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 weekly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.
This week: One of last year’s big Oscar winners, an indie drama, fierce documentary that should’ve been at this year’s Oscars, and catalog titles running the gamut from Scorsese to Stallone.
ON AMAZON PRIME:
“Honey Boy”: Few traditions are more time-honored than turning your pain into art, but few recent artists have made such a tangy glass of lemonade out of the lemons of their lives than Shia LaBeouf. He wrote this script for this semi-autobiographical story of a movie star (and former child actor) coming to terms with the damage inflicted by his emotionally and physically abusive father. He also plays the role of the father, an act of onscreen exorcism that’s both emotionally shattering and, often, darkly funny. It sounds like a vanity project, and it could have been, were it not for the distinctive voice and unmistakable style of director Alma Har’el; her previous work was mostly in the realm of narrative/documentary hybrid, and that grounding in the real (and her specific, off-kilter worldview) keeps “Honey Boy” on firm footing.
ON NETFLIX:
“Nighthawks”: Bruce Malmuth directs Sylvester Stallone and Billy Dee Williams is this sleazy ‘80s New York cop movie, with all the grime and decay that phrase suggests. Rocky and Lando play a pair of undercover cops who “work decoy,” flushing out muggers and scumbags until they’re reassigned to an inter-agency group tracking a flashy international terrorist (Rutger Hauer). It’s atmospheric and effective, as our heroes cruise discos and case dance floors (kind of a “Looking For Mr. Goodbomb” situation), and if you’ve seen “Terror In the Aisles” – which excerpts it copiously and somewhat inexplicably – you’ll know that yes, we see Sly in a dress. He wears it well!
ON 4K:
“Shutter Island”: It’s tempting to dismiss this Gothic thriller from director Martin Scorsese as an exercise in pure style – and make no mistake, he’s clearing have a blast making a genre picture, teeing up the creaky doors and raging storms and nightmarish visions. But this is a haunted movie about a haunted man, and the more time we spend over the shoulder of its protagonist (Leonardo DiCaprio, doing top-tier work), the more emotional and affecting it becomes, up and through its devastating climax. Scorsese’s influences, as always, aren’t hard to track; what’s refreshing is how he transforms the post-WWII trauma subtext of those inspirations into text, making what first seems an atmospheric lark into something all of a piece with his most psychologically incisive works.
ON DVD / VOD:
“What You Gonna Do When the World’s On Fire?”: Sometimes, the best thing a true ally can do is listen. That’s what director Roberto Minervini does in this searing documentary, shot in the south in the summer of 2017, as his cameras follow The New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense through planning sessions, protests, confrontations, and pushbacks. It’d be easy to hype this up or make it a finger-waving polemic. But instead, he invites his subjects to talk, and they have stories to tell, of trauma and prejudice and distress and desperation, and the lens does not blink. Both observational and stylized (the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography is by Diego Romero), this is a scorching, timely film.
ON BLU-RAY:
“Roma”: Netflix and the Criterion Collection join forces for several long-overdue disc releases for their prestige originals, starting with Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Best Director, and Best Cinematography. In addition to performing both of those jobs, Cuarón also wrote this memory play, based on his middle-class childhood (and the giant shifts that altered all that), but seen through the eyes of Cleo (Oscar nominee Yalitza Aparicio), the family’s housekeeper, babysitter, and general caretaker. Yet there’s much more to her life than that, and “Roma” is – as many of our best films are – a story of empathy, of learning to understand the struggles and heartaches of those we take for granted.
“Legal Eagles”: Ivan Reitman’s 1986 follow-up to “Ghostbusters” was rather a notorious boondoggle – a slick, star vehicle that cost about twice as much as it should’ve, and grossed about half what everyone was expecting. It’s not a classic, but its new Blu-ray release from KL Studio Classics does make a case for reconsideration. Screenwriters Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. were clearly aiming for a contemporary Hepburn and Tracy vibe with this story of two warring attorneys who find themselves on the same side of a high-profile case and suffice it to say that the writers of “Top Gun” were not really the guys for that job. But Reitman directs with a light touch and stars Robert Redford and Debra Winger generate workable sparks and some fine comic beats (his reaction to finding a literal ticking bomb is priceless). In other words, it’s diverting enough – a perfectly enjoyable TBS Sunday afternoon movie.
