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 biweekly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.
READ MORE: Summer 2021 Preview: Over 50 Movies To Watch
It’s a fully loaded week for new releases, with a new family favorite on Netflix, a newly crowned Oscar winner on disc and VOD, a classic Spaghetti Western on 4K, and a wide array of classics, genre flicks, and peculiar picks on Blu-ray.
ON NETFLIX:
“The Mitchells vs. the Machines”: The latest feature from Sony Pictures Animation bears the stamp of the studio’s ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse’ producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and it pulls off the same seemingly impossible cinematic magic trick: it’s a clever, funny, family-friendly genre exercise that does all of those things well, while simultaneously (and slyly) delivering an unexpected emotional gut-punch. Abbi Jacobson and Maya Rudolph are unsurprisingly wonderful as a college-bound teen and Instagram-obsessed mom trying to cope with a robot uprising, but the MVP is Danny McBride, who finds just the right mixture of oafishness and heart as the patriarch.
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
“Judas and the Black Messiah”: Daniel Kaluuya just picked up a richly deserved Oscar for his electrifying turn as Fred Hampton in this harrowing dramatization of the FBI’s campaign to infiltrate and assassinate the Black Panther leader, with the assistance of informant William O’Neal. LaKeith Stanfield is stunning as O’Neal; his unsteadiness and doubt are an effective counterpoint to Kaluuya’s confidence and righteousness. And director Shaka King isn’t content to merely act out the events – the Filmed Wikipedia Page approach of too much historical cinema these days. King truly brings this era to life, not only in its people, costumes, and music but the overall feeling of social change within grasp, then slowly slipping away. (Includes featurettes.)
“Crestone”: “This movie is a love letter,” explains director Marnie Ellen Hertzler. “This movie is about the end of the world.” What it’s more specifically about is her trip to Crestone, Colorado, where she made a film with a group of friends who moved into the desert “to sell weed and make music for the Internet.” The specific music they make is hip-hop for SoundCloud, and perhaps the most striking quality of her mostly-documentary feature is the way it captures and translates the dreamy, hazy feel of that music into cinema, even as encroaching wildfires lend their lives a sense of impending doom. It’s a vibe, in other words, and it’s easy to get lost in it. (Includes audio commentaries, deleted scene, and trailers.)
“F.T.A.”: At the height of the Vietnam War, Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland (who’d recently wrapped “Klute”) toured American bases with a kind of anti-U.S.O. variety show, a rowdy mixture of songs and sketches for soldiers who weren’t so happy to be there. There was real tension at those performances, which sometimes flares up and gets scary, but Francine Parker’s 1972 documentary is less about that tour than what its participants saw and heard, intercutting performance clips with interviews, strategy sessions, and overheard conversations. The result is insightful, observant, and – especially in its incendiary conclusion – righteously angry. (Also available via Kino Now.) (Includes feature-length 2005 documentary “Sir! No Sir!,” new introduction and interview with Fonda, and essays by David Cortight and Mark Shiel)
ON 4K:
“The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly”: Few films have seen as many Blu-ray releases as Sergio Leone’s 1966 Spaghetti Western masterpiece, and I’m sorry, but even if you bought it before, you’re going to want to buy it again. KL Studio Classics’ new 4K UltraHD disc has the beauty and texture of a freshly-struck print, magnificently capturing both the vast, dusty landscapes of its wide shots, and the grizzled faces of its three protagonists (Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach), cleverly out-maneuvering each other in the hunt for $200,000 in Confederate gold. The film is sweaty, bloody, and brutal, yet still strangely beautiful, finding visual poetry in its fly-swarmed dustiness. And it’s funny to boot, both in its touches of slapstick comedy and the laughs Leone mines from its performative cool. (Includes audio commentary, featurettes, deleted scenes, vignettes, trailers, and image galleries.)
ON BLU-RAY:
“Fast Times at Ridgemont High”: Director Amy Heckerling and screenwriter Cameron Crowe both made their feature debuts with this from-the-trenches chronicle of teenage life in the early 1980s, new to the Criterion Collection, featuring an astonishingly stacked cast of up-and-comers (including Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, and, very quickly, Nicolas Cage). Its candid takes on sex and drugs made it a trendsetter for the decade’s youth cinema, but few of its imitators bothered to replicate what made it truly special: Crowe’s keen ear for honest dialogue, and Heckerling’s assured command of tone, which allows the picture to plumb emotional depths uncommon to the genre. (Includes audio commentary, new and archival interviews, featurettes, Crowe introduction, and essay by Dana Stevens.)
