Loveless: Blu-ray
Whenever rescue workers fan out in search of a missing child, a palpable of sense of dread – even as transmitted through the lens of a camera – is impossible to avoid. Sadly, such searches have become commonplace events in American movies, TV dramas and true-crime programs like “Forensics Files.” When the child is found unharmed or rescued from harm, the relief we feel is as powerful as the sadness that comes from unspeakable tragedy. The same can be said about the crime dramas and mini-series from Europe that find their way to PBS, BBC-America and various streaming services. The greater horror comes from not knowing the missing child’s fate, one way or another. In the Oscar-nominated Loveless, Andrey Zvyagintsev and co-writer Oleg Negin have crafted a different sort of missing-child story, set among atypically middle-class Muscovites, whose concepts of family and status are far from traditional. Their previous collaborations – Elena, The Banishment and Leviathan – have also required that we look to the east through a different prism. None of Zvyagintsev’s films have been particularly easy to watch, from an emotional point of view. If they present life stripped of contrivances and narrative shortcuts, it’s still the human condition that drives the stories and is never far from their surface.

Boris (Alexei Rozin) and his soon-to-be-ex-wife Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) share an apartment, which, for once, doesn’t look as if it were designed by a Politburo-approved architecture firm. It’s possible that they haven’t enjoyed a moment of marital bliss since they realized that the only thing holding them together is their 12-year-old boy son, Alyosha (Matvey Novikov), whose birth precipitated the marriage. Both enjoy the company of lovers, whom they’ll probably marry after the dissolution papers are signed. Boris’ girlfriend is already pregnant. It’s during one of Boris and Zhenya’s more bitter arguments that Zvyagintsev’s camera finds Alyosha, in a closet, sobbing uncontrollably. That night, or one soon thereafter, while the adults are sleeping elsewhere, the boy decides he’s had enough and runs away from home. When they finally figure out that Alyosha isn’t playing a game on them, Boris and Zhenya report the disappearance to police, who aren’t terribly helpful. Fortunately, one them advises them to call a local relief organization that specializes in such recovery efforts. There’s no reason to spoil anything here, except to say that the intricately choreographed search takes viewers into corners’ of the wooded Moscow neighborhood that look as familiar as any in our own backyards. Although the parents’ selfish responses to the continued lack of news isn’t likely to surprise viewers, the flash-forward ending should raise a few eyebrows, at least. The package includes the unusually candid 61-minute “The Making of Loveless,” which is more of a stripped-down documentary than promotional EPK.

In Syria
The Good Postman
In his 2009 debut as writer/director, seasoned Belgian cinematographer Philippe Van Leeuw chronicled the Rwandan genocide from the perspective of a Tutsi domestic, whose Belgian employers are preparing to flee the country in advance of Hutu militants. While The Day God Walked Away received scant exposure here, by all accounts. it wasn’t a feel-good movie about life on the run from horror. In his similarly impactful follow-up, In Syria (a.k.a., “Insyriated”), a mother struggles to keep her family safe over a 24-hour period, as war rages outside their largely undamaged Damascus flat. Because the movie was shot in an apartment in Beirut, the claustrophobia experienced by the family members is palpable here, as well. The incomparable Israeli-Arab actress Hiam Abbass (Lemon Tree) was nominated for a Lumières Awards for her portrayal of Oum Yazan, the mother of three who has turned her home into a safe harbor for her multigenerational family and neighbors. Outside the front door, bombs explode at irregular intervals and automatic-weapons fire punctuates conversations. On this day, Oum’s attempts to keep her guests from panicking will be sorely tested by forces beyond her control, however.  Neighbors Samir and Halima (Diamand Abou Abboud), a young couple with a small baby, have made plans to leave for the safety of Beirut after their flat upstairs was destroyed by shelling. Very little time passes before Samir is gunned down by a sniper, almost immediately after leaving the apartment to finalize their escape. Oum decides not to tell Samir that her husband might be lying dead or seriously wounded, fearing that she would run to him and be shot. She decides to withhold the truth from her until after dusk. The most disturbing scene comes when two burglars, pretending to be security officials, break through Oum’s defenses and rape the first woman they see, while the others hide in the kitchen.  Even though Van Leeuw spares viewers from the worst of the attack, the victim’s facial expressions reveal everything. The all-pervasive intimacy of the family’s ordeal makes In Syria different than the growing number of theatrical films and documentaries describing conditions in the war-torn country. The DVD includes the short film, “Le Pain,” directed by Hiam Abbass; a directors’ statement; Why-We-Selected statement, from Film Movement.

Theoretically, at least, it would be possible to follow the same characters we meet in films such films as In Syria, as they make their way north to places like Finland — Aki Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope — with stops in Bulgaria — Tonislav Hristov’s The Good Postman – and another dozen border-crossings along the way. Other recent movies have chronicled what happens to African and Afghan refugees, seeking new lives in Italy, Greece, France and England, and, for several decades now, from Central America, to the United States. It’s a subject that not only lends itself to the prejudices of xenophobic demagogues, but also filmmakers whose compassion for displaced people has resulted in several powerful dramas and dark comedies. Sadly, most of them have a better chance of winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Feature than finding distribution here, outside the festival circuit. The Good Postman, a stylishly made documentary that I initially confused with being a work of fiction, is set in a tiny Bulgarian village, facing the Turkish border, that has been resisting foreign invaders since the times of the Roman and Ottoman Empires. It is now being overrun by refugees on their way elsewhere. The once-thriving village has been reduced to an electorate of 37 elderly citizens and at least one middle-age slacker hoping for a return to communism.

