Digital Week – March 18

Chinese-American high-schooler Joan yearns to be as popular as white girl Olivia, so in desperation Joan goes to a clinic to get something called ethnic modification surgery, transforming herself into Jo, the girl of her own dreams, in writer-director Amy Wang’s unsubtle but effective black comedy that takes more from “Mean Girls” than last year’s overrated body-horror cautionary tale “The Substance.” Wang’s script is as blunt as a sledgehammer, but her unsettling film has the courage of its convictions and is led by resonant performances from Shirley Chen (Joan) and McKenna Grace (Jo).

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s writer-director follow-up to “The Lost Daughter” pulps Mary Shelley’s classic novel into a steampunk mashup of “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Bride of Frankenstein” that’s so on the nose and incoherent that it’s starts out risible and ends up enervating. Pointlessly using Shelley herself as a framing device to comment on and propel the story (such as it is) forward, Gyllenhaal lazily hangs several disparate but desperate set pieces onto the flimsy plot—Frankenstein’s creature (a hammy Christian Bale) and his undead female companion (an even hammier Jessie Buckley, who also overacts as Shelley) run from the law—including shoehorning in an unnecessary “Young Frankenstein” homage/rip-off (set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” duh). There’s a joylessness to the entire enterprise that’s surprising—even Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard, seems bored whenever he’s onscreen. 

A middle-aged couple, Chris and Kathryn, kidnap Tommy, a 19-year-old hooligan, to try and rehabilitate him, keeping him literally chained up in their basement with a collar around his neck—so the title of the film (and its original title, Good Boy) already hints we’re not dealing with a subtle character study. The first English-language film by Polish director Jan Komasa (who made the intriguingly offbeat “Corpus Christi”) has visual panache but is saddled with Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid’s soggy script, in which everyone—Chris, Kathryn, Tommy, the couple’s young son Jonathan and their foreign housemaid Rina—acts so contradictorily that it’s less reality than arbitrariness. The cast, led by Stephen Graham (Chris), Andrea Riseborough (Kathryn) and Anson Boon (Tommy), does its best with what’s basically a shaggy-dog story. 

This often absurd but entertaining drama, based on Freida McFadden’s lively page-turner of a novel, tries a sleight of hand by pitting an unhinged mother, Nina, against her new, desperate housemaid, Millie—as Nina’s angelic husband, Andrew and young daughter Cece look on. Director Paul Feig could never be accused of subtlety, so when it’s obvious early on who the villain is, the rest of this overlong flick becomes a slog, especially when everything is spelled out with clunky flashbacks. Still, the twisty revelations and consequences that are meted out are fun to watch, as are Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney’s paired performances as Nina and Millie. The Blu-ray looks good; extras include two commentaries featuring Feig, deleted scenes, short featurettes and a 40-minute look at how the adaptation went from McFadden’s book to screen.

In Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi’s glorious 1983 adaptation of Yasutaka Tsutsui’s 1967 sci-fi novel, teenage superstar-to-be Tomoyo Harada is a delight as Kazuko, a teenage student who faints one day in her high school’s lab and soon finds herself moving back and forth in time, reliving days in her past as well as finding herself in future moments. Obayashi’s visual dazzlement beautifully conveys Kazuko’s bewilderment as well as trenchantly observing how a tentative romance could break the time-travel cycle. There’s an excellent UHD transfer and an audio commentary on the 4K disc; the accompanying Blu-ray disc includes the commentary, two visual essays, two vintage Obayashi interviews and a featurette about Harada.