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.
It’s the last month of the year, and the last couple of weeks before Christmas, so the new release shelves are loaded up this week with fall prestige pictures, family favorites on 4K, and catalog favorites from the recent and distant past.
PICK OF THE WEEK:
“The Red Shoes”: Powell and Pressburger’s grand stew of movie musical, musical, fairy tale, and backstage drama bursts onto 4K from the Criterion Collection, a showcase for the textured images and rich saturation of the format if there ever was one. As ever, the startling color palate brings extra dimension to a story operatic in its emotions: jealousy, rage, deception, lust. It’s a gorgeous fever dream of a movie – but also one with much to say about creativity, collaboration, and the myth of the male genius. (Includes audio commentary, making-of documentary, interviews, restoration demonstration, featurettes, trailer, and essay by David Ehrenstein.)
ON NETFLIX:
“The Power of the Dog”: Jane Campion’s first feature film in over a decade is a whopper, a Western-tinged tale of masculinity, fragility, resentment, and secrecy. Kirsten Dunst is marvelous as a widowed mother who marries a well-to-do rancher (Jesse Plemmons), only to find that his roughneck brother (Benedict Cumberbatch) is bound and determined to make everyone around him as unhappy as he is – including her and her teenage son (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Campion puts the picture together with the kind of confidence that decades of craft instills – it’s simultaneously meandering and focused, and there’s never a doubt she knows where she’s going, but she takes her time getting there. Jonny Greenwood’s score matches that energy (it’s somehow both mellow and urgent), and the result ranks among her very best works.
ON 4K ULTRA HD BLU-RAY:
“The Wolf of Wall Street”: “Don’t Look Up” is a rough enough slog as it is; it’s certainly done no favors by the simultaneous 4K release of a genuinely brilliant and transgressive satire of American values, also featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill in leading roles. Martin Scorsese’s masterstroke was taking the frenetic aesthetic of his ‘90s gangster classics “Goodfellas” and “Casino” and making their subtext – that organized crime is the logical outgrowth of apple pie American capitalism – into text, with a story about a genuinely dangerous scumbag who is able, thanks to the faults of the system, to commit his crimes in broad daylight. This is one of DiCaprio’s best performances, summoning up all his movie-star charisma and then gleefully torpedoing it, while then-newcomer Margot Robbie proved, right out of the gate, that she was much more than eye candy. (Includes featurettes.)
“Who Framed Roger Rabbit”: This 1988 fusion of live-action throwback noir riff and animated adventure is widely beloved and far from forgotten, yet it somehow still feels underrated; the juggling act that director Robert Zemeckis pulled off seems, even more so in retrospect, a feat of sheer magic. He’s doing several impossible things at once: spinning a mythology of an old Hollywood where “toons” and humans lived and worked side by side, telling a detective story with genuine menace and stakes, and intermingling classic cartoon characters from multiple sources with credible new ones. Funny, thrilling, and technically dazzling, it’s everything a great popcorn movie should be. (Includes audio commentary, Roger Rabbit shorts, deleted scenes, and featurettes.)
“Hard Target”: John Woo’s American debut (like “Broken Arrow” after it) suffers from a bit of an identity crisis; the director didn’t quite go all-in on importing his baroque style, a surprising hesitation considering how much his aesthetic had already invaded American action cinema. That tentativeness mostly impacts the dialogue scenes, which end up corny rather than operatic – the language barrier could be a factor – but the action sequences, which speak the language of compositions, cuts, and tempo, are electrifying. His signature touches are all here: wild camera moves, copious cross-fades, freeze-frames and slo-mo by the bucket, and, yes, doves. But he also gets interesting work out of Jean-Claude Van Damme (sporting one of the all-time great movie mullets) and Lance Henriksen, who is bug-eyed and batshit crazy as the villain. (Includes audio commentary, interviews, and trailer.)
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
“The Last Duel”: The first of Ridley Scott’s two 2021 releases has proven divisive and controversial – unsurprisingly, for a film about rape, survivors, and toxic masculinity. But “The Last Duel” manages to avoid heavy-handedness, telling its story of the accuser (Jodie Comer), her blowhard husband (Matt Damon), and the accused (Adam Driver) with clever narrative subtleties and no shortage of verbal and compositional wit. Scott paints on a grand canvas, throwing copious amounts of swordplay, gore, and revelry into his two-and-a-half hour epic. The mere notion of such a picture will keep some viewers away, as we’ve seen. But those who take a chance will find an old-school studio picture of the highest order. (Includes featurette.)