A mayoral election is being contested in the village — long referred to as the Great Gate — concurrently with efforts by UN border guards to stem the flow of men, women and children across the border. One candidate wants to crack down on the refugees, while his chief opponent would encourage some to take root in the village and work toward its recovery. The favorite has no stated opinion one way or another. The region, which appears to be rich in agricultural opportunity, has lost all the young people willing to put in the hard work it would take to bring the fields, pastures and vineyards back to life. The Good Postman, named for the mayoral candidate who advocates the absorption of refugees into village life, introduces us to several of the men and women who will decide the election, most of whom are infirm. My opinion of The Good Postman hasn’t changed since I realized – yeah, I know, duh – that it’s a documentary. The thoroughly engrossing film benefits mightily from Orlin Ruevski’s elegantly composed wide-screen cinematography and Petar Dundakov’s simple, Middle East-inflected score. It’s the faces of the ancient Golyam Dervent residents that most clearly resonate throughout the film, however. Only a century ago, their parents and grandparents were the ones escaping persecution, after Turkish troops and irregulars attacked the region, burning homes, raping women and killing villagers in their path

Inflame
Turkey not only serves as an entry point for refugees from its war-ravaged neighbors, but it also is dealing with serious troubles that originate within its own borders. Although it’s listed among the region’s secular states, Turkey’s increasingly politicized Muslim majority is divided among dozens of well- and lesser-known denominations. Some are extremely tolerant of their co-religionists’ beliefs, while others have resorted to violence to express the differences. The current government has been accused of using repressive measures of its own to maintain control of religious and political extremists. Turkish officials have also allowed their hatred of Kurds to interfere with the country’s key role in the war against ISIS and opened the door for Moscow to get a foothold in northern Syria. While a working knowledge of contemporary Turkish affairs isn’t necessary to appreciate Ceylan Özgün Özçelik’s impressive debut feature, Inflame, a basic understanding of the country’s varied demographics doesn’t hurt. That’s because what begins as a psychological drama – with supernatural overtones – gradually evolves into a paranoid thriller, colored by political mandates and religious intolerance. The film opens with a group of educated friends debating the role social media plays in modern Turkish society. It is heavily regulated by the government to control the flow of information and impede dissent. Inflame’s protagonist, Hasret (Algi Eke), is caught somewhere in the middle of the debate. As an editor of documentaries for the government news channel, she’s been accorded a certain amount of freedom in the choices she makes at work.

Lately, however, Hasret has been haunted by recurring nightmares that take the form of disjointed newsreel footage of a tumultuous event in the country’s near past. They’ve impacted her work to the point that she’s transferred to a department that contributes editorials and voice-over work for government speeches. It means that every word and image that airs is pre-screened by editors conversant in official government policy. Now, when she returns to the flat left to her after her parents’ death, 25 years earlier, the questions raised in her dreams take on a life of their own. In addition to hearing music that isn’t there and being confronted by a dog with strangely human traits, Hasret begins to suspect that the apartment, itself, is haunted by the spirits of her parents. I won’t spoil the outcome, except to point out that the date of their fatal accident corresponds to the 1993 mass murder of 35 artists and musicians, mostly Alevi intellectuals, who had gathered for a cultural festival in Sivas. She comes to believe that they died in the fire, deliberately set by fundamentalist Sunni locals, and their deaths went unreported in the media. The mob was reacting to the presence of prominent author, satirist and activist Aziz Nesin. (In early 1990s, Nesin began a translation of Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel, “The Satanic Verses.”) A post-script explains how the horror of that event still reverberates through Turkish society and creates a solid foundation for Hasret’s ordeal. Inflame was nominated for Best First Feature at the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival and won the Special Jury Prize at the Ankara International Film Festival and SXSW Gamechanger Award.

An Ordinary Man
One of the inherent flaws of the cinematic art is an inability to precisely differentiate between evil characters who earn our disdain for their sinful acts and lack of remorse for their crimes, and the antiheroes whose dastardly deeds are superseded by an actor’s outstanding interpretation of a clever screenplay. Although the concept can be traced back to the origins of theatrical drama, it wasn’t until the 1960s that it was fully exploited in popular culture. Even then, however, filmmakers toyed with their audiences’ emotions by casting such charmers as Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Kris Kristofferson and a post-spaghetti Clint Eastwood to impersonate criminals, trigger-happy cops and vigilantes who, in real life, would look guilty, even leaving a confessional. Charles Bronson and Warren Oates had to work extra hard to win our sympathy. Ben Kingsley is one of a small handful of actors who’s delivered mesmerizing and highly credible portrayals of characters ranging from Mahatma Gandhi, Georges Méliès and Simon Wiesenthal, on one end of the spectrum, to Sweeney Todd, Fagin and Meyer Lansky, on the other … with Adolf Eichmann yet to come.  In the darkly comedic crime drama, Sexy Beast, his take on career criminal and world-class thug Don Logan was simultaneously, frightening and hilarious.

In Brad Silberling’s An Ordinary Man, Kingsley delivers another brilliant performance, this time as a character clearly modeled after former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić and former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadžić. Both men avoided arrest for more than a decade after charges were filed and a price was put on their heads. Like them, Kingsley’s character, the General, could be said to have been hiding in plain sight. To avoid capture, he was routinely moved from safehouse to safehouse by his security detail. Unlike Karadžić, who grew a beard David Letterman might have envied, the General resembles the undisguised images of him plastered on walls around the city in which he’s hiding … possibly Belgrade. In An Ordinary Man, no matter how much effort Kingsley exerts keeping viewers from seeing him as an antihero or obedient soldier, the General’s charisma and cunning are undeniable. Neither is the movie a procedural, whose focus is on the efforts to capture him.  Our fascination comes from the General’s interaction with his only companion, Tanja (Hera Hilmar), a cleaning woman in her 20s, who came with the apartment. After he tests Tanja with a withering barrage of sarcastic barbs and insulting demands, they open up to each other about their lives and later venture out to shop or, in one scene, dance. The chemistry that develops between them is well-earned and constantly surprising. That the 30-year-old Icelandic actress (“Da Vinci’s Demons”) is able to go toe-to-toe with Kingsley for most of the movie’s 90 minutes is quite an achievement.

Docs-to-DVD
Six Films by Nikolaus Geyrhalter
I Called Him Morgan
Motherland
Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four
The Cage Fighter
My Letter to the World
I can’t remember a better week for lovers of documentaries of all artistic persuasions. It’s topped by Icarus Films’ comprehensive seven-disc compilation, “Six Films by Nikolaus Geyrhalter.” The Vienna-born documentarian may not be as well-known here as Michael Moore and Errol Morris, but his films have routinely captured major awards in prestigious festivals around the world. They’re distinguished by calm, carefully framed shots with an eye for geometric compositions. Typically, they eschew commentary and music to create visually striking accounts of “places at the margins of our perception, while, at the same time, cataloging social phenomena and periods of upheaval in a cinematically epic fashion.” Using a mostly static camera, Geyrhalter has tackled such disparate topics as the terrain of post-disaster Chernobyl (Pripyat), reflections on a dystopian world (Homo Sapiens), modern food production (Our Daily Bread), Europe’s endangered factory workers (Over the Years), the western world after dark (Abendland), and people who live and raise families with little technological assistance (Elsewhere). The package is the first comprehensive survey, representing more than 17 years of Geyrhalter’s films, three of which have never been released in the U.S. It adds a booklet, featuring Alejandro Bachmann’s “Spaces in Time,” published in English for the first time; excerpted interviews with Geyrhalter; Elsewhere location notes; and a new high-definition Blu-ray edition of Our Daily Bread. In January, Kimstim released Cern, the director’s fascinating portrait of the immense Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest laboratory for particle physics, located underneath the border of France and Switzerland.

