Digital Week – April 26

This 1972 concert film of Pink Floyd performing at the ancient Roman amphitheater in Pompeii—with no audience present—has been restored and remixed, giving fans a superior visual and aural experience. Adrian Maben’s documentary is a true artefact of its time, with an hour’s worth of Pompeii footage supplemented by interviews with Gilmour, Mason, Waters and Wright as well as glimpses of them at Abbey Road recording “Dark Side of the Moon.” There’s a surfeit of crude, cliched visuals (split screens, front projection, superimposition, slow-motion) that haven’t aged well—but the film anticipates the MTV video era and remains an eye- (and ear-) opening document of Pink Floyd right before the group became rock royalty. 

The devastating fallout of a school shooting is the subject of this earnest, often static but unsettling drama by actor Michael Shannon, making his feature directing debut; based on a play and script by Brett Neveu, Shannon’s film centers on Janice, mother of Eric, who fatally shot three of his classmates. Her interactions with her husband, pastor, victims’ mothers and her son—both in prison and as a young child in her memories—make up this occasionally piercing but also plodding character study. Unsurprisingly, Shannon’s cast is superb, led by Judy Greer (Janice)—also impressive are Alexander Sarsgaard (husband), Paul Sparks (pastor), Tracy Letts (preacher) and Annie Parisse and Kate Arrington (victims’ moms).

The perfect documentary subject—endlessly personable and confessional—is alternative music pioneer Ani DiFranco, the Buffalo-born musician turned entrepreneur (she has her own record label, Righteous Babe) who’s released dozens of albums in the past three decades. In Dana Flor’s intimate fly-on-the-wall portrait, DiFranco—now in her early 50s—must navigate how to remain relevant in a business very different from when she began and how to keep her artistic integrity while raising her two daughters. The film’s title refers to the toll-free phone number for her Buffalo office in the early days; it also describes the fierce independence that’s marked DiFranco’s career.

In director-cowriter Léa Domenach’s feature debut, Catherine Deneuve is a delight as Bernadette Chirac, France’s First Lady from 1995-2007; her deadpan delivery borders on bemusement as Bernadette navigates the tricky journey from being a loyal president’s wife to becoming a cultural icon in her own right. Although Deneuve unsurprisingly wears Karl Lagerfeld’s clothes perfectly—and director Domenach shows cleverness in her tongue-in-cheek use of a church choir—but even superstar Deneuve’s glamour can’t make this light satire more than an amusingly slight concoction.

David Cronenberg’s latest is an inert meditation on grief (his wife Carolyn Zeifman died in 2017) that plays like a lumpen parody of a Cronenberg film, with howlers in the dialogue, embarrassingly stiff acting by Vincent Cassel as the director’s stand-in, and a bunch of plot and thematic threads that pile up but go nowehere. Even a bizarrely entertaining turn by Guy Pearce and appearances by the appealing Diane Kruger (in two roles) and the always welcome Sandrine Holt (in a lazily-written part) can’t drum up much interest. Despite Cronenberg’s attempt at dealing with the finality of death in his singular way, his film has the slick look of a feature-length Tesla commercial (Cassel drives a white Tesla throughout), which is the lasting memory of this farrago.

If unblinking body horror is your thing, then this twisted take on “Cinderella” could fill the bill—writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt follows a desperate young woman who has always been second fiddle to her beautiful stepsister and how she takes the ultimate desperate measures to ensure that (of course) the prince’s glass slipper fits her foot—even though her mother already “fixed” her nose, teeth and eyelashes to no avail. Done with a minimum of humor and maximum of nastiness, it’s skillfully, even stylishly, made and enacted with commitment by its cast—too bad the final shot fails at being simultaneously dark and darkly humorous. 

Ismail Merchant (who died in 2005 at age 68) was the producer of his professional and personal partner James Ivory’s films, including the award-winning “A Room With a View” and “Howards End.” But Merchant also directed his own features, including this pair of very different character studies. While In Custody is rather stuffy and clunky as it explores the clash between a skeptical interviewer and a famous Urdu poet in India, The Proprietor showcases a wonderful Jeanne Moreau as a French Holocaust survivor who leaves Manhattan to return to her Parisian childhood home—along with its attendant ghosts. Both films have good hi-def transfers; extras include interviews with Ivory and Merchant; a commentary on “The Proprietor”; and Merchant’s 1974 short film, “Mahatma and the Mad Boy.”