“Merrily We Go to Hell”: This Pre-Code romantic drama from director Dorothy Arzner (also new to Criterion) stars Frederic March as a cheerfully alcoholic newspaper columnist and Sylvia Sidney as the heiress who falls for him, in spite of many red flags to steer clear. It’s something of an “I can fix him!” ur-text, and as is so often the case in real life, his booziness becomes less charming the more time we (and she) spend with him. March pulls off the neat trick of showing us exactly why she found him so charming, and why she shouldn’t have; Sidney reaches astonishing heights of sympathy and charisma, and their chemistry is so good, you almost get why they stick it out. But all of that is a warm-up for the last half hour, in which the psychological complexity of Arzner’s storytelling really kicks in – “Merrily” displays the kind of emotional maturity and inquisitiveness that’s rare in mainstream cinema now. (Includes Arzner documentary, video essay by Cari Beauchamp, and essay by Judith Mayne.)
“Trances”: Ahmed El Maanouni’s documentary, previously seen as part of Criterion’s first “Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project” set, gets a stand-alone release – and it’s a real treat. The subject is the Moroccan band Nass El Ghiwane, whose passionate, electrifying concert footage makes it seem, at first, like a MENA counterpart to Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz.” But this band’s politics are more overt, so while “Trances” is a mosaic of music – performed on stage, in the streets, and in private – it’s also an analysis of it, with songs and their concerns (earth, humanity, nature, injustice) argued over, broken apart, and reassembled again. And in the closing moments, as the lyric “Brothers in trances / when will freedom come” resonates through the hall, Maanouni slows it down and isolates it; that question is at the heart of his movie, and, to this day, at the heart of so many struggles. (Includes Scorsese introduction, interviews, and essay by Sally Shafto.)
“Masculin Feminin”: Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 classic (recipient of a shiny new Blu-ray upgrade) opens by announcing its “15 concise episodes” – a syntax choice that’s funny in itself, as you can apply many adjectives to Godard’s work, but “concise” is rarely one of them. Yet this is one of his best works, from arguably his finest period (“the age of Vietnam and James Bond”), playfully tinkering with music, sound effects, text, and storytelling, a free-form exploration of the time and place, but grounded by a pair of blunt (even nasty) back-and-forths between men and women on dating and sex. It moves like a fire truck, landing well-aimed shots left and right, and sparing none of its characters from the filmmaker’s barbs. (Includes archival interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, trailers, and essay by Adrian Martin.)
“Smile”: The new boutique label Fun City Editions hits another one out of the park with this spiffy restoration of Michael Ritchie’s oddly underrated 1975 satire, in which the contestants for the Young American Miss pageant gather in Santa Rosa, California for the three-night competition. It sounds like a dry run for “Drop Dead Gorgeous,” and you can certainly see this film’s influence on that one. But some of the most compelling material is only tangentially related to the event; it’s in the way the filmmakers know this town to its bones, its endless rituals and dead-end ennui. Much of that is personified by Bruce Dern, all oily confidence as Big Bob Freelander, local RV salesman and the pageant’s head judge. The screenwriter is Jerry Belson, a TV sitcom vet, and it’s easy to see how this same material could’ve played broad and bad – but Ritchie’s tough is light and graceful, never giving a sense that he’s looking down on these people or laughing at them, and that generosity is infectious. (Includes audio commentary, Dern interview, theatrical trailer, image gallery, and essay by Mike McPadden.)
“The Hot Spot”: Dennis Hopper’s 1990 adaptation of Charles Williams’ novel “Hell Hath No Fury” is a near-perfect pastiche of neo-noir and late-‘80s sleaze, with Don Johnson as the sap, Virginia Madsen as the femme fatale, and Jennifer Connelly as the ingénue. The trio smolders convincingly at each other, playing the archetypes and turning them in on themselves; Williams and Nona Tyson’s script is loaded with arched eyebrows and double entendres, and Hopper’s direction is delightfully horny. It’s entirely too long at a full two hours (the noir guys got this kind of thing done in a tight 80 minutes), but it’s plotted with clockwork precision, and the score – by Jack Nitzsche, and performed by Miles Davis, John Lee Hooker, and Taj Mahal, among others – is an all-timer. (Includes audio commentary, new interviews, and theatrical trailer.)
“Tank”: This Southern-fried 1984 action drama is not only the kind of movie where James Garner owns his own personal Sherman tank, but the kind of movie where he calls said tank “ol’ girl.” The picture leans heavily on the considerable charisma of its star, as the new Division Sergeant Major for a small-town Army base who makes the unfortunate decision to cross a scuzzy deputy (James Cromwell, shockingly) and, then the town sheriff (a repugnant G.D. Spradlin). Anyway, that’s all warm-up – we’re waiting for the hour mark, when it climbs in his tank and goes to give those good ol’ boys what fer. That material is rich and satisfying; it falls apart a bit in the third act, when Garner is injured, leaving C. Thomas Howell, as his son, to do the heavy acting lifting. Nevertheless, it’s a James Garner movie, and I’ll take all of those I can get. (Includes audio commentary, theatrical trailer, and radio spots.)