In February 1972, celebrated jazz musician Lee Morgan was shot and killed by his common-law wife, Helen, during a gig at a club in New York City. The murder sent shockwaves through the jazz community, and the memory of the event still haunts those who knew the Morgans. Filmmaker Kasper Collin’s I Called Him Morgan is informed equally by vintage recordings and photographs of the “hard bop” trumpeter in rehearsal and performance, and a remarkably candid interview that jazz historian Larry Reni Thomas conducted in 1996, with Helen Moore (a.k.a. Helen Morgan), a year before her death. Among the other participants are Wayne Shorter, Jymie Merritt, Billy Harper, Judith Johnson, Bennie Maupin, Larry Ridley, Paul West, Al Harrison, Charli Persip and Albert “Tootie” Heath. The FilmRise release is as good a documentary about the passions that drive jazz musicians as any I’ve seen.

In Motherland, Filipino-American filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz takes viewers inside what’s reputed to be the world’s busiest maternity hospital, located in one of the world’s poorest and most populous countries: the Philippines. Her almost shockingly intimate portrait of Manila’s Fabella Hospital is enhanced by the same vérité approach popularized here in the 1960s by Frederick Wiseman, the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin. Like flies on the wall, we follow Diaz’ unobtrusive camera through the doors of the warehouse-sized facility, where the next group of expectant women is told what to expect in the next few hours, then are ushered into waiting rooms teeming with patients experiencing severe labor pains and, as quickly as is safely possible, deposited into overcrowded nurseries, where they’re introduced to their babies and taught how to breast feed them. All of this transpires without narration or prejudicial observations. We’re allowed to eavesdrop on conversations between the patients and their discussions with nurses and social workers. Visiting hours resemble stampedes and, yes, misidentifications do occur. We’re not talking about dozens of patients here, but hundreds of women, coming and going as rapidly as their stitches and doctors allow them to exit. It would have been easy – if not particularly humane – for Diaz to focus more tightly than she does on the single mothers who are repeat customers and show reluctance to use contraception. (Most of them are Catholic, but the Church’s moral stance on such things isn’t utmost in the minds of the mothers and staff.) Even if we know that the children are likely to be raised under poverty conditions, it’s difficult not to cheer for these women and the uphill climbs they’ll face throughout motherhood.

Investigative documentarians make their bones by exposing miscarriages of justice, corruption and abuses of power by prosecutors. Even in the most egregious rushes to judgment, the odds are stacked against defendants attempting to reverse unfair convictions. No one in authority wants to admit that mistakes were made on the road to a headline-making verdict, least of all police, prosecutors and witnesses who swore to God that their testimony was truthful. Deborah Esquenazi’s almost excruciatingly painful to watch documentary, Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four, helped overturn the wrongful convictions of four Hispanic lesbians in a case even the producers of “Law & Order” would consider to be too far-fetched to air. In Texas, however, even a complete lack of evidence isn’t sufficient cause to dismiss charges on lesbians, gays and people of color. In the summer of 1994, Elizabeth Ramirez, Cassandra Rivera, Kristie Mayhugh and Anna Vasquez were accused of sexually assaulting Ramirez’ 7- and 9-year-old nieces, in San Antonio. The four openly gay women were charged after a week-long visit from the girls at Ramirez’s apartment. They were indicted in an environment of pervasive homophobia and the idea that homosexuals are naturally prone to sexually abusing children and “satanic-related” crime. None of it, including the forensic evidence of abuse, was backed by science, data or precedent. Even so, the women were sentenced to 15 years in prison, with Ramirez being hit with an additional 12 years and the loss of her newborn baby, several days after the start of her sentence. The film picks up in the closing years of their incarceration, after one of the nieces admitted to having been pressured by her father, Javier Limon, to make the false accusations. In 2013, Texas lawmakers passed a law allowing individuals to challenge their convictions, if there is new or changed scientific evidence. With the assistance of the Innocence Project of Texas and Good Samaritans from as far away as Canada, Esquenazi’s film earned its happy ending. [

Jeff Unay’s action documentary, The Cage Fighter, might have delivered a more powerful punch if it weren’t for such recent pictures as Rocky Balboa (2006), The Wrestler (2008), Grudge Match (2013) and Creed (2015). Neither did it help the film’s chances that one of the recurrent themes of movies based on MMA fighting is the willingness of seemingly over-the-hill cage fighters to risk their lives in pursuit of one last title. In the briskly paced and edited film from IFC, Joe Carman is a journeyman cage fighter, whose constant battle with post-concussion syndrome hasn’t prevented him from re-entering the caged ring – sometimes in the shape of an octagon – and seeking redemption for past beatings. Neither have promises to his wife and four daughters prevented him from risking his life for the sake of vanity of delusions of grandeur. Watching the tears run down their faces when he comes homes bruised and battered, or is pummeled in the ring in front of them, is nothing short of heartbreaking. Just as shattering is a conversation over glasses of beer between Joe and top contender Clayton Hoy, a much younger MMA star who has precious little to show for his success. That Carman is cut from the same physical mold as characters played by Sylvester Stallone and Mickey Rourke – not to mention, Joe Palooka – doesn’t hurt The Cage Fighter one bit.

My Letter to the World was made as a companion piece to Terence Davies’ surprisingly well-received biopic of Emily Dickinson, A Quiet Passion, for which Cynthia Nixon was nominated as Best Actress by the National Society of Film Critics. The future gubernatorial candidate also lends her voice to Solon Papadopoulos’s project, which digs a bit deeper into the historical record of the poet’s life and work and fits perfectly on the small screen. The documentary journeys through the seasons of the writer’s life, in 1800s New England, and features interviews with scholars and other knowledgeable folks. They add new theories about the poet’s personal relationships and her revered work.

