Digital Week – November 14

George Lucas’ best film remains this 1973 nostalgia trip, a beautifully made, gently touching evocation of the 1950s high school scene—it’s an understated classic, an anomaly in a movie career otherwise engaged with Ewoks, robots and intergalactic battles. It’s also crammed full of young actors giving lively, unaffected performances, including Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford, Charles Martin Smith, Candy Clark, Paul LeMat, and even Suzanne Somers in a memorable cameo. The film looks terrifically aglow in UHD—Lucas’ visual consultant was none other than the master cinematographer Haskell Wexler—and extras include Lucas’ commentary, screen tests and a vintage making-of featurette.

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 adaptation of an Alberto Moravia novel was his attempt at a commercial film, starring the great French beauty Bridgette Bardot, whom Godard—at the producers’ behest—shot in various enticing poses and lack of clothing. But, as usual with Godard, the film is a head-swiveling display of satire, melodrama and sunbaked color (Raoul Coutard was, of course, the genius cinematographer). In addition to Bardot, there are fine performances by Jack Palance, Michel Piccoli, Fritz Lang and Giorgia Moll. But it’s Godard’s singular artistry that takes over. The film looks breathtaking in 4K; lone extra is scholar Colin McCabe’s intro—too bad none of the features from the 2010 Blu-ray edition were ported over.

The inevitable sequel to the fairly standard 2018 horror flick is an improvement over the first incarnation mainly because the scares are not as obvious, even if they are, almost inevitably at times, the cheap jump-scare variety. Still, it’s done with some stylishness by director Michael Chaves, and the acting by Taissa Farmiga as the eponymous heroine and Jonas Bloquet as the boarding-school handyman who becomes possessed by a demon is a notch above the usual for these films. Cinematographer Tristan Nyby’s dark, foreboding look is captured well on 4K; extras are two making-of featurettes.

So you want to see Santa turn into a vengeful Terminator, tracking down and destroying the villains who have entered a rich family’s home on Christmas Eve? Well, here’s your chance. Although the bloody violence is overdone, there’s a silly sense of humor involved in watching a drunk, downbeat Kris Kringle doing his holiday thing, and director Tommy Wirkola has smartly populated the movie with fine character actors from Beverly D’Angelo to John Leguizamo, with the redoubtable David Harbour making a memorably bad Santa. There’s an excellent ultra hi-def transfer; extras are on-set featurettes, interviews and deleted/extended scenes.

Robin Bain wrote and directed this derivative but sexy drama about two young women whose dysfunctions let them bond, at least for awhile, until they discover that there are things they can’t otherwise escape. Although the acting is variable and there’s too much of a late-night Cinemax feel to the erotic trysts, Bain has made a film that delves a bit deeper than one might expect and, in Dare Taylor and particularly Willow Grey, two performers unafraid to go further than others might dare to.

The deadly cost of entitlement marks this unnerving Venezuelan drama about the aftermath of the death of a teenager who was part of a group of hedonists drinking, doing drugs and having sex along with trying to get revenge on a hated teacher—who is later convicted of the girl’s death. Director Hernán Jabes Águila (from his and Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles’ script) has made a difficult to watch depiction of the cost of personal and political corruption that trickles down to ordinary people and where ethics and morals disappear. It’s a daring high-wire act that threatens to collapse but remains compulsively watchable, with a splendid cast leading the way.

Neil Burger’s adaptation of Karin Dionne’s popular novel about Helena, a young woman who’s the offspring of Jacob, who kidnapped her mother as a teenager, took her to the woods and kept as a prisoner for years, is both absorbing and plodding as it follows her confronting him decades later when he escapes from prison. The narrative beats are all present and everything has a high gloss, but the predictability of the plot—once Jacob escapes we know exactly how this will end—robs it of much urgency, despite strong work by Daisy Ridley (Helena), Brooklynn Prince (young Helena) and Ben Mendelssohn (Jacob).

Sofie Gråbøl gives a powerhouse portrayal of Inger, a schizophrenic woman on a bus trip to France with her sister Ellen, brother-in-law and a group of other Danish tourists, and whose misunderstood behavior affects several others, including Christian, a 12-year-old boy whose clueless dad, Andres, makes his negative feelings toward Inger known. Once Inger and Christian become unlikely friends, director Niels Arden Oplev’s offbeat drama becomes a sympathetic but prickly portrait, and there’s excellent support from Luca Reichardt Ben Coker as Christian, Søren Malling (best known for his role on the long-running series Borgen) as Andreas, and Lene Maria Christensen as the harried but devoted Ellen.

The subjects of this surprisingly emotional documentary were also subjects of earlier documentaries, and directors Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall catch up with them to discover how having one’s life displayed onscreen has affected them, in ways that are illuminating and often distressing. “The Staircase,” “The Wolfpack,” “Capturing the Friedmans,” “The Square” and “Hoop Dreams”—the people populating these films have been exploited and/or affected personally by their experiences, and Tiexiera and Hall broaden their outlook to the ethical considerations of recording regular individuals’ private lives and if monetary compensation should be used, among other tantalizing sidebars.

Lily Gladstone—currently stealing Martin Scorsese’s masterly adaptation of “Killers of the Flower Moon”—gives her usual persuasive, natural performance in this diffuse character study by writer-director Morrisa Maltz. Gladstone plays Tana, a woman coming off a crushing personal loss, who attends a family wedding on the Lakota reservation then takes a road trip to find closure. What follows is meandering but intermittently interesting but, as Tana meets real people living real lives, Maltz has them narrate their own stories, which end up obscuring Tana’s own journey—the final stunning location shots of Tana feel dramatically and metaphorically unearned. It all looks lustrous on Blu, and extras include a commentary by Gladstone, Maltz and editor Vanara Taing; a Mill Valley film fest panel; a Maltz short, “Odyssey”; a Maltz music video; and a Maltz Q&A from a Chicago festival screening.