“The Card Counter”: Oscar Isaac is fantastic – subdued but fiery, haunted but fierce – in this terrific drama of sin and redemption from (who else) Paul Schrader. Isaac is the title character, an ex-convict who has become a master of quietly winning medium scores in casinos but finds himself drawn to higher stakes by the appearance of ghosts from his past. Tye Sheridan is miscast as his protégé – he just never quite gets his arms around Schrader’s dialogue – and Tiffany Haddish has some trouble settling into the role. But her chemistry with Isaac is undeniable, and the grace notes of their relationship pull the picture through its rougher patches. (Includes featurette.)
“One Night in Miami”: If we’re being honest, it’s kind of rude of Regina King to be great at literally everything. The Emmy- and Oscar-winning actor adroitly and confidently directs this adaptation of Kemp Powers’s play (new to Criterion), a dramatization and fictionalization of the night when Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) became the world champ and celebrated with friends Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown. It’s a torrent of words, and much of its running time consists of four men, huddled up, talking honestly and intimately. On one hand, that’s not what we traditionally consider “cinematic”’; on the other, there’s a closeness and intimacy here that only movies can achieve. (Also streaming on Amazon Prime Video.) (Includes interviews, featurettes, and essay by Gene Seymour.)
ON BLU-RAY:
“Harold and Maude”: One of the all-time great cult movies, this darkly comic masterpiece from the great Hal Ashby concerns a morbid, rich 20-year-old (Bud Cort) who falls in love with a free-spirited 79-year-old (Ruth Gordon), so don’t show this one to the people who are obsessed with the age gap in “Licorice Pizza.” Ashby’s deadpan style is a perfect match for Colin Higgins’ bleakly funny script, and its stars were never better. Like “Nashville” earlier in the year, this one previously hit Blu-ray from Criterion before this 50th anniversary “Paramount Presents” release, but this one features a gorgeous new 4K restoration and remixed soundtrack, as well as a couple of new goodies that make it worth the double-dip. (Includes audio commentary, interview, and trailers.)
“Beavis and Butt-Head Do America”: When Beavis and Butt-head became sensations of MTV (and whipping boys for culture warriors), their creator Mike Judge could’ve easily cranked out a lazy rip-off for the multiplexes. Instead, he crafted a genuinely funny and at times piercing satire that expanded their tiny world, generated some dead-on set pieces, and brought in several welcome guest voices (including, unbilled, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, and David Letterman). It was also, sadly, the last time a Mike Judge movie was recognized as great upon its original release, and rewarded for it at the box office. (Includes commentary, featurettes, trailers, and TV spots.)
“The Long Goodbye”: KL Studio Classics gifts us a new and improved special edition of their out-of-print disc for Robert Altman’s 1973 classic, featuring a beautiful new 4K master. It remains one of the master’s finest, affectionately skewering the conventions of private detective fiction and new age California in the ‘70s by incongruously intermingling them, with Elliot Gould in top form as a muttering, befuddled Phillip Marlowe investigating the disappearance of a Hemingway-esque novelist (a roaring Sterling Hayden). It absolutely should not work, but it does, and it remains one of Altman’s singular acts of inexplicable alchemy. (Includes audio commentary, featurettes, trailers, and radio and TV spots.)
“Busting”: It’s time for an Elliot Gould double feature, as KL is also re-releasing this 1974 cop comedy from writer/director Peter Hyams. Gould and Robert Blake co-star as a pair of reckless vice cops, and that particular piece of casting isn’t the only thing that’s aged, well, troublingly; suffice it to say that the attitudes towards sex work and homosexuality are very much of their time. But if you can get over those speed bumps, there’s a lot to like here – Hyams’ kinetic style comes out of the gate intact, Gould is as enjoyable to watch as ever, and Allen Garfield is an appropriately despicable villain. (Includes audio commentaries and trailer.)
“Mr. Majestyk”: Charles Bronson stars as an ex-con watermelon farmer who gets on the wrong side of local scumbags and a mob-connected hitman in this lean, muscular crime picture from director Richard Fleischer and screenwriter Elmore Leonard. It has the qualities of Leonard’s best work: wonderfully twisty plotting, quotable dialogue (“Seems like there’s just no use trying to get on your good side,” Bronson muses, just before socking a guy in the jaw), and a welcome nasty streak. But he also crafts a sympathetic character for Bronson; when the bad guys machine-gun his melon crop, it’s genuinely upsetting. This hit theaters in 1974, the same year “Death Wish” made Bronson a star, and it’s yet another example of a road you wish his career would have taken. (Includes audio commentary, interviews, TV spot and trailer.)