Tormentero
Progress is a relative thing, especially in parts of the world where poor people are the last to benefit from their labors, taxes and discoveries. In Mexican filmmaker Ruben Imaz’ visually arresting Tormentero, a huge oil patch is discovered in the watery backyard of a fishing village. Naturally, the accidental find makes everyone wealthy, except the residents of the villages, who no longer can take advantage of the once-rich supply of shrimp and swim in water uncontaminated by globules of oil and the chemicals used on the nearby oil derricks. The oil workers precipitated an overnight crime wave and inflation was soon to follow. Instead of taking their unhappiness out on the government-owned oil company and fat-cat profiteers, who followed in its wake, the helpless villagers decided to blame their troubles on Romero (Jose Carlos Ruiz), the poor sap who first noticed the crude oil bubbling up along the shoreline. Viewers are introduced to Romero much later in his life, when the alcohol he guzzles has begun to pickle his brain, causing hallucinations and dreams haunted by ghosts. He torments his simple-minded son, whose only friends appear to be the monkeys he finds in the jungle. In his final days, Romero makes it his mission to reclaim the love and honor he lost decades earlier. Imaz stages the film almost like a dream … somewhere between a hallucination and reality. Absent a clearly defined narrative, Imaz invites us to look at this world through the jaundiced eyes of his protagonist. He invests Tormentero with generous amounts of magical realism, surrealism and fever dreams. Cinematographer Gerardo Barroso allows Imaz to realize his vision by capturing the region’s beautiful natural settings and darker hues of Romero’s prison without walls.

Ice Mother
The characters we meet in Bohdan Sláma’s endearing family dramedy, Ice Mother, are so familiar that it takes a while to figure out what part of Europe it might be located. If the movie had been dubbed, instead of subtitled, it could have been set in Minnesota, Wisconsin or North Dakota … anywhere immigrants maintain customs that most Americans consider, at best, quaint. Otherwise, the family dynamics are universal. After the death of her tightwad husband, 67-year-old Hana (Zuzana Kronerová) attempts to continue such family traditions as the communal Sunday dinner and maintain a house that’s inefficiently heated by coal. Her two adult sons are spoiled and lazy, and their wives have come to expect Hana’s services as a cook and babysitter. One of the sons even steals money from her to finance one of his hare-brained schemes. It’s no wonder that she appears to have given up having any life of her own. That changes, however, when Hana and her equally spoiled grandson, Ivanek, happen upon a group of men and women her age, who belong to an outdoors swimmers’ club, which appears to prefer wintery conditions than warm weather. She’s welcomed to their number after she helps pull one of their struggling members, Broňa (Pavel Nový), from the frigid river. These old-timers make Polar Bear Club members in Chicago look like cowards. They also convince Ivanek to put down his handheld computer and play some of the same games as the people his grandma’s age do. (He’s also entrusted with Broňa’s favorite pet chicken.) Not surprisingly, the closer Hana and Ivanek grow to the club members – Broňa, especially – the greater their sense of independence becomes. The only questions that remain involve Hana’s willingness to prove to her family that she means business, and whether she’ll join her new friends in Prague’s version of the Winter Olympics.

The Outsider
There have been several good movies and documentaries made about the financial crisis of 2008 and the traders, bankers and white-collar thieves who nearly broke the back of the global economy. Boiler Room (2000), The Big Short (2015) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) preceded The Outsider, which reminds us that greed knows no boundaries. Months before the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 caused chaos in world markets and misery for millions of homeowners, the Paris-based bank, Société Générale, lost approximately €4.9 billion in a scandal involving fraudulent transactions traced to a young hotshot trader, Jérôme Kerviel. Christophe Barratier’s The Outsider (a.k.a., “Team Spirit”) does a pretty good explaining how Kerviel (Arthur Dupont) pulled off the scheme, which didn’t begin to concern bank officials until his ledgers began to bleed red ink. Otherwise, everything was copacetic. And, while Kerviel was justly punished for his run of bad luck, he almost certainly wasn’t the only trader playing fast and loose with the numbers. There isn’t as much bad behavior on display in The Outsider, as that depicted in the American films. Except for a couple of strip-club scenes and a line of cocaine, or two, most of the good-ol’-boy antics are limited to the banks of computer screens in the high-rise office building overlooking the city. As repetitive as The Outsider feels, at times, it’s entertaining enough to recommend to completists. Barratier struck gold in 2004, with the musical drama, The Chorus.

I Can Only Imagine
Seventeen years after MercyMe’s “I Can Only Imagine” became the best-selling Christian single of all time, selling 2.5 million copies, the inspirational story of its creation has been turned into film. Bart Millard says that he wrote the emotional ballad in the direct wake of the death of his father and terrorist attacks on 9/11, as way to comfort relatives and friends of people killed that day. The song took very little time to write and wasn’t necessarily targeted at a Christian audience.  “I think the biggest thing is, there’s no agenda: we’re not trying to shove the Bible down anybody’s throats,” Millard has explained. “I’m asking the same question many people have wondered, whether you go to church or not: ‘OK, God, if this turns out to be real, if we die and we get (to heaven), how am I going to respond?’ There’s no answers in that song, it’s all questions.” In the Erwin Brothers’ depiction of the song’s genesis, newcomer J. Michael Finley plays Millard, opposite Dennis Quaid, who effectively portrays the singer/songwriter’s abusive father. It isn’t until Millard discovers that his father has experienced a come-to-Jesus moment of his own, after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, that he returns home to mend fences. Country-music stars Amy Grant and Trace Adkins also contribute to the song’s success in I Can Only Imagine. Despite mostly lackluster reviews, I Can Only Imagine scored big at the North American box office, returning $84 million against a reported $7-million production budget. Clearly, the unabashedly melodramatic drama wasn’t produced to impress critics. The Blu-ray package includes commentary with co-directors Andy Erwin and John Erwin, Millard, co-writer/composer Brent McCorkle and producer Kevin Downes; deleted scenes; featurettes “Imagine Forgiveness with Bart Millard,” “MercyMe: The Early Days,” “Casting I Can Only Imagine,” “The Power of the Song,” “Dennis Quaid: On My Way to Heaven”; recording sessions; and EPKs.

