Every week, 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, catalogue 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.
This week’s disc and streaming recommendations include a star-filled drama that came and went quietly earlier this year, a new drama from a French master, a fresh look at a sophomore stumble, and the usual assortment of catalogue oddities. Let’s take a look:
ON MUBI:
“The Salt of Tears”: Philippe Garrel’s latest romantic drama covers fairly familiar territory – new romances, old flames, third wheels – but a film like this isn’t really about blowing our collective hair back with plot twists anyway. It’s about observation, of mood and detail, and it does both well. And its protagonist (or, perhaps, antihero) is a fascinating figure, easy to dismiss as a monster, but not quite that; he’s simply cavalier and insensitive, in that very specific, horny, mid-twenties way. Garrel puts us into his head without apologizing for him, treating him with empathy if not sympathy, which is hard to do.
ON DVD / VOD:
“Our Friend”: There’s certainly no shortage of films about beautiful people and the terminal illnesses that take them from the rest of us – “Love Story” seems like the modern template, but hell, you can go all the way back to “Camille.” But this one’s worth your time anyway, for two reasons. Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite is a documentarian by trade – best known for the explosive “Blackfish” – and you can feel her quest for authenticity and detail in each scene, pulling the picture gingerly back from the brink of cliché. And the trio of performances at its center (from Jason Segel, Casey Affleck, and Dakota Johnson) find the emotional truth and trickiness in each of these relationships, elevating “Our Friend” above your typical, four-hankie, movie-of-the-week territory. (Includes featurette.)
ON 4K:
“Spaceballs”: Mel Brooks’ 1987 takeoff on the “Star Wars” movies (and the ubiquitous marketing and merchandising therein) is something of a hinge movie: not up the sky highs of “Young Frankenstein,” “Blazing Saddles,” or “The Producers” (below), but not yet to the depths of “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” or “Dracula: Dead and Loving It.” Even the lesser gags get a considerable lift from his stellar cast, including Bill Pullman in the Han Solo role, John Candy as his half-dog sidekick, and Rick Moranis as “Dark Helmet.” And while you don’t tend to think of Brooks movies for their mind-blowing visuals, KL Studio Classics’ 4K UHD Blu-ray looks and sounds sharp as a tack. (Includes audio commentary, featurettes, interviews, bloopers, storyboard comparisons, and trailers.)
ON BLU-RAY:
“Southland Tales”: “This is the way the world ends,” goes the opening of Richard Kelly’s much-anticipated, and then much-derided, follow-up to “Donnie Darko.” Much of that derision came from its Cannes screening, which was so poorly received that Kelly reworked the picture and cut something like 25 minutes for its theatrical release – which was still poorly received. Arrow’s new Blu-ray includes not only that cut but the original, Cannes version, and even in that longer form it remains wildly undisciplined, full of table-setting and loose ends and strange sidebars and inside jokes. But to its credit, it’s a major movie that’s genuinely subversive, Unapologetically and unsubtly political, speaking specifically to the American mindset of the PATRIOT Act era; it plays now as a time capsule, a pure shot of paranoid, W-era Id. Kelly fills the cast with “Saturday Night Live” alumni, and perhaps that’s the spirit to approach it in: hit and miss, sometimes wildly so, but capable of landing a bulls-eye on occasion. (Includes
“Doctor X”: Warner Archives, UCLA Film and Television Archive, and The Film Foundation team up to bring this 1932 effort from director Michael Curtiz to Blu-ray – in its original two-strip Technicolor format, which gives the picture a distinct, other-worldly air of green-tinged noir, making it seem like the embryo for “Dark City” and even “The Matrix.” The story concerns the search for “The Moon Killer,” who strikes on the full moon and deftly deploys surgical techniques on his victims, leading police and media to believe the killer could be a doctor; the title character (Lionel Atwill) volunteers to aid in the investigation via a series of wildly dangerous “experiments.” Curtiz’s craft is just staggering, as is his narrative efficiency; this is a mad scientist horror movie, and Agatha Christie-style whodunit, and a fast-talking newspaper picture, all in one, all in 77 minutes. (Includes black-and-white version, audio commentaries, featurette, restoration demonstration, and trailer.)
“The Producers”: It’s a Mel Brooks two-fer from KL Studio Classics, as they present a new Blu for his 1968 directorial debut (and Oscar winner for Best Original Screenplay). It’s a double-dip – Shout Factory put out a collector’s edition Blu-ray back in 2013 – but it looks great, and the proudly vulgar picture more than stands up (Brooks famously defended it by saying “my picture rises below vulgarity”). And suffice it to say that its story, of a delightfully disreputable Broadway producer (Zero Mostel) whose accountant (Gene Wilder) convinces him that a giant flop could ultimately make more money than a hit, has only grown more relevant in our current, grifter-ridden hellscape. (Includes audio commentary, featurettes, radio spot, and trailer.)
“The Wild Life”: Cameron Crowe’s second produced screenplay was envisioned as something of a follow-up to his “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” debut, this time following a group of recent high school graduates into the precarious world of living on their own. (Sean Penn’s brother, the late great Chris Penn, was even cast as a Spicolli-style party animal.) It didn’t make the same impact, probably because producer-turned-director Art Linson didn’t have the sure hand of “Fast Times” helmer Amy Heckerling, and the novice filmmaker never quite musters up the comic momentum required by the big blowout in the third act. But there’s a lot to like anyway: the nice guy/hedonist tension between Penn and Eric Stoltz, the sweet chemistry between Stoltz and Lea Thompson (before both their aborted reteaming in “Back to the Future” and their eventual one in “Some Kind of Wonderful”), and, as with “Fast Times,” a friendship between two young women that’s uncommonly insightful and observant. (The prohibitively expensive music clearances have kept this one MIA on home video for quite a while, and while the replacement cues are unfortunate, none are particularly distracting.) (Includes audio commentary, interview, radio spots, and theatrical trailer.)
“Forbidden Fruit Vol. 9: The Lash of the Penitentes”: “None of the characters in this picture are portraits from life,” notes the opening disclaimer, so you can’t say they didn’t warn you, as Kino-Lorber and Something Weird’s collection of vintage exploitation pictures carries on with this 1936 oddity. Los Hermanos Penitentes were a religious sect in northern New Mexico that captured the popular imagination with their rituals of masochism and flagellation; cinematographer Roland Price (whose “Marihuana: Weed With Roots in Hell” was featured earlier in the series) shot those rituals documentary style, then grafted a story of a murdered journalist atop it, awkwardly bridging the clearly mismatched footage with sensationalistic (and, occasionally, fumbled) narration. It’s a wild piece of work – not much as narrative, but, as is so often the case with these releases, tremendously instructive about the kind of material deemed taboo, and thus desirable, once upon a time. (Includes extended and condensed versions, audio commentary, and trailers.)
