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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, and 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.
This week’s disc and streaming guide includes Oscar winners, Oscar nominees, a box set from one of the most respected distributors of our time, and a box set from one of the most disreputable filmmakers of her time.
PICK OF THE WEEK:
“Sony Pictures Classics 30th Anniversary 4K Ultra HD Collection”: As 4K UHD Blu-ray release slates broaden, studios are increasingly moving past the obvious titles, the bombastic show-off blockbusters and cult favorites, into more esoteric territory. If that sounds like your brand of vodka, walk-don’t-run to pick up this cube of indie goodness from SPC, featuring eleven of their most acclaimed titles – ten of them new to the format (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” is the only holdover). But even “indie” doesn’t do the selection here justice; they’re running the gamut from art films (“Orlando,” “The City of Lost Children”) to documentaries (“The Celluloid Closet”) to genre riffs (“The Devil’s Backbone,” “Run Lola Run”) to mid Oscar bait (“Still Alice”) to auteur dives (“Volver,” “Synecdoche, New York”) to character-driven drama (“Call Me By Your Name”) and comedy (“SLC Punk”). It’s like a mini-history of indie cinema, in one handsome box. (Includes audio commentaries, deleted scenes, featurettes, interviews, music videos, trailers, and more.)
ON HBO MAX:
“Master of Light”: Rosa Ruth Boesten’s SXSW-winning documentary is the kind of material that could’ve easily veered into sentimental pap – it profiles George Anthony Morton, who studied and perfected the art of portrait painting during a ten-year stretch in federal prison – but handles its story, and the people at its center, with delicacy and grace. Morton is a fascinating focus, a talented and thoughtful guy who just took a wrong turn at the wrong moment, and his redemption story is a worthwhile one. But Boesten peers deeper, keying into the ways in which his hopscotching between worlds and classes conjures up resentment and regret among those he cares about (and within himself).
ON 4K:
“Malcolm X”: Spike Lee has directed at least three legitimate masterpieces, and it’s hard to pin down his best film, because his great one work in such different ways, deploying contrasting tools of his trade. But few filmmakers have ever crafted a historical biopic as electrifying as this, a cradle-to-grave story of the controversial Muslim leader that paints on a giant canvas, without ever forfeiting the intimacy or humanity of its subjects. Washington had played Malcolm early in his career, in the off-Broadway play “When the Chickens Come Home to Roost,” and the years he’d spent studying Malcolm showed; he had the familiar speech cadences and rhetorical flourishes down to a tee. But the epic scope and length of Lee’s biopic allowed him to push deeper, to show the full range of how he became the forceful, confident figure familiar from documentary footage. Ernest Dickerson’s cinematography remains stunning (and it’s beautifully rendered by The Criterion Collection’s new 4K digital restoration), and Terence Blanchard’s score is still his most stirring. This is a filmmaker in full command of his gifts, and the richness of this work is impossible to understate. (Includes audio commentary, deleted scenes, new interviews, featurette, trailer, and feature-length 1972 “Malcolm X” documentary.)
“WALL-E”: A rare collab between the cinephile’s biggest heroes and villains, as Andrew Stanton’s 2008 Disney/Pixar effort joins the Criterion Collection. Say what you will about the team-up, this is one of the best films from a pretty spectacular Pixar run, its the story of a resourceful trash-collecting robot on the long-abandoned planet earth managing to both serve the needs of the plucky Disney hero and the none-too-subtle (not that it should be!) environmentalist message. The imagery and compositions are gorgeous (the great Roger Deakins was brought in as a visual consultant), the Thomas Newman score is impeccable, and the robot designs are smashing. (Includes audio commentaries, deleted scenes, featurettes, Stanton masterclass, short films, trailers, feature-length “The Pixar Story” documentary, and an essay by Sam Wasson.)
“High Plains Drifter”: This 1973 Western was only Clint Eastwood’s second directorial effort, but he was already displaying a keen understanding of both the Western mythos and how his persona fit into it. It’s too easy to call a ‘70s Western “subversive,” but how else do you approach a movie in which the ostensible hero is as big of an asshole as this one, taking full advantage of a targeted town’s desperation to milk them for every penny and ounce of goodwill? In a wild way, it becomes something closer to a comedy of manners – they keep giving him an inch, he keeps taking a mile, and they let him, lest they be perceived as impolite. Some of it doesn’t quite land, and the politics of the thing aren’t terribly subtle, but credit where due: its director/star knows we’ve seen these stories a million times, and he knows when and how to shake them up. (Includes audio commentaries, interviews, vintage featurette, “Trailers from Hell” commentaries, trailers, and radio and TV spots.)