Body of Deceit
If this erotic thriller is supposed to remind viewers of the kinds of movies that made Sharon Stone an A-list star, it falls short in the excitement department. Apart from several clearly telegraphed double-crosses and an extremely fragile love triangle, Body of Deceit’s primary selling points are its gorgeous Malta locations and copious amount of nudity and make-out sessions … mostly of the girl/girl variety. Eliminate the beautiful scenery and reasonably high production values and what’s left is a late-night Cinemax movie. That’s OK with me, but others might feel cheated by the obvious plot twists. Kristanna Loken plays a professional ghost writer, Alice, who’s still traumatized by a terrible automobile accident that left her in a coma for two weeks in a mainland hospital. Unable to recall the details, Alice has begun to suffer from depression, cryptic nightmares and writer’s block. Her husband, Max (Antonio Cupo), persuades Alice to go back to the island, hoping that something will unblock her mind, so she can start working again and meet her last deadline. The couple is welcomed to a beautiful Maltese villa by the stunning maid, Sara (Sarai Givaty), who resembles Rosanna Arquette, circa 1985. Things heat up with Alice realizes that she’s being followed by an undercover cop, whose intentions are too-quickly revealed. Even so, director Alessandro Capone (Hidden Love) keeps a couple of rabbits up his sleeve until the film’s 91 minutes are over.

Jerry Lewis: 10 Films
Coming to America: 30th Anniversary Edition: Blu-ray
Trading Places: 35th Anniversary Edition: Blu-ray
Terminator: Genesis/Forrest Gump: 4K UHD/HDR
It’s been 10 months since Jerry Lewis’ death, at 91, of cardiovascular disease. In a career that extended, on one stage or another, from the early 1930s to 2017, the former Joseph and/or Jerome Levitch defined what it meant to be a multihyphenate. Obituary writers struggled to complete a lead paragraph that described all the different hats he wore during that period: comedian, straight man, actor, singer, hoofer, mime, humanitarian, film director, film producer, screenwriter, tech wizard, headliner, television host, guest star, author, teacher and family man. It wouldn’t be accurate to compare his career to a roller-coaster, because it remained on the ascendency for nearly 30 years. I think it’s safe to say, marathon appearances on the annual MDA than the movies included in “Jerry Lewis: 10 Films.” He deserved a Best Supporting Actor nomination, at least, for his startling performance in The King of Comedy (1982), despite protestations that he was just playing himself. (His improvisational and directorial skills also were cited by Martin Scorsese.)

If the cheap shots about the reverence shown him by French critics and filmmakers never really ended, how many of his detractors could split the difference between auteur theory and schtick? Without belaboring the point, here’s what Jean Luc Godard had to say about the mercurial artist, at the height of his career and early days of the French New Wave: “Jerry Lewis … is the only one in Hollywood doing something different, the only one who isn’t falling in with the established categories, the norms, the principles. … Lewis is the only one today who’s making courageous films. He’s been able to do it because of his personal genius.” The titles included here, which played to adult sensibilities, while also delighting kids, are the one that prompted such praise.

The Stooge (1951) features one of Lewis’ earliest pairings with Dean Martin as a musical-comedy duo, albeit one forged by unusual circumstances; The Delicate Delinquent (1956), in Lewis’ first solo flight, he plays a bumbling janitor caught between neighborhood toughs and a friendly cop (Darren McGavin); The Bellboy (1960), in which a clumsy, mostly mute bellboy turns Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau Hotel upside-down; Cinderfella (1960), in which Lewis adds his trademark touches to the classic fairy tale, with Ed Wynn playing the Fairy Godfather; The Errand Boy (1961), in which Paramount Pictures enlists a human wrecking ball to discover who’s draining studio resources; The Ladies Man (1961) inserts a girl-shy nebbish into a women’s-only hotel to serve their every, frequently selfish whim; The Nutty Professor (1963) confuses a nerdy chemist with a slick lounge lizard, Buddy Love; The Disorderly Orderly (1964) puts an overly empathic med-school dropout in charge of caring for patients in a private rest home; The Patsy (1964), a cameo-heavy twist on “My Fair Lady,” with Jerry’s trademark schlub as Eliza Doolittle; and The Family Jewels, with Lewis playing seven distinctly different characters attempting to win the heart and fortune of an orphaned heiress. Binging on all 10 movies provides ample proof of how much Lewis influenced generations of comics to come, including Eddie Murphy and Jim Carrey.

Only Murphy was afforded the kind of freedom Lewis that enjoyed while acting on his whims and brainstorms. His influence is most visible in Murphy’s own version of The Nutty Professor (1996) and its sequel, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000). In 1988, Murphy and Arsenio Hall both played multiple characters in Coming to America, while Eddie reprised the gag in Vampire in Brooklyn (1995). The original version of The Nutty Professor was included on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 funniest American films of all time and was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2004. Just for kicks, let me suggest watching The Delicate Delinquent alongside West Side Story. The curated boxed set adds commentaries with Lewis and Steve Lawrence; deleted scenes; interviews with compiler Chris Lewis; auditions; and backstage material.

Paramount is rolling out a quartet of its most popular vintage titles on Blu-ray and/or 4K UHD/HDR. Newcomers to Murphy’s work should check out “Coming to America: 30th Anniversary Edition,” with Hall and James Earl Jones; and “Trading Places: 35th Anniversary Edition,” with Dan Aykroyd, Ralph Bellamy, Don Ameche and, of course, Jamie Lee Curtis. Both were directed by John Landis. Neither has been remastered or includes fresh featurettes, but they add slipcovers and vouchers for UV/iTunes digital copies. Terminator: Genesis and Forrest Gump benefit from fresh 4K UHD/HDR upgrades, with such enhancements as 12-bit Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos soundtracks. Terminator: Genesis‘ UHD disc contains no extras, but the pair of bundled Blu-ray discs ports over both all the original Blu-ray’s content, as well as a second disc with in-depth extras not included on the core release from 2015. Forrest Gump‘s UHD disc carries over a pair of legacy commentary tracks, which can only be found under the “Settings” tab. Viewers will find a plethora of extra content on the included pair of Blu-ray discs, which are simple ports of the 2009 set. A UV/iTunes digital copy code is included purchase.

Abominable: Special Edition: Blu-ray
Released in 2006, Ryan Schifrin’s Abominable feels like a throwback to a bygone era when creature features and disaster epics ruled the drive-ins. For some reason that I can’t exactly figure out, it works remarkably well today, surrounded in the marketplace by even more dated flicks that have been re-tooled in Blu-ray. Like many of the titles refurbished by Scream Factory, Cult Epics, Lionsgate, Synapse, Grindhouse, Cheezy and, now, MVD Rewind, Abominable has camp and nostalgia value up the yin-yang. For once, the story behind it isn’t bad, either. The publicity material suggests that the almost certainly mythical beast, variously known as Sasquatch, Yeti and Bigfoot, has been sighted some 42,000 times in 68 countries. It wasn’t until 1921 that the Himalayan Yeti became popularly known as the Abominable Snowman, a term that has little resonance today. Despite the insistence of filmmakers, the Yeti, Sasquatch and Bigfoot sightings argue against the hairy bipeds being aggressively violent. In fact, the rarity of the sighting suggests they’re incredibly reclusive. No one, as far as I know, has encountered a baby Bigfoot and it’s more likely to be a vegan than carnivore. The persistence of the legend can largely be traced to its value to the tourist industry in the Pacific Northwest.

