Digital Week – March 5

This tense slow-burn thriller recounts that awful day during the 1972 Munich Olympics when a group of Palestinian terrorists took several Israeli Olympic teammates and coaches hostage, culminating in all of their deaths after an airport shootout. Tim Fehlbaum directs straightforwardly, and the mostly no-name cast (with the exception of Peter Sarsgaard as ABC producer Roone Arledge) is formidable and seamless. And if it’s problematic that the men who lost their lives are kept offscreen except for actual news footage, the film still honors their memory by showing how a bunch of technicians and sports reporters told the story of that day as professionals.

Three generations of failed relationships are explored by writer-director Noah Pritzker in this alternately amusing and bemusing study of Peter (Griffin Dunne), whose 35-year marriage to Maria (Rosanna Arquette) has ended on the heels of his own father Simon (Richard Benjamin) announcing his six-decade marriage to Peter’s mother Eunice is over. Peter goes to Mexico to compress while his oldest son Nick (James Norton) is having a bachelor party there—and he announces his wedding’s cancellation. Pritzker explores this family—which includes Peter’s youngest son Mickey (Miles Heitzer) confused about his identity after recently coming out as queer—perceptively but also melodramatically, but the cast’s restrained performances (including a lovely turn by Eisa Davis as a woman Peter meets in Mexico) make this a worthwhile watch.

Despite a stellar cast featuring the likes of Ed Harris, Bill Murray, Gabrielle Union, and Jennifer Coolidge, Dito Montiel’s black comedy about a retired hit man living a placid upstate life with his younger wife and her son who finds his violent downstate past revisiting his home is too gratuitously violent and filled with easy laughs to perform a successful balancing act. Montiel seems to sense that as well for, despite the many shootings, there’s an attempt at a melancholic sort of happy ending—but the bad taste lingers of innocents being killed unceremoniously and being played for laughs, and even committed performances can’t overcome that misstep.

Milos Forman’s 1984 adaptation of Peter Schaffer’s Tony-winning play about the supposed rivalry between mediocre composer Salieri and young genius Mozart became an unlikely hit and won eight Oscars, including best picture and best director. It is certainly entertaining and sumptuously made on location in Prague, yet at 160 minutes it wears out its welcome with wearying repetition about Mozart’s vulgarity and Salieri’s delusions of grandeur along with risible recreations of Mozart composing, with Salieri himself writing down the dying young master’s score for his  classic Requiem. Tom Hulce and Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham shine as Mozart and Salieri, respectively, while Miroslav Ondricek’s stunning camerawork performs visual wonders that are accentuated on the new UHD release. Extras include two making-of featurettes: a vintage one with Forman and Schaffer (who have both since died) and a more recent one.

Some giggly young Italian skiers inadvertently uncover the frozen corpse of a condemned devil-loving witch and trigger a long nightmare of demonic vengeance in this goofy but watchable 1989 horror entry by Lamberto Bava, whose father Mario Bava made the classic Black Sunday that this is all but a remake of. Silliness abounds throughout, yet Bava Junior and his attractive cast—including Mary Sellers, Debora Caprioglio and Michele Soavi—are able to somehow keep contrivance at bay for the most part for the 98-minute runtime. The film looks terrifically grainy for its U.S. Blu-ray premiere; extras comprise interviews with Bava, Sellers and Caprioglio.

Russian Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s greatest opera is this tragic romance that the composer presciently dubbed “lyrical scenes”: his intimate and subtle music bears the emotional weight of the story, based on a Pushkin verse novel, about young Tatyana, rejected by the arrogant Onegin, only to turn the tables when he belatedly realizes his error. Although everything seems right in this 2023 Brussels staging—Laurent Pelly’s exquisite direction; the singing of Sally Matthews (Tatyana), Stephane Degout (Onegin) and others; the playing of the La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra led by conductor Alain Altinoglu—the performance remains respectable and slightly distant, not emotionally shattering as the best productions of this masterpiece are.