“Mystery Men”: With a cast that included such late-‘90s comedy mainstays as Ben Stiller, Janeane Garafalo, and Eddie Izzard, and beloved character actors like Hank Azaria, William H. Macy, Geoffrey Rush, and Paul Reubens, Kinka Usher’s 1998 ensemble action/comedy felt like it should have been a slam dunk. When it wasn’t, its rep went toxic. But viewed now—especially after two-plus decades of seemingly non-stop comic book movies—this superhero spoof really sings, particularly when Garafalo and/or Macy are on screen. And the bulk of the cast remains astonishing; whatever its flaws may be, find me another occasion when Tom Waits, Cee-Lo, Lena Olin, Kel Mitchell, Louise Lasser, Wes Studi, and Ricky Jay all appeared in the same movie. (Includes audio commentary, deleted scens, new and archival featurettes, and trailer.)
ON BLU-RAY:
“The Rob Epstein – Jeffrey Friedman Collection”: Documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman – whose “The Celluloid Closet” is one of the highlights of the Sony Pictures Classics set – get their own spotlight in this collection of three films (all new on Blu-ray) from Milestone. The highlight is the 1989 Oscar winner for best documentary feature, “Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt,” which tells the stories of five people memorialized on the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, presenting a cross-section of victims and the survivors who tell their stories. Narrated by Dustin Hoffman, it’s poignant and touching but also infuriating, detailing the shameful responses to the crisis by a government that drug its feet and a media that didn’t care until the virus spread to “the general public.” “Where Are We? Our Trip Through America,” released in 1992, is lesser-known but riveting, as the filmmakers go on an 18-day journey through post-Gulf War America, mainly through areas where you wouldn’t expect to find two queer filmmakers from San Francisco; some of what they find is terrifying, but they find plenty of pockets of accommodation, empathy, and kindness. And the 2000 doc “Paragraph 175” delves deeper into history – and the history of impression – by tracking down the few gay survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, and telling their horrifying stories. All three films are first-rate; taken together, they’re a portfolio of two of our most important non-fiction filmmakers. (Includes audio commentaries, archival footage, “Common Threads” follow-up short documentary “Then and Now,” short documentary “Greetings from Washington D.C,” additional interviews, deleted scenes, and archival footage, and trailers.)
“The Films of Doris Wishman: The Daylight Years”: AGFA and Something Weird Video close out their trilogy of collections honoring the venerable exploitation filmmaker, moving backward through her filmography from the almost-porn sleaziness of “The Twilight Years” to the softcore and roughie pizzazz of “The Moonlight Years” to this selection of her early oeuvre of nudist pictures. In those desperate early-‘60s years, horny moviegoers had to get their skin via turgid “documentaries” about life on nudist colonies, but our Doris gets around that by wrapping her nudist footage with riffs on science fiction (“Nude on the Moon,” with astronauts in cheap scuba gear and nude women in antennae headbands), crime flicks (“Hideout in the Sun,” which is almost a parody of a low-budget heist movie), and star-gazing (“Blaze Starr Goes Wild,” featuring the burlesque queen who famously had an affair with Governor Earl Long). The conventions and taboos quickly become apparent, and Wishman entertainingly kids them; these movies aren’t high art, but they’re good trash. (Includes audio commentaries, archival interview, and trailers.)
“White Reindeer”: Writer and director Zach Clark (“Little Sister”) helmed this dark 2013 holiday comedy/drama, new on Blu from Factory 25. Anna Margaret Hollyman is spectacular as a content, happily married realtor whose life is disrupted by the unexpected, brutal murder of her husband – just before the holidays, natch. The vibe is quirky and funny, but it gets real raw, real quick, particularly when her grief turns into an exploration of things she might not want to know about the person she thought she knew best. Clark’s dialogue is dryly funny (“Autumn is my stripper name, my real name is Fantasia”) and his narrative undercuts obvious expectations at every turn; it’s a hidden gem, waiting to be discovered. (Includes commentary, deleted scenes, short film, trailer, and essays by Brandon Harris and Caroline Golum.)
“I Think We’re Alone Now”: “Tiffany and I have known each other most of her life, and we are in love with each other, and she’s a great singer!” announces Jeff Turner in the opening moments of Sean Donnelly’s 2008 documentary, and if that makes you uncomfortable, oh just you wait. Turner is a 50-year-old California man with Asperger’s Syndrome whose imagined relationship with the ‘80s pop sensation is so intense that he’s been charged with stalking and been on the receiving end of restraining orders; his story is told in parallel with another Tiffany obsessive, Kelly McCormack, and intersex fan from Colorado. “The difference between me and a stalker is that they don’t truly love her,” Kelly insists, and in moments like that, it’s easy to question Donnelly’s motives, or how wise it might be to indulge these subjects and their upsetting need for attention. But when Kelly explains, “I knew that she would accept me for who I am,” the film is suddenly about much more than Tiffany, or even obsessive fandom. It’s about celebrity culture, and the stories we tell ourselves about the famous people we desire. (Includes audio commentaries, updates, featurettes, deleted scenes, and music video.)
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