Digital Week – January 30

Jonathan Glazer’s loose adaptation of a Martin Amis novel looks at the banality of evil through the family of Auschwitz Commandant Hoss, who lives next door to the death camp with his wife Hedwig and their five children, including a toddler. They go about their daily lives, hosting parties, the kids going to school, the parents planning their postwar future, all while he works as a large cog in the murderous machine that was the Holocaust. Though brilliantly executed, the film comes off as a stunt that doesn’t do much more than repeat sequences where what is going on in their lives and in their world goes unmentioned for 105 minutes. There’s extraordinarily effective sound design and Glazer allows himself flourishes like a local girl hiding food at night where the camp workers will be sure to find it the next day, shot in starkit B&W; but the ending, in which modern-day custodians at the Auschwitz museum are seen going about their daily work while Hoss retches in an empty Nazi office building, is a meretricious copout.

Filmed using the same astonishing hand-painted technique as the 2017 feature “Loving Vincent”—also made by the duo responsible for that earlier success, DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman—this picturesque journey through four seasons in a small Polish village, centered around a beautiful free spirit, Magda, who loves a married farmer but agrees to marry his widowed elderly father. What ensues is alternately sorrowful and affecting, horrible and hopeful. It’s old-fashioned in its storytelling—the original novel, by Polish author Władysław Reymont, won the Nobel prize for Literature—but the dazzling colors embedded in the strikingly rendered animation make this breathtaking to watch.

French composer Camille Saint-Saëns’ most successful opera, a musically poetic retelling of the Biblical story of the Jewish strongman Samson extracting revenge on his lover Dalila and the Philistines, is given an intelligent 2022 reading at London’s Royal Opera House. Well staged by director Richard Jonees, the opera showcases two monumental performances: South Korean tenor Seokjong Baek as Samson and Latvian superstar mezzo Elīna Garanča as Delilah, particularly in her ravishing second-act arias. There are short extras of conductor Claudio Pappano discussing the opera, and the hi-def video and audio are first-rate.

This pair of World War II dramas, crisply directed by Lewis Gilbert (who would later go on to direct three James Bond features), is so obscure that even Leonard Maltin’s comprehensive movie guide doesn’t include them. 1954’s “The Sea Shall Not Have Them” follows the difficult days after a crew of British airmen are shot down, adrift in the North Sea. And 1953’s “Albert, RN” is set in a POW camp where British and American naval officers try and escape. Both pictures, which feature typically tuneful scores by the great British composer Malcolm Arnold, look quite good in new hi-def transfers.

Veteran director John Woo is at his best in long, choreographed action sequences, and his latest feature has that in spades as he follows a grieving father who goes to war against gang members who killed his son in a drive-by shooting. We watch him training, stalking, finally attacking, and Woo follows suit, heightening the tension until it’s ready to explode—it’s too bad that he loses it at the end with a ridiculous ending in which our hero acts stupidly confronting his final adversary and fatally hesitates. Still, the 100 minutes move quickly, and Joel Kinnaman plays the silent—hence the title—man on a mission with an impressive singlemindedness. Unfortunately, as his sorrowful wife, Catalina Sandino Moreno is wasted. The film looks superb on Blu; lone extra is a making-of featurette.

In this action-heavy adventure, a paramilitary-trained physician (!) looking to uncover the truth behind his father’s suspicious killing joins a group of mercenaries that discovers a vast conspiracy that could threaten the lives of millions of innocent civilians. It’s not the most original tale, but writer-director Michael Chang has dialed up the fighting sequences to 11, and many fans of this genre of filmmaking will surely overlook everything else: the routine plotting, acting and characterizations. There’s an excellent Blu-ray transfer.

Obviously season five sans Axe was subpar by “Billions” standards, so for the series’ final season look who’s back: in an effort to stop the Trump-like Prince from succeeding in his shady campaign to become U.S. president, the unlikely team of D.A. Chuck Rhoades and his former enemy Axe becomes an actual thing. While it doesn’t reach the delirious heights of earlier seasons—indeed, it comes off as even more contrived than anything else in the show’s checkered history—there’s fun to be had as Prince tries to ward off Chuck, Wendy, Axe and all the rest. The acting by Paul Giamatti, Maggie Siff, Asia Kate Dillon, David Constabile, Condola Rashad, Corey Stoll and Damien Lewis is much better than last season’s phone-in performances. Extras are two featurettes.

The complete boxed set of all six seasons of “Billions” gives the show’s fans much more bang for their buck, with all 84 episodes included on 28 discs. Also featured are more than an hour’s worth of extras that encompass several making-of and behind-the-scenes featurettes.