Digital Week – April 16

John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1972 One to One benefit concert at Madison Square Garden culminated months of left-wing activism after they moved to NYC, as per Kevin Macdonald’s both enlightening and frustrating documentary, which alternates restored video and audio from Lennon’s final full live concert performance with archival footage from that era. Macdonald uses vintage clips to provide political and cultural context for the couple’s wide-ranging activism, although the many references to notable names and events overstuff this 100-minute film. As for the music, Macdonald takes John and Yoko’s powerful performances and adds (you guessed it) archival video to comment on—at times forcefully and at others in a strained manner—what was going on. John’s propulsive “Instant Karma” features scenes of destruction in Vietnam and the U.S., while his raucous heroin-habit tune “Cold Turkey” includes glimpses of the 1972 Republican Convention. Even the finale, “Give Peace a Chance,” showcasing a joyful Stevie Wonder scat-singing over the familiar chorus, is only excerpted—maybe upcoming streaming and Blu-ray releases will include all the full performances as important additions to Beatles history.

Actress Daryl Hannah followed boyfriend Neil Young around on his 2023 solo tour of the West Coast, and the resulting B&W documentary is the last word in self-indulgence: watching Neil chat up his bus driver gets old quickly—although driver Jerry Don Borden is interesting enough to deserve more screen time—and the dullness of being on the road is conveyed all too well. Luckily, Hannah smartly shoots most of the concert footage up-close—the intimacy suits Young’s performance, which consists of him, his acoustic guitar, harmonica and an old grand piano. But don’t expect hits: aside from “Mister Soul” and “Comes a Time,” casual fans won’t know songs like the recent “Love Earth,” which gets a half-hearted call-and-response from the audience.

Director-cowriter Leonardo Van Dijl’s engrossing exploration of an elite teenager at a Belgian tennis academy and how she deals with—or not—the dysfunctional, woefully unbalanced power dynamics with her coach is grounded by the astoundingly subtle performance by Tessa Van den Broeck as Julie. Van Dijl and Van Den Broeck (who’s a tennis player, not an actress) team up for a superbly detailed study of the painful sounds of silence—and how the “thwack” of a racket hitting a ball has metaphorical reverberations that can be heard far from the court.

Coming so soon on the heels of “A Real Pain,” with Jesse Eisenberg and Oscar winner Keiran Culkin as estranged cousins on a road trip to explore their Polish ancestry is this diffuse and blurry buddy flick about estranged childhood friends who forego their own adult responsibilities by taking a car ride from Los Angeles to central California. The problem is that neither character is individualized enough for us to care about their journey, their friendship or the people they meet along the way. Michael Cera has played this kind of jittery character many times already, while writer-director-costar Michael Angarano’s manipulative liar is not as witty or charming as he thinks; and their leading ladies—Kristin Stewart, Maya Erskine (Angarano’s real-life wife), AJ Mendez and Iman Karram—are given short shrift, when any of them could be the center of a less one-dimensional character study.

This 2020 documentary celebrating the art of drumming hears from an impressive cross-section of rock and pop drummers like the Police’s Stewart Copeland, Deep Purple’s Ian Paice and Queen’s Roger Taylor to Steven Perkins (Jane’s Addiction), Cindy Blackman (Santana) and Samantha Maloney (Hole). Director Mark Lo’s fleet, short film is informative and surprising in equal measure, with appropriate stops for the great drummer forerunners like Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich to the earliest rock masters (Ringo, Charlie Watts, Keith Moon, Ginger Baker) to the ultimate hard-rock drummer, John Bonham. Clips of them performing are always welcome, while the thoughts of some interviewees, particularly Copeland, Perkins and Maloney, come across strongly. Of course, things are missed—no mention of Phil Collins’ gated drum sound that dominated the ‘80s or any prog drummers, notably Rush’s Neil Peart—but then it would have been much longer. And RIP to Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins and Blondie’s Clem Burke, both included here.

In what may be the quintessential French movie, Laure Calamy plays a prostitute desperate to get her ne’er-do-well teenage son into a famous cooking school—so she debases herself by working for a tough pimp at a sleazy German nightclub while dealing with her son’s laziness and later ungratefulness. Director-writer Cécile Ducrocq doesn’t so much wallow in the sexual underground as record it passively, while Calamy—always a magnetic presence—is reduced to striking poses that alternate between sexy and tired. But there’s a nagging question: however well-intentioned, should we care about a mother who needs to raise 50,000 Euros so her son can go to a posh school he’ll probably flunk out of anyway?

Writer-director Brandon Cronenberg is a chip off the old block with his 2012 debut film, as unpleasant and sour as advertised: it follows a sales rep for a clinic that harvests celebrities’ infections to inject into their most maniacal fans. Although his film is cleverly constructed, Cronenberg has an eye based on other clinical directors like his dad to Kubrick, and there’s no one onscreen worth getting involved with. The visuals look impressively steely in UHD; extras—on a separate Blu-ray disc that also includes the film—comprise Cronenberg and director of photography Karim Hussain’s commentary; Cronenberg’s short, “Broken Tulips”; interviews; featurettes; and deleted scenes with optional commentary.