), a sure sense of time and place, and some well-staged set pieces. And hey, given the choice between this and more Poirot, I say bring on the nostalgia. (Includes audio commentary, alternate ending, deleted scenes, and featurette.)
ON 4K:
“Madman”: When the chief counselor at a “special retreat for gifted children” spins a campfire yarn about an axe-wielding psychopath’s killing spree (“Wait a minute, now that I think about it, it was the same night as tonight”), you’ve got a pretty clear idea of what’s to follow: heavy-breathing first-person handheld camera, wildly over-the-top foley work, buckets of bright red blood, and synthesizer music up the wazoo. “Madman” isn’t a particularly noteworthy slasher, but it’s not a bad one either; it delivers what it promises with a modicum of style, and Vinegar Syndrome’s 4K transfer is appropriately grimy, even if it does no favors to the title character’s mask and makeup. (Includes audio commentary, interviews, introduction, featurettes, feature-length making-of documentary, trailer, and TV spots.)
ON BLU-RAY:
“I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians”: This week is a real buffet for lovers of Romanian cinema, with three films from the country out from Vinegar Syndrome’s partner labels. The most high-profile is this pitch-black satire, which ran the festival circuit in 2018, in which a young theatre director (Ioana Iacob) gets in a bit over her head – politically, intellectually, and artistically – when she agrees to stage and immersive reenactment of the 1941 Odessa massacre (of Ukranian Jews, an accidentally timely touch). The filmmaking is ingenious, flipping from verite-style observation to a slick digital sheen for the event itself, but the film’s big surprise is its thematic conclusion, transitioning from a knowing commentary on ironic detachment to a thoughtful meditation on the responsibility of dramatists and the inevitable repetition of history. (Includes introduction, short film, trailer, and booklet essay by Ariel Esteban Cayer.)
“Cain and Abel”: This Filipino exploitation classic is a cross between soapy familial melodrama and blood- and bullet-ridden revenge thriller, which sounds like an impossible mixture, but damned if director Lino Brocka doesn’t pull it off. The soapy stuff takes up much of the first half, which establishes the long-simmering rivalry between the sons of a wealthy matriarch, the well-to-do mama’s boy and the perpetual fuck-up who nevertheless stuck around and built up the business. It would be easy to play favorites as easily as their mother does, but Ricky Lee’s operatic screenplay sees them both as deeply flawed, and deeply damaged, which gives the picture’s later passages of emotional and physical brutality a real bite. (Includes interviews, featurette, and booklet essay by José B. Capino.)
“Two Lottery Tickets”: This Romanian comedy (out on Blu from Dekalog) is a deadpan treat, following a sad-sack mechanic and perpetual kicking post who picks the winning lottery numbers, but loses the ticket in a clumsy mugging. So he and his equally incompetent pals set about finding the muggers, and hijinks ensue. Director Paul Negoescu resists the urge to play this as overt farce, so much of the viewer’s joy derives from the straight-faced absurdity with which he chases his plot down every silly side street. (Includes audio commentary, short film, introduction, trailer, booklet essay by Mihai Chirilov, and additional feature “A Month in Thailand.”)
“Sister Sister”: Bill Condon, later the highly decorated director of such Oscar bait as “Gods and Monsters” and “Dream Girls,” is yet another distinguished alumni of the Roger Corman factory, though this New World release also boasts a primo cast, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, and Judith Ivey. It’s a horny slab of Bayou Gothic, loaded up with casual madness, long-buried secrets, and jealous rage; the mood and atmosphere are tip-top, though Condon’s attempts to weave in slasher horror elements are less successful. Nevertheless, Leigh is fire (as always), and the grace notes of its closing scenes are unexpectedly affecting. (Includes audio commentaries, interviews, deleted scenes, trailer, and essay by Cristina Cacioppo.)
“Delta Space Mission”: Romania’s first animated feature film, dates back to 1984 but has never made its way to America before this 4K Blu-ray release from Deaf Crocodile Films. It is very much of its era, from the Euro disco score to the animation style that’s somehow both chintzy and striking. In that way, it’s reminiscent of such divergent influences as “Yellow Submarine,” “Fantastic Planet,” and “Heavy Metal” – the tools may be rudimentary, but the imagination is boundless. (Includes audio commentary, interviews, short films, and booklet essay by Stephen R. Bissette.)