Digital Week – November 4

David Robert Mitchell wrote and directed this clever monster movie that plays like a lengthy “Twilight Zone” episode as it spins a bizarre yarn of a middle-class middle America neighborhood in 1982 that finds itself back in the prehistoric era and the families must fend for themselves against killer dinosaurs. Of course it’s nonsensically silly but it works, mostly because Mitchell keeps it relatively short, populates it with good actors like Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor and concentrates on thrills instead of explanations (notwithstanding the goofy ending). It all looks magnificently treacherous in 4K; extras comprise a trio of on-set featurettes. 

When Mark Sevenson and his family move into a new neighborhood, they discover that their eponymous neighbors are so besotted by the Christmas season that they celebrate every day of the year—and they will violently make trouble for anyone who doesn’t go along. It sounds like a dopily dark comedy, but instead director Kevin Lewis and writer Zack Imbrogno have made a sour, mostly unfunny and unnecessarily bloody attempt to combine the holidays and horror. The cast is defeated by the unoriginal material, but Rob Riggle manages to squeeze a couple of laughs out of a nutty Santa.

Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu returns with his latest provocative morality play that dramatically reverberates long after it ends, like his earlier “4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days” and “Beyond the Hills.” Romanian husband Mihai, his Norwegian wife Lisbet and their five children have moved back to Norway, where their conservative religious beliefs butt up against their new progressive community, coming to a head when the parents are accused of abuse and their kids are removed from their home. Based on a true story, Mungiu’s film is as complicated and messy as real life—although a subplot involving their neighbors’ elderly father too obviously underlines the difficult relationships between parents and children—and it’s acted superbly by the entire cast, led by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as the beleaguered Mihai and Lisbet.

Chinese master Zhang Yimou’s ravishing 1991 drama, set during the 1920s, follows Songlian, the young fourth wife of a wealthy man who lives on an estate with all his wives—or mistresses, as they’re referred to—and the power plays, double dealings and relationships that happen. Zhang has always been a primarily visual director, and the variously subtle hues of red that he and ace cinematographer Zhao Fei film may be the apogee of their filmmaking style. Zhang’s then-muse, the stunning Gong Li, is a spectacular Songlian, while the new restoration makes Zhang’s film look more dazzling than ever.

French composer Georges Bizet never got to appreciate the success of his now-classic opera, since he died of a heart attack at age 37 a few months after its failed premiere. Of course, it’s now among a handful of recognizable musical stage dramas, with indelible characters, a romantic but tragic story and the most intoxicating earworms. In director Damiano Michieletto’s serviceable 2024 staging set in Franco’s Spain at London’s Royal Opera House, Bashkir mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina makes a splendid Carmen, dramatic, fiery, humorous and ultimately tragic. There’s superb hi-def video and audio; extras are two backstage featurettes.

For her ambitious biopic about Franz Kafka, director Agnieszka Holland refused to take the obvious route in dramatizing the ordinary existence and extraordinary work of a writer whose very name has become an adjective that even those unfamiliar with his writings know. Her energetic direction—heightened by Tomasz Naumiuk’s expert cinematography—unpacks Franz’s rather conventional life and quite unconventional art in ways both illuminating and irritating. Several characters directly address the camera as if giving first-person accounts in a documentary, while a short story like the intense “In the Penal Colony” is recreated in a too-literally blood-dripping manner. Intentional anachronisms abound as well, making Holland’s kitchen-sink approach as eccentrically strange as her subject, played with enormous intelligence by Idan Weiss, a twitchy Kafkaesque lookalike.