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.
Our first disc and streaming guide of the new year brings you a handful of fall theatrical releases, a couple of old favorites on 4K, and several catalog titles from here and abroad. But first, a modest late-‘80s sleeper that comes highly recommended:
PICK OF THE WEEK:
“Breaking In”: Director Bill Forsyth and screenwriter John Sayles seem like a strange match-up, but they made magic together with this 1989 comedy/drama. Burt Reynolds (in one of his very best performances) stars as Ernie, an ace thief who runs into a young thriller-seeker (Casey Siemaszko, all wide-eyed enthusiasm) and decides to show him the ropes. “You learn by doing!” is his mantra, but soon enough, the kid begins to question the amorality of it all, and the relationship starts to curdle. Forsyth’s light touch serves the material well, and his stars find the right odd-couple dynamic for their scenes. And he surrounds them with a cast of terrific character actors – how can you not want to see a movie that puts Maury Chaikin and Steven Tobolowsky in a scene together? (Includes audio commentary and trailer.)
ON NETFLIX:
“The Lost Daughter”: Maggie Gyllenhaal is one of our most reliable actors, each performance a well-crafted and nuanced gem, so of course she turns out to be a terrific filmmaker as well – most strikingly as an actor’s director, coaxing similarly complicated performances out of stars Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, and Jesse Buckley. This is not to imply that it’s merely an actor’s showcase. In adapting Elena Ferrante’s novel, Gyllenhaal digs thoughtfully and pointedly into questions of parenthood, responsibility, and virtue, and her screenplay’s construction keeps a considerable number of slowly-revealed secrets without seeming to jerk the viewer’s chain.
ON 4K ULTRA HD BLU-RAY / BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
“Dune”: The advertising for Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel made a noticeable – and slightly dishonest – effort to hide the film’s full, onscreen title: “Dune: Part One.” (The closing line of dialogue is “This is only the beginning,” wink wink.) And that’s the film’s only real problem: it’s very much half a story, with considerable time spent on set-up and exposition and a sense that it ends just as it gets going. But it’s impressively epic in scope and design, and the cast is absolutely stacked; the standouts include a chilling Charlotte Rampling, a horrifying Stellan Skarsgård, and a scene-stealing Jason Mamoa, who comes off like the film’s Han Solo. (Includes featurettes.)
ON 4K ULTRA HD BLU-RAY:
“The Great Escape”: KL Studio Classics continues their streak of must-have 4K upgrades with this new edition of John Sturges’ classic war adventure, which stands alongside “The Dirty Dozen” as the quintessential WWII “men on a mission” movie. Steve McQueen exudes dangerous charisma as the ringleader of a group of P.O.W.s who plot an intricate getaway from their Nazi prison camp; the ace ensemble also includes James Garner, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and Donald Pleasance. Sturges pulls the titular event out like taffy, wringing out every possible moment of tension and suspense, while his subversive third act upends all of our expectations for this kind of picture. (Includes audio commentaries, featurettes, and trailer.)
“Juice”: Spike Lee’s regular cinematographer Ernest R. Dickerson made his feature directorial debut in 1992 with this hard-hitting New York crime movie, featuring Omar Epps and an electrifying young actor named Tupac Shakur in the leading roles. Epps stars as Q, a kid from the projects whose dreams of DJ stardom are interrupted by the tough-guy aspirations of his best friend Bishop (Shakur). The tropes of the “hood movie” were already beginning to cauterize – “Boyz n the Hood” came out the previous year, “Menace II Society” the next – but the intensity of the performances and the lived-in authenticity of the filmmaking has kept this one reasonably fresh. (Includes audio commentary and featurettes.)
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
“Antlers”: Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”) seems like an odd fit for a ggory monster movie, so it’s not surprising that the best material here is found not in the horror beats but the character- and dialogue-driven narrative. Keri Russell is a schoolteacher who becomes understandably concerned when a withdrawn student begins sharing terrifying visions; Jesse Plemmons is her brother, who himself becomes concerned when these events start scratching at the shared traumas of their own childhood. Both actors are excellent, playing the drama without so much as a wink, as are marquee supporting players like Graham Greene and Amy Madigan (who fully commits to her gnarly death scene), and if Cooper seems uncertain with the scary stuff – and hobbled by a terrible twist ending – he creates plenty of creepy, doomy atmosphere. (Includes featurettes.)
“Ema”: Pablo Larraín’s in-between movie (he made it between his snapshot biopics “Jackie” and “Spencer”) is one of the films whose release was most battered by COVID-19; it played festivals in the fall of 2019, was scheduled for a theatrical release in 2020, ended up going to MUBI and other home services that year, then went to theaters last year, and now it’s available on disc. It is, in some ways, a strange way station between those two films, with much lower stakes and less iconic personalities. But in this story of the complicated breakup of a dance company director and his star dancer, the filmmaker maintains his interest in process and ritual, and in the indescribable complexities of the human heart. (Includes audio commentary, trailers, and essay by Carlos Aguilar.)
ON BLU-RAY:
“Gambit”: This caper comedy from director Ronald Neame (“The Poseidon Adventure,” “Hopscotch”) features Michael Caine as a sly con artist, Shirley MacLaine as his accomplice, and Herbert Lom as their mark. But Jack Davies and Alvin Sargent’s script is also a clever deconstruction of the con and heist movies, opening by zipping through the successful caper, spending a full 30 minutes on it, and then revealing that entire first act to be a mere explainer – so we can then watch them screw it up. Caine and MacLaine are a good match, each funny and charismatic, and Neame keeps things moving at his customary good clip. (Includes audio commentaries and trailer.)
“Rich and Strange”: Alfred Hitchcock’s “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” is always mentioned as a huge outlier in his filmography, a statement that’s not entirely accurate; there’s a pretty straight line from that film to this early British effort, another light comedy about the flimsiness of matrimony. Henry Kendall stars as a bored middle manager; “I want some of the good things in life,” he announces, mere moments before his rich aunt sends over his inheritance, early. He and wife Joan Barry then embark on a worldwide cruise, which becomes something of a “be careful what you wish for” situation when they both find alternate paramours onboard. It’s pretty insubstantial stuff, but enjoyable; more importantly, it finds Hitch trying out some genuinely radical innovations in point-of-view camerawork that would come in very hand later. (Includes audio commentary, Hitchcock/Truffaut interview audio, introduction, and trailers.)
“Rebels of the Neon God”: “Do you have nothing better to do with yourself?” asks one of their mothers in the opening scenes, a question that hangs over much that follows, a story of disaffected youth and shrugging misery, told by Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang in his feature debut (and new on Blu from Big World Pictures). His style was not yet fully formed – released in 1992, it’s visually very much of a piece with the neon-soaked Hong Kong cinema of the time – but the images are properly, strikingly poetic. More importantly, he gets the feeling right, of long nights these characters spend hanging out, making out, disappointing their parents, and disappointing each other. (Includes audio commentary, trailer, and essay bye Ariel Esteban Cayer.)
“Being Natural”: Taka (Yohta Kawase) doesn’t want to do much more than play his bongos and hang out. He’s a cheerfully unambitious fellow – and this wry comedy/drama from director Tadashi Nagayama follows his lead. Taka spends his days taking care of his elderly uncle, but his easy-breezy existence is turned upside down, first by the old man’s death and then by the arrival of an obnoxious yuppie family in the neighborhood. Most of what follows is gentle and wistful, with the occasional tinge of darkness, though the strange turn of the final scenes doesn’t work at all. But until then, “Being Natural” is a mellow, low-key treat. (Includes featurettes, trailer, and essay by Mathieu Li-Goyette.)