Digital Week – February 27

The Bosnian War waged in the mid ’90s in the former Yugoslavia not only destroyed lives and neighborhoods but also shook ordinary citizens’ souls to their core. Nenad Cicin-Sain’s riveting documentary looks at that fraught time through the lens of music—first through the ordinary people who used it as a mechanism to have some sort of normalcy during the war but also through the Irish band U2, whose ZOO-TV tour captured the zeitgeist of the 24-hour news cycle, which was exploited by American aid worker Bill S. Carter (on whose memoir this film is based). He managed to interview Bono, get comments from Sarajevo residents played on stadiums’ video screens via satellite during U2’s European tour to raise awareness and finally get the band to come to the beleaguered city for the a concert that would bring together thousands of jubilant fans. New, emotional interviews with many of the those involved—Bono, the Edge, Carter, news correspondent Christine Amanpour, and several Bosnian journalists and citizens—are contrasted with vividly horrific archival footage of the murderous siege of Sarajevo to paint an unforgettable picture of how music helps heal the worst wounds.

In Italian director Matteo Garrone’s intensely dramatic—if slightly manipulative—new feature, Senegalese teens Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall) take what little funds they have and try to get to Europe, little realizing the horrors that await them. They are captured, separated and tortured in Libya, abandoned but reunited in North Africa, and finally go via the Mediterranean to southern Italy—but only if 16-year-old novice Seydou can pilot the boat filled with dozens of migrants. Garrone captures the humanity of these people desperate for a new start alongside the inhumanity of many others. If manipulation and contrivance didn’t intrude, “Io Capitano” would be a masterpiece, not simply a superior melodrama. But there’s that staggeringly moving final shot of Seydou, the face of non-actor Sarr going through so many conflicting emotions that he should be in the running for every award there is.

The famed Ukrainian restaurant on Second Avenue in Manhattan’s East Village is the subject of Michael Fiore’s engaging but often enraging documentary narrated by David Duchovny that shows how the current owner Jason and his father Tom, the previous owner, allow their place to double as a safe haven for locals after the COVID-19 lockdown and for fellow Ukrainians after Putin’s forces invaded their home country in February 2022. Fiore perceptively follows Tom, Jason and several of their employees as they first navigate COVID and its aftermath, then find themselves worrying constantly about family members still in Ukraine when the invasion starts. Some are able to leave and arrive in New York, where they must acclimate to a new country and culture, even though the familial feel of Veselka itself and their loved ones who are already working there helps.

Hungarian director György Fehér, an associate of Béla Tarr—whose use of slow tracking shots and stark B&W camerawork became ubiquitous in his films—made his debut in 1990 with this strikingly composed procedural. Although he only made one more film (“Passion,” a fiery if convoluted 1998 adaptation of “The Postman Always Rings Twice”) before his death in 2003 at age 63, the accomplished Fehér has made a resonant exploration of a detective who investigates horrific child murders. Instead of Tarr’s existential dread, Fehér zeroes in on society’s alienation; there are several extraordinary sequences—shot by master cinematographer Miklós Gurbán, who also did the grading of this brand-new, beautifully restored hi-def transfer—including very unsettling close-up “interviews” with two young girls. Extras include interviews with Gurbán and film editor Mária Czielik, along with two early Fehér shorts: 1969’s “Öregek” and 1970’s “Tomikám.”

The music of Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky is inherently theatrical—witness his operas and ballets that are centerpieces of the modern stage repertoire—but his songs are less well-known; but even resourceful director Christof Roy comes to grief trying to stitch together several of the master’s songs and a few chamber pieces into a workable narrative. In this 2021 staging in Frankfurt, Germany, the music is lovely, the singing (especially by soprano Olesya Golovneva and mezzo Kelsey Lauritano) is gorgeous, but it comes off as a stylized recital, the performers moving robotically onstage while two pianists alternate in their accompaniment. It’s certainly nice to hear, but not so much to see. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.

The first opera of Richard Wagner’s epic Ring cycle is also by far the shortest: he himself refers to it as a “prelude,” a 2-1/2-hour set-up of the story to come in the next three mammoth-length music dramas. In this 2021 Berlin Opera staging by director Stefan Herheim, the setting is modernly non-descript, which to my eyes loses some of the grandeur of a timeless conflict among gods and humans. But the music making by the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin conducted by Donald Runnicles is first-rate and the singing by a hugely capable cast is led by Derek Welton’s Wotan, the supreme god, and Markus Brück as the dwarf Alberich, whose curse fatally haunts the rest of the tetralogy. There’s excellent hi-def video and audio.

Steven Soderbergh’s nail-biting suspense drama, which realistically paints a horrifying glimpse at the outbreak of an unknown disease that engulfs much of the planet, has only grown in stature since the COVID-19 pandemic. In a series of plausibly shot, edited and acted sequences, the movie scarily shows how our globally connected 21st-century world looks like when it’s affected in such a monstrous way. A superb ensemble cast, from Matt Damon and Kate Winslet to Laurence Fishburne and Jennifer Ehle, make this a most entertaining but truly frightening film as well as an uncanny predictor in its final scenes. On UHD, Soderbergh’s stark, documentary-like style has brilliantly preserved; the extras comprise archival featurettes about the film and the science behind it, including interviews with cast, crew and experts.