Digital Week – January 23

This thin sci-fi flick starts with an obvious setup—3 Russians and 3 Americans on the orbiting international space station are told by their handlers to take over the vessel in the name of their country once war breaks out on earth—and spends its remaining 90 minutes letting the six of them act alternately smartly and stupidly in the name of either humanity or patriotism. Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite never fully takes advantage of the claustrophobic setting, and the capable actors can’t do much more than maneuver themselves into ever-dwindling spaces, with the result neither an epic fiasco nor a nail-biting thriller.

Parisian artist Apolonia Sokol is the focus of this documentary by Danish filmmaker Lea Glob, who several years ago began recording Apolonia’s long and winding road from obscurity to acclaim, in addition to presenting intimate scenes of the artist’s personal life. There are moments that are quite shattering—notably Apolonia’s response to hearing that her close friend, the Ukrainian activist Oksana Shachko, committed suicide—amid the insights and colorful glimpses at the modern-art world that show how this young woman has become such an artistic force with her original canvases as well as her friendship with Glob herself.

Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki’s latest deadpan comic portrait plays like desperate self-parody; if I didn’t know he had made it, I’d have sworn some no-talent had lazily aped what gave Kaurismaki his international reputation. But where in his better films like “Le Vie de boheme” and “Drifting Clouds” the humor and melancholy felt organically entwined, here it’s the opposite: the characters are caricatures, the humor is puerile, the romantic relationship is risible, and the attempts at bittersweetness are eye-rolling. Shockingly, this has gotten Kaurismaki’s best reviews in decades.

The return of the kids’ cartoon favorites following 2016’s “Trolls” and 2020’s “Trolls World Tour” includes several animated sequences that are amusing nods to classics of the genre like “Fantasia” and “Yellow Submarine,” and there are funny voice performances by Anna Kendrick, Eric André, Andrew Rannells, Amy Schumer and Kenan Thompson. But the storyline, which features boy bands not unlike NSYNC—and including vocal appearances by the likes of Justin Timberlake and Lance Bass—makes it all much ado about not much. Still, the UHD transfer for this “Sing-Along Edition” looks superb—the extras include a Trolls short, “It Takes Three; deleted scenes; cast-filmmaker interviews; and featurettes.

When Marco, a Korean-Filipino boxer whose beloved mother needs expensive surgery, goes to look for his estranged father, he stumbles into getting mixed up with vicious underworld characters, including a particularly ruthless assassin and a rich heir who has eyes on his father’s fortune. Park Hoon-jung’s high-octane but overlong thriller spins its wheels after an impressive first hour, with skillfully done action sequences combining gunplay and physical dexterity. The film looks excellent in hi-def.

This high-tension series stars Zoe Saldana, who’s surprisingly effective as the leader of a shadowy special-ops group that initiates a new recruit, Cruz, for a dangerous mission that involves her infiltrating the personal life of a known terrorist’s daughter. Over eight fast-moving episodes, there’s an intriguing balance of the quotidian alongside the scheming among government agents. Zaldana’s career-best performance is equaled by one by Laysla de Oliveira, who shines in a physically demanding role as Cruz. The hi-def image looks terrific; extras include making-of featurettes and interviews.

What begins in the most contrived way possible—what occurs in the deli after a $156 million lottery ticket is sold is unbelievable in the extreme—soon settles into a diverting crime drama for about an hour or so, until it devolves into something that’s less clever than it thinks, with a particularly anticlimactic windup. Writer-director Daniel Brown cranks up the intensity—and also, for no particular reason, revels in ratcheting up the violence—and gets a rock-solid central performance by Jessica Garza as a pregnant deli customer who makes the most of a bad situation, but his social commentary is a bit too on the nose. There’s a fine Blu-ray transfer.