“Sweet Liberty”: In the 1980s, in the later years and aftermath of his success on “M*A*S*H,” Alan Alda carved out a niche as something of a JV Woody Allen, writing, directing, and starring in a series of charming romantic comedy/dramas. Now that Allen is out of vogue, perhaps it’s time to give Alda his due – and this is a good place to start, with Alda playing a college professor and historian whose town is taken over by a film crew, adapting his book into a not-quite-faithful movie. “This isn’t my book!” he complains. “There are all these naked women and people keep falling off horses!” So he slyly inserts himself into the process, which requires massaging the considerable egos of the film’s stars: Michael Caine (typecast as the most charming man on earth) and Michelle Pfeiffer (in a marvelous two-part performance as the Method ingénue). Alda tries to do a bit too much – as lovely as it is to see Lillian Gish in a supporting role, her subplot goes nowhere – but this is a funny, knowing peek at how the sausage is made. (Includes audio commentary and trailer.)
“All-American Murder”: This 1991 effort from director and “Happy Days” alum Anson Williams (new on Blu from Vinegar Syndrome) gets off to a bumpy start, with Charlie Schlatter (TV’s Ferris Bueller) playing a bad boy falling for the college good girl (Josie Bissett) – corny stuff, filled with comically on-the-nose needle drops. And then Christopher Walken arrives, giving us a straight shot of “King of New York”-era controlled chaos, and all bets are off. The first act turns out to be a head fake, giving way to a nasty, brutish, and inventively gory little thriller with some delicious twists and turns. And if you’ve ever longed to see Walken sing “Feelings” into a megaphone, well, look no further. (Includes audio commentary and new interviews.)
“The Cellar”: This 1989 horror flick from director Kevin S. Tenney (“Witchboard,” “Night of the Demons”) has a backstory as fascinating as anything on screen – taken over by Tenney five days in, it was then taken from him by its producers before release, who reshot scenes and recut it into a more conventional horror movie for its VHS release. Vinegar Syndrome’s new Blu-ray includes both versions and makes the case for the director: his cut is atmospheric, well-acted, and about as intelligent as a movie about creeping sludge can possibly be. John Woodward’s screenplay mines a genuine emotional investment in these characters and their relationships – oh, and the monster is pretty convincing too. (Includes two cuts, audio commentary, and featurette.)
“Winterbeast”: There’s something very specific – and charming – about locally produced, microbudget horror; they’re just trying so hard, and the handmade quality of the results is often more endearing than the real thing. This 1992 item (part of Vinegar’s new “Home Grown Horrors” set) was shot in rural Massachusetts on bits and pieces of 16mm and 8mm film over several years, and it has all of the expected qualities: amateurish acting, goofy stop-motion monsters, boobs. But it also boasts an absolutely bonkers performance by its villain, whose buck-wild reveal in the third act is like “Twin Peaks” on nitrous oxide. And that, friends, is the kind of thing you’ll never find in a “real movie.” (Includes audio commentaries, new and archival interviews, deleted scenes, featurette, and workprint version.)
“Horizons West”: The great Western director Budd Boetticher helms this 1952 oater, with Robert Ryan and Rock Hudson as brothers returning to their Texas home after the Civil War. Hudson is optimistic, but Ryan is sullen, dead set on “building an empire,” and Louis Stevens’ screenplay slowly moves them into opposite sides of right and wrong. Raymond Burr turns in a deliciously villainous turn as the local land baron in Ryan’s way, but by the story’s conclusion, the hero has become the villain, and the intensity of the climactic familial standoff is surprisingly powerful. (Includes audio commentary and trailer.)
“The Wages of Sin”: Most of Kino-Lorber’s previous installments in their “Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture” series have been confined to the 1930s and 1940s; this one dates to 1966, from an era when American exploiters found that there was money to be made by importing sexual “education” films from Europe, where filmmakers could be more candid. This one was, per the opening credits, “filmed in the Gynecological Clinic in Zurich,” and it’s basically a hospital soap opera, interspersed with educational sequences, ominous warnings about population explosion, and, yes, sequences of live childbirth, before morphing into a courtroom drama about a botched abortion. As ever, it’s hard to imagine how any of this was ever considered remotely sexy – even in the prurient desert of the times – but therein lies the fascination. (Includes audio commentary, additional feature, additional childbirth shorts, and medical lecture/book pitch.)
