Digital Week – January 22

For his first English-language feature, veteran Spanish director Pedro Almodovar cast Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton to headline a maudlin drama about how the relationship between two women who haven’t seen each other in years is tested when one, stricken by a rare and fatal cancer, asks the other to assist in her suicide. It’s beautifully shot by Edu Grau and Almodovar’s eye is as sharp as ever, but the script is crammed with cliched and occasionally laughable dialogue—still, it’s always worth watching Swinton and Moore do their stuff both together and apart, excepting the wincingly bad sequence when Swinton play her character’s daughter.

In actress and screenwriter Aurélie Saada’s pithy 2021 directorial debut, the great Françoise Fabian takes on the title role of the Goldberg family’s matriarch, whose life changes profoundly when her beloved husband of many decades suddenly dies and she must face widowhood and her judgmental adult children. Even if some of what Saada shows of Rose not acting her age is borderline soap opera, but no matter what, Fabian commands the screen as she did as the irresistible Maud in Eric Rohmer’s 1969 “My Night at Maud’s”—right up until the very last image of Rose (and Fabian) fiercely looking directly at the camera…and us.

Jim McKay’s low-budget, fiercely independent study of a group of high school girls debuted at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival and now returns in a new transfer; it was rehearsed extensively by the cast, written by McKay and shot in suburban New Jersey. The result has a pleasing authenticity of place and character, but the situations and dialogue remain on a superficial level. Still, Lily Taylor, Anna Grace and Bruklin Harris make a forceful trio—and Aunjanue Ellis, seen at the beginning, is equally good—letting us care about these young women.

When young locksmith Mady answers an evening call in a Brussels apartment, he finds himself mixed up with violent thug Yannick, whose money was taken from the place and who blames Mady—the locksmith spends the rest of the night trying to track down the cash and clear his name, all while the city bursts with violent protests and civil unrest. Michiel Blanchart’s tautly made thriller is quite exciting, but the chase scenes—like a ridiculous one after our hero steals a bike—become risible. Still, setting the action during a single night works well, and with a charismatic lead performance by Jonathan Feltre as Mady and a forceful turn by Romain Duris as Yannick, “Night Call’s” 95 minutes fly by.

Spanish writer-director Eduardo Casanova’s surreal journey into the toxic relationship between smothering mother Libertad and her teenage son Mateo has its arresting moments but provides diminishing dramatic returns as it splinters into plots that follow Mateo’s dying dad Roberto and his pregnant wife as well as a family in Kim Jong-Il’s Korea. The latter subplot feels dragged in for reasons known only to the director, who also introduces a sympathetic psychiatrist and a brain tumor, both triggering more horrible actions from Libertad for unearned shock value. Ángela Molina, who plays Libertad, also starred in “That Obscure Object of Desire,” the final film of surrealist master Luis Buñuel, to which “La Pietà” may be an homage, but Casanova’s own powers of provocation are stretched beyond endurance.

Outside of Steven Spielberg, there’s not a more familiar filmmaker than Alfred Hitchcock, instantly recognizable in his film cameos and the distinctive voice and dry humor heard in interviews. Director Mark Cousins uses those traits for his latest idiosyncratic documentary, with British actor Alistair McGowan giving an uncanny voice impression. The problem is, though it sounds like Hitchcock, it’s enough not like him to sound just off each time you hear it. Otherwise, Cousins provides a master class in focusing on thematic strands in Hitchcock’s imposing body of work (more than 50 feature films, from the 1920s silent era to 1976’s “Family Plot”), divided into six chapters mainly as an excuse to dazzle viewers once again with some of the most celebrated sequences in film history, including “Strangers on a Train,” “Rear Window,” “Psycho” and “The Birds.” The Blu-ray looks terrific; extras include an alternate trailer with Cousin’ narration, McGowan’s voice test, a Cousins interview and Cousins’ intros for Hitch’s “Notorious,” “Rope” and “Saboteur.”