Digital Week – April 3

Alice Rohrwacher has been one of our brightest filmmers since her unforgettable debut, “Corpo Celeste,” debuted at the 2011 New York Film Festival. Her 2014 follow-up, “The Wonders,” relied too heavily on forced Felliniesque whimsy, but 2018’s “Happy as Lazzaro” got the balance between reality and surrealism right. Her latest cinematic fable again traverses that thin line and is as pointed and poignant as anything she’s done. It follows Arthur (Josh O’Connor, excellent in a bilingual role), an English archeologist who robs Truscan sites of artifacts while pining for his girlfriend Beniamina, his own chimera—an impossible-to-find treasure—and remaining in touch with her family, especially boisterous grandmother Flora (Isabella Rossellini, in her liveliest performance in years). Rohrwacher’s sumptuous film is alternately humorous and sad, angry and melancholic—an enormously affecting exploration of coming to terms with one’s past.

Necessary but scary is a good description of Charlie Sadoff’s incriminating study about how and why so many veterans of the U.S. armed forces gravitate toward militias and other white supremacist groups, which look ahead—or even forward—to what many of them consider the next civil war. Sadoff talks with military vets, generals and civilians, along with experts on the subjects (especially Kathleen Belew, who has written expertly about the white power and paramilitary movements), all illuminating a subject that will probably be relevant indefinitely—unfortunately. But why Sadoff ends the film with the fact-free rantings of the unhinged Eric “General E” Braden is a real head-scratcher.

The awful story of Grace Millane—a 21-year-old English woman who was brutally murdered while vacationing in New Zealand by her Tinder date—is recounted in Helena Coan’s documentary that’s cannily structured like a procedural. After Grace goes missing, the police question a man who was seen on CCTV cameras with her hours before her disappearance—and his version of the story is methodically debunked by the cops and by Coan, who uses the voluminous footage captured of the suspect’s movements to definitely show that he was, in fact, her murderer. What’s most heartbreaking is his not-unusual excuse that they had rough sex and her death was accident—something she could not rebut.

Now 91, Italian director Tinto Brass has made playfully erotic films full of pulchritude falling just short of hardcore for several decades, and this 1992 riff on the Mozart opera “Cosi fan tutte”—also the film’s original Italian title—is a prime example: Diana, the gorgeous, teasing wife of a bespectacled husband, titillates him with made-up tales of sexual escapades, but when he angrily throws her out after seeing marks on her body, she goes further than before. As usual with Brass, there’s a surfeit of simulated sexual sequences, and his lead performer, the Romanian actress Claudia Koll, is a histrionic knockout. The superb UHD transfer allows viewers to gaze at Koll as intimately as her director did; extras include a commentary, Brass interview and on-set footage.

Italian composer Ferrucio Busoni’s greatest opera—which was completed after he died in 1924—is rarely produced for some reason but has two meaty roles for the leading protagonist and antagonist. This 2023 staging in Florence, directed by Davide Livermore, is a well-paced reading of this complex parable about the nature of good and evil. Busoni’s imposing music is performed superbly by the orchestra and chorus of Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, conducted by Cornelius Meister, while the exemplary cast is led by Dietrich Henschel’s Faust and Daniel Brenna’s Mephistopheles. The hi-def video and audio are also excellent.

Norwegian composer Carl Nielsen wrote two operas, neither of which is frequently performed—the underrated Biblical tragedy, “Saul and David,” and the frisky comic romp, “Maskarade,” the latter getting an enjoyable 2021 production by director Tobias Kratzer at Frankfurt Opera. Despite his reputation as a self-serious composer, Nielsen’s engaging music keeps the pace moving fluidly, and Kratzer’s staging is abetted by a fine and large vocal cast and the Frankfurt Opera orchestra and chorus led by conductor Titus Engel. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.

These Chinese films home in on the basics of storytelling to create effective flicks for unfinicky audiences. In “Polar Rescue,” an 8-year-old boy wanders off into the wilderness after his dad punishes him for his misbehavior, and while they search for him, guilt becomes an overwhelming factor; despite some sloppy writing, director Chi-Leung Law constructs a tidy thriller that has the guts to end on a down note. Liu Xiaoshi’s “Born to Fly” has exciting aerial sequences that compensate for more moribund segments on earth as daring pilots test updated fighter jets to try and keep pace with the meddling American air force. Both films have crisp, clean hi-def transfers.