“Angels with Dirty Faces”: Michael Curtiz’s 1938 classic is a roll call of names you want in your gangster picture – James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Pat O’Brien, the Dead End Kids – all used to great effect. Cagney and O’Brien are childhood pals who take wildly different paths, with Cagney pursuing a life of crime and O’Brien becoming a man of the cloth, so yes, it’s old hat, and much of it has codified into cliché. But Curtiz works in a fast, hard, slangy style, and the stale materials are still fresh and exciting here. And it’s particularly fun watching Bogie, who would re-team with director Curtiz four years later for “Casablanca,” playing the heel. (Includes audio commentary, Leonard Maltin intro, newsreel, shorts, cartoon, featurette, trailers, and radio version.)
“The Learning Tree”: Gordon Parks joins the Criterion Collection with this one-man band of an effort; he directed, produced, composed the score, and adapted his own semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in rural Kansas in the 1920s. He soaks up the small-town atmosphere – the warmth, the dread, the seediness – to show a place that can veer from idyllic to threatening, often in the blink of an eye. Evocative and unsurprisingly gorgeous, and working with themes and ideas that are timeless, from the borderline impossibility of doing what’s right to the inevitability of racist cops shooting unarmed Black kids. (Includes new conversation, featurette, making-of documentary, trailer, and the films “Diary of a Harlem Family” and “The World of Piri Thomas.”)
“Disciples of Shaolin”: 88 Films follows up last month’s stellar release of “The Chinese Boxer” with this ace edition of another kung fu classic, featuring Sheng Fu as a recent arrival at a textile factory who prompts something of a worker uprising. (Labor issues are still hot!) Fu is a likable lead – a rogue, but a charming one – and the writing is cracklingly funny, not just bridging the raucous, energetic fight scenes, but boosting them. It dawdles a bit early on, but the third act absolutely rips; the action beats are breathlessly executed, and Chang Cheh’s direction is top-notch. (Includes audio commentaries, new interview, and trailer.)
“Revenge of the Shogun Women”: There’s something particularly enjoyable about 3D exploitation movies, which dispense with the formalities and merely think of any excuse imaginable to heave things at the lens, lest the producers (and the audience) don’t get their money’s worth. This 1977 grinder (new on Blu from KL and the 3D Film Archive) is a mash-up of kung fu and rape-revenge movies, but mostly it’s a sizzle reel, with first, sticks, axes, and a precise flying hair braid lunging at your eyeballs throughout. It’s so hilariously shameless that it borders on transcendent; this is utterly stupid, and an absolute blast. (Includes both BD3D polarized and anaglyphic versions, 2D version, anaglyphic 3D glasses, and three 3D shorts.)
“Get Crazy”: Allan Arkush’s 1983 musical comedy, long MIA on home video due to music rights, gets a proper special edition from KL, and it’s like the essence of its decade bottled into 92 minutes: broad, dopey, leering, and (literally) coke-dusted. Allen Garfield (again!) is delightful as a small-time hustler and rock promoter whose killer New Year’s Eve show has to go off without a hitch or he’ll lose his theater, and Malcolm McDowell is inspired as an utterly out-of-control rock star in the Ozzy mold. (Lou Reed also pops up in a hilarious cameo, muttering, perhaps metatextually, “I seem to have lost my edge.”) It’s dumb as hell, but never pretends otherwise, and it’s ultimately pretty hard to resist. (Includes audio commentary, making-of documentary, featurette, trailers, and music videos.)
“Number Seventeen”: KL continues their welcome tradition of cleaning up and spit-shining standbys of the cheapo public domain bin with this beautiful edition of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s early, British efforts. He was still young, but his visual acumen was fully sharpened by this point; the film goes so long without dialogue that I paused to check if it was a silent movie. It’s not, and it does have that echo-y clumsiness of his (and many other) early talkies. But it’s nevertheless entertaining and enlightening – we’re seeing the filmmaker drawing the blueprint here for a matched career, and a distinctive style. (Includes audio commentary, documentary, Hitchcock/Truffaut interview audio, introduction, and trailers.)