Abominable doesn’t offer viewers much of a back story, really. The conceit – a horror flick inspired by Rear Window – substitutes for a coherent narrative. The monster simply appears one night outside the farmhouse belonging to Billy and Ethel Hoss (Rex Linn, Dee Wallace). The creature has killed a horse and will soon devour the family dog, an Irish Setter too stupid to know when to stay put. It returns to the Hoss’ house, but only to leave behind some humungous footprints. When next encountered the Sasquatch is threatening the lives of a group of young women holding a bachelorette party at a high-altitude retreat and their neighbor, a wheelchair-bound man who lost the use of his legs in a climbing mishap. A hunting party that includes the farmer is also in the vicinity. Matt McCoy plays the injured neighbor, who monitors the monster’s attack on the women through a pair of binoculars. The subsequent attack on the mountain condos is well choreographed by Schifrin, whose father, Lalo, composed the musical score. The Sasquatch is a take-no-prisoners sort of a fellow, who’s even able to survive an ax that’s driven through its chest and being crushed between a tree and the rear end of an automobile.

The question that lingers is how can a single Sasquatch be at so many places simultaneously and still be hungry after devouring so many large pieces of meat? Stay tuned. Besides Wallace, Linn and McCoy, the familiar cast includes Jeffrey Combs, Paul Gleason, Haley Joel, Phil Morris, Tiffany Shepis and Lance Henriksen. The Blu-ray adds an audio/visual upgrade; commentary with Schifrin, McCoy and Combs; Schifrin’s introduction; deleted and extended scenes; outtakes and bloopers; the featurette, ”Back to Genre: Making Abominable”; short films by Schifrin; the original 2005 version of the film; a storyboard and stills gallery; and collectible poster.

Ninja III: The Domination: Collector’s Edition: Blu-ray
It would be difficult to find a genre picture more indicative of the cheeseball fare associated with Cannon Films in its 1980s heyday than Ninja III: The Domination. OK, maybe Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, which also starred former Miss Kansas candidate and Solid Gold dancer Lucinda Dickey. In it, she plays Christie Ryder, a telephone-company worker and part-time aerobics instructor, who becomes possessed by the spirit of an evil ninja, whose life she attempted to save. Dominated by the killer’s vicious and relentless rage, she sets out to avenge his death. Her boyfriend, confused by Christie’s changing personality and afraid that he might be her next victim, enlists the help of Yamada (Shô Kosugi). In a life-threatening exorcism and ultimate fight to the death, Yamada proves that he is Christie’s only chance for survival. It is not really a trilogy in the sense that the story lines are all connected or that Kosugi plays the same character in each movie, which he doesn’t. According to director Sam Firstenberg, Ninja III was inspired as much by The Exorcist and Poltergeist as previous kung-fu movies. The collector’s edition is enhanced by a 4K remaster of the film and new interviews with Dickey, actor Jordan Bennett, producer and stuntman Alan Amiel, production designer Elliot Ellentuck and co-composer Misha Segal. Ported over are isolated tracks from the original score; a theatrical trailer with optional “Trailers From Hell” commentary with screenwriter Josh Olson; commentary by Firstenberg and stunt coordinator Steve Lambert; and reversible cover with original theatrical poster art.

Sherlock Gnomes: Blu-ray
In this long-anticipated sequel to the remarkably successful animated feature, Gnomeo & Juliet (2011), detective Sherlock Gnomes (Johnny Depp) is recruited to help investigate the mysterious disappearance of ornaments from lawns around London. Sherlock has defeated his archenemy Moriarty (Jamie Demetriou), once and for all, and Gnomeo (James McAvoy) and Juliet (Emily Blunt) – now in charge of restoring their master’s garden to its former glory — assume that he has plenty of time to get to the bottom of the crime. To this end, Sherlock can count on the wisdom and detection skills of Dr. Watson (Chiwetel Ejiofor). This time around, the action is more suited to younger audiences than full-family viewing, but the production values are high enough to keep adults interested, for a while anyway. The Blu-ray adds featurettes “Gnome Is Where the Heart Is,” “All Roads Lead to Gnome: London Locations in Sherlock Gnomes,” “Gnome Wasn’t Built in a Day: The Design and Art of Sherlock Gnomes,” “Miss Gnomer: Mary J. Blige and the Music of Sherlock Gnomes,” the music video “Stronger Than I Ever Was,” “How to Draw” and “Animating Sherlock Gnomes.”

TV-to-DVD
NBC: Will & Grace (The Revival): Season One
Lifetime: Sea Change
PBS: Frontline: Bitter Rivals: Iran and Saudi Arabia
History: Ancient Aliens: 10th Anniversary Edition
Nickelodeon Favorites: Great Summer Campout!
Unlike the revival of “Roseanne,” which ABC pulled the plug on last month, the reboot of NBC’s pioneering sitcom, “Will & Grace,” will live to see the bright lights of two more seasons, at least. If Roseanne Barr’s ignoble downfall taught the television establishment anything, it’s that the only person who can get away with posting crackpot opinions on Twitter is the President. Amazingly, he’s told so many lies on social media that his nose has run out of the cartilage needed to surpass Pinocchio’s record. And, no one asks him to apologize, either. The first incarnation of “Will & Grace” was broadcast on the Peacock Network from September 1998 to May 2006. Despite initial criticism for its stereotypical portrayals of gay characters, as well as some timidity on the part of NBC’s promotional department, it went on to become a staple of its Thursday-night lineup. It was met with continued critical acclaim and awards recognition. Emmy nominations have yet to be announced, but the revival likely will get its share. In 2012, former Vice President Joe Biden cited the show as a trailblazer for acceptance of the LGBT community, “I think ‘Will & Grace’ probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody has ever done so far. This is evolving.” Indeed, Biden’s endorsement of the sitcom and same-sex marriage preceded President Obama’s willingness to publicly accept the controversial stance. Beyond that, the ninth season of “Will & Grace” picked up where it left off 11 years ago. Not having followed the show for most of its original run, it’s difficult for me to say if the characters are more outspoken and willing to show their affection for same-sex friends. Maybe, maybe not. All I know is that Debra Messing’s Grace, with all her neuroses, would make a wonderful match to Jerry Seinfeld’s Jerry, in “Seinfeld.” (Their paths crossed twice on the show, in “The Yada Yada” and “The Wait Out,” but with Messing playing a different character, Beth.) Bonus features include deleted scenes, a gag reel, “Back to the Beginning,” “Reuniting the Team” and a discussion with director James Burrows and cast members.

