Kino Lorber recently retrieved three titles from the distributor’s seemingly bottomless well of obscure noirs from the genre’s golden age for yet another impactful box set. The Dark Side of Cinema XXI ($33.22 Blu-ray) features three titles that largely dance around the traditional expectations of noir, mixing its shadowy atmosphere with timely espionage drama and hothouse … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Solondz’s disturbing ‘Happiness,’ and a wry wolfman movie
As director Todd Solondz himself concedes in a bonus interview for Criterion’s long-awaited release of 1998’s Happiness ($34.99 4K, $27.99 Blu-ray, $13.91 DVD), the film “never would have been financed today.” This perspective seems to be the consensus, owing to shifting social mores, to increased institutional adversity to risk, and I suppose to wokeism. Down to brass tacks, a … [Read more...]
‘Speak No Evil’ opts for thriller clichés after psychological study
For city couples like Ben and Louise Dalton, played by Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis in Speak No Evil, the invitation to spend a holiday in the English countryside sounds like just the respite they need to recharge their dimming batteries. Sure, they only met the hosts once, as fellow tourists on an Italian sojourn, but they seemed harmless enough — maybe even exciting in … [Read more...]
‘Red Rooms’ a disturbing look at serial killer obsession in the AI age
Chromatically, Pascal Plante’s colorfully titled thriller Red Rooms (opening Friday in Lake Worth Beach) lives in a world of black and white. The movie is set largely in two locations. One is an antiseptic, glaringly bright courtroom in Montreal, where a man named Ludovic Chevalier is standing trial for murdering, maiming and sexually violating (the heinous order of events is … [Read more...]
‘Not Not Jazz’: Medeski, Martin & Wood doc shortchanges importance of jazz/fusion band
A new phenomenon emerged through the 1990s when keyboardist John Medeski, drummer Billy Martin and bassist Chris Wood (www.medeskimartinandwood.com) created what proved to be the most formidable jazz/fusion act without a stringed instrument since Weather Report. Director Jason Miller’s new Medeski, Martin & Wood documentary, Not Not Jazz (Oscilloscope Laboratories/MVD … [Read more...]
Powerful ‘Green Border’ a brutal look at refugees trapped in Europe’s freedom mirage
A single apple to feed a family, passed among its members like contraband. The existential utility of a partially charged cellphone. A $200 bottle of water. The things they carry, and the things they leave behind—whether a suitcase of valuables or the elders too weak, too injured or too exhausted to continue the journey. These are the considerations of the Middle Eastern and … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Six in Paris’ an effective New Wave omnibus and travelogue
Like the more cumbersome New York Stories 24 years later, 1965’s Six in Paris, now on Blu-ray (Icarus Films, $25.52), is an anthology film whose central theme is its setting. Rightly believing that Paris is an “inexhaustible” subject for cinema, as he tells an interviewer in one of the Blu-ray’s extras, producer Barbet Schroeder enlisted six directors, mostly associated with … [Read more...]
‘Daddio’: Taxicab confessional a little too play-bound to take off
Even in an increasingly secular America, the faithless have their confessors — those strangers, all but unseen behind a divider, ready and willing to lend an ear, a note of empathy, perhaps even some advice, if not absolution. I’m speaking, of course, of the taxicab drivers: the chauffeurs of the urban jungle, the mobile therapists, the keepers of many secrets. At least … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Woody Allen’s icy but buoyant foreign-language debut
It would be tempting, in the current media narrative of Woody Allen’s now-tarnished career in the United States, to view his first foreign-language film as a necessary retreat. After all, the story goes, the guy can only shoot overseas because no American actors will agree to work with him anymore. Allen’s cancellation is regional, not global. Maybe there is some truth to … [Read more...]
‘The Fall Guy’: An elegy for moviemaking buried in a charming rom-com
The new Ryan Gosling vehicle The Fall Guy is, as stuntman-turned-director David Leitch has said, “a love letter” to the stunt industry. It’s a business model that can use some love. In the trades and on the picket lines in recent years, there has been much chatter of artificial intelligence replacing flesh-and-blood stunt performers with digital replicas. In this environment, … [Read more...]