If Lifetime had a YA division, “Sea Change” would be one of its marquee attractions. More or less based on Aimee Friedman’s young-adult novel of the same title, it’s about a teenage girl, who, after the death of her father, returns to the island home of a mother she never knew. It doesn’t take long for 17-year-old Miranda Merchant (Emily Rudd) to figure out that scenic Selkie Island – actually, Nova Scotia’s Oak Island – is divided in almost every way possible by the demands of the wealthy summer residents and the locals, who couldn’t survive without them. It will take a bit longer for Miranda to learn that the locals are divided, as well, by the normal folks and the seemingly normal Seawalkers, who are half-human, half-amphibian. As Miranda settles into island life, she finds herself torn between T.J., heir to one of the oldest Selkie families, and mysterious bad boy, Leo, who is part of the working-class “townies.” Leo has the advantage over T.J., for saving Miranda after she momentarily forgets that she can’t swim and wades into the ocean. The deeper she digs into Leo’s life, the closer Miranda comes to uncovering mysteries of her own. Veteran television director Chris Grismer does a nice job maintaining a balance between teen schmaltz and supernatural melodrama.

One doesn’t need a degree in international relations to fully appreciate how messed up things are in the Middle East and how unlikely it is that they’re going to get better any time soon. Invest two hours of your precious time watching the “Frontline” presentation, “Bitter Rivals: Iran and Saudi Arabia” and you’ll know as much about the situation as any undergraduate and more than 90 percent of the people running things in Washington. Not only is the mess complicated, but the roots of current hostilities extend back 1,400 years. The two-part documentary is quite a bit more interesting than what students usually are able to glean in lecture halls, if only because the visuals are more exciting than textbooks. The central event that drives the series is the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988. The conflict, which left at least a million combatants and civilians dead, more closely resembled World War I than other modern wars. It involved large-scale trench warfare, with barbed wire stretched across fortified defensive lines; machine-gun nests; bayonet charges; Iranian human wave attacks, extensive use of chemical weapons by Iraq and deliberate attacks on civilian targets. What most people outside the region didn’t understand, at the time, is that the carnage was caused, in large part, by religious differences almost imperceptible to most westerners. Although Saudi Arabia wasn’t directly involved, it took sides with Iraq. Years later, the ramifications of that war would be felt in the ill-advised American invasion of Iraq; civil wars in Lebanon and Syria; the rise and decline of ISIS; collapse of Yemen; and increased militarization of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Throw in Israel, oil and an out-of-control refugee problem, and you have the makings of a real powder keg … or Armageddon, one.

Who knew that there was so mileage in a series of quasi-investigative reports about UFOs, extraterrestrials, crop circles and other phenomena associated with the possibility that life exists on other planets? I don’t know if “Ancient Aliens: 10th Anniversary Edition” represents History Channel’s biggest cash cow, but the 36-disc collection would be impressive, even as a doorstop. The gift set includes all 135 episodes and over 100 hours of “Ancient Aliens” content. The epic series explores the ancient and unexplained, in search of humankind’s origins, as well as the secrets of the universe. From the age of dinosaurs to the mysteries of ancient Egypt, and from early cave drawings to present-day sightings and cover-ups, “Ancient Aliens” has fed the imaginations of true believers and skeptics, alike.

The new “Nickelodeon Favorites” DVD, “Great Summer Campout!” features five episodes from select Nick Jr. shows about summer and camping. They are “Bubble Guppies: The Summer Camp Games,” “Shimmer and Shine: Treehouse Retreat,” “Blaze and the Monster Machines: Truck Rangers,” “Sunny Day: Wild Styled” and “Nella the Princess Knight: Dueling Sleepovers.” Let’s hope the DVD is reserved for rainy days only.

Annihilation: Blu-ray, 4K UHD HDR
Alex Garland is a terrific writer-director who challenges the imagination and rewards viewers, for whom patience a virtue. Garland received sole screenwriter credit on 28 Days Later … (2002), Sunshine (2007), Never Let Me Go (2010) and Dredd (2012), while sharing the writing credit with Tameem Antoniades on the video games and “DmC: Devil May Cry” and “Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.” He also wrote the novels from which The Beach (2000) and The Tesseract (2003), were adapted. None of them enjoyed an easy stroll to the big screen. Those difficulties were a walk in the park compared to the difficulties the London-born author and filmmaker faced getting Ex Machina (2014) and Annihilation into theaters. Together, they represent two of the finest examples of Earth-bound science fiction — or, if you prefer, speculative fiction or cutting-edge fiction – to be produced sequentially, in memory. The former lost its U. S. distributor, Universal-Focus, after it was screened on December 16, 2014, as part of the BFI’s blockbuster “Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder” exhibit. A24, its new distributor, introduced Ex Machina three months later, at the South by Southwest Film Festival. Fearing the movie wouldn’t reach the desired demographic, the company elected to using the dating app, Tinder, as a marketing tool. A profile was created for the gynoid, Ava (Alicia Vikander), and matched with other Tinder users. It generated a text conversation that lead users to the Instagram handle promoting the film. It’s hard to say if the gimmick encouraged even a single user to check out Ex Machina. It wasn’t until the Comic-Con crowd and other sci-fi buffs launched a successful word-of-mouth campaign that carried Ex Machina into its DVD/Blu-ray afterlife and awards season.

Annihilation’s American release was threatened when, after a test screening, a financier and producer at Paramount voiced concerns that the film was – wait for it — “too intellectual” and “too complicated.” He reportedly demanded changes, including making the female protagonist’s character more sympathetic and changing the ending, to appeal to a wider audience. Producer Scott Rudin, who had final-cut privilege, shared Garland’s lack of interest in altering the film. On December 7, 2017, it was announced that a deal was struck allowing Netflix to distribute the film internationally. Paramount, then under new leadership, agreed to handle the American, Canadian and Chinese release, freeing Netflix to begin streaming the film in other territories about a month later. Despite all the hubbub and the imperfect arrangement, Annihilation stands a fair chance of reaping something resembling a profit in the DVD/Blu-ray/UHD/VOD marketplace. It certainly deserves to attract the same viewers who enjoyed Ex Machina.

Annihilation, based on Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach Trilogy,” isn’t the easiest movie to summarize. One way for potential viewers to get a fix on it would be to imagine how scientists and military leaders might react if the skies over the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone suddenly began to resemble the contents of a lava lamp. All post-meltdown research and what limited tourism that exists would be halted immediately, but, after a while, the Ukrainian government probably would want to know what’s up with the Shimmer, as the hallucinatory electromagnetic field is referred to in the movie. Annihilation follows a group of carefully chosen scientists – portrayed by Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson and Tuva Novotny – as they enter the quarantined zone, Area X, which is distinguished by mutating landscapes, transmogrifying creatures and an ability to manipulate time. One ill-fated expedition has already ended in failure, so the “volunteers” are aware of the danger. Strangely enough, a year after the participants of the doomed mission had been given up for dead, one of them shows up at the home he shared with his biologist wife, Lena (Portman). In terrible shape physically and his memory wiped clean, Kane (Oscar Isaac) might very well be a mutated clone of his former self. When he and Lena are hauled into headquarters by military authorities, he’s put into an intensive-care ward and she’s quarantined with the team of women chosen to search for the Shimmer’s source. All that needs to be revealed about what they find inside Area X is that it’s brilliantly rendered, completely illogical from a scientific point of view and occasionally quite disturbing. (OK, one scary tidbit: a gigantic irradiated alligator ambushes the women as they approach a ruined swamp-side house … but that’s all.) One reviewer characterized the story as “Under the Dome meets Event Horizon” and I wouldn’t disagree. The film’s production values are second to none, especially on the 4K UHD edition, which captures the Shimmer in all its glory. The special effects and CGI are spectacular, but they never detract from the human story being told or its mysteries. Admirers of the movie will want to check out the three-part making-of package, which is more than an hour long and covers all the bases.

The Other Side of Hope: Criterion Collection: Blu-ray
Moonrise: Criterion Collection: Blu-ray
Just because a filmmaker has won important awards at every festival worth attending and his pictures are universally praised by critics who didn’t wake up one morning and decide they wanted to write a column on the Internet, doesn’t mean his latest gem will automatically be shown in more than 11 theaters here. The latest of many such cases in point is The Other Side of Hope, by Finnish writer/director Aki Kaurismäki, which has been rescued from obscurity by Criterion Collection. Kaurismäki may not be the most accessible in the world, but lovers of arthouse cinema deserve an opportunity to see it on a screen larger than the one on their phone. His wildly offbeat road movie, Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989), can be enjoyed as much today as This Is Spinal Tap continues to be with fans of mockumentaries and heavy metal, and there’s no reason it can’t be enjoyed by the same audiences. If The Other Side of Hope demands more in the way of a viewer’s attention, patience and an awareness of current events, the payoff is well worth the effort. His characters tend to fit the stereotype established for them by the European neighbors: melancholy, unambitious, unkempt, often rude and prone to alcoholism. You’d probably be surly, as well, if you lived within shouting distance of the Arctic Circle and in constant fear that some mad Russian could decide to invade your beautiful country at the drop of a reindeer’s turd … again. The same can be said about Alaskans, I suppose. Kaurismäki’s characters are entirely recognizable as living, breathing human beings, just like people we knew growing up or see every day on our way to work. They are not comic-book superheroes or wannabes. Even so, Kaurismäki makes us care about these every-day jamokes in ways that Hollywood movies never do.

With the exceptions of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, there may not be another filmmaker in the world whose stories are founded on basic humanistic ideals; feature unexceptional, yet endearing characters; and grab viewers with their droll, minimalistic and entirely organic compassion and humor … and do so for so little commercial gain. Like La Havre (2011), which describes the friendship that develops between an elderly bootblack and an illegal underage immigrant from Africa, The Other Side of Hope concerns people in desperate need of a fresh start in life. This includes refugees from Syria and Iraq, and a middle-age Helsinki shirt salesman whose path they cross. After a quarrel with his wife, Waldemar (Sakari Kuosmanen) decides to sell his inventory to a shopkeeper and risk the money in a high-stakes poker game. After cleaning out the other players, he buys a non-descript strip-mall restaurant, whose customers drink more than they eat. He keeps its three employees on the payroll after they were stiffed by the previous owner. At the same time, Khaled (Sherwan Haji) shows up in Helsinki after an arduous journey from the ruined city of Aleppo, where most of his family perished. After entering the city illegally, buried in a pile of coal on a cargo ship, Khaled turns himself in to the police, who will process his application for asylum. At the refugee processing facility, he’s quartered alongside several other men and women who’ve just risked their lives to find work in a new home. On Khaled’s trek north, he lost track of his only living relative, a teenage sister, who disappeared in one of several border skirmishes. When the Finnish government denies Khaled’s application – somehow, it considers Aleppo to be a habitable city — he escapes from the facility, just ahead of the immigration agents assigned to transport him to the airport. After claiming a spot of his own to call home – behind the dumpster outside Waldemar’s restaurant –he impresses the owner with his willingness to fight for his right to stay there. Rather than call the police, Waldemar absorbs Khaled into the fabric of the struggling business, which is in the process of changing themes and cuisines to find one that fits the local clientele.

It’s here that The Other Side of Hope threatens to turn into a veritable laugh fest. It stops short of that by the constant threats to Khaled’s well-being from skinhead thugs and police, as well as the ongoing search for his sister. Kaurismäki doesn’t ignore the people in Khaled and Waldemar’s orbit, who otherwise might have been relegated to the background. Their concern for the protagonists’ struggles, and willingness to help them in any way they can, is in direct contrast to the behavior of the skinheads and cops, who represent two sides of the same coin. You can also discern a blurred cultural identity in the emotionless faces of the musicians we meet on the street and in the bars, and dancers who don’t look as if they’re enjoying themselves, particularly, but really are. Don’t be surprised if the movie begins to remind you of Jim Jarmusch early work, as they’re kindred spirits. In Night on Earth (1991), Jarmusch paid homage to the Kaurismäki brothers, Aka and Mika, by naming of the Finnish taxi driver and his sleeping drunken passenger after them. At a time when the plight of refugees and undocumented immigrants couldn’t be any more pressing, The Other Side of Hope also reminded me of A Better Life (2011), The Visitor (2007), La Promesse (1996) and Dirty Pretty Things (2002). La Havre and The Other Side of Hope form the first two legs of what the writer/director/producer is calling the Refuge Trilogy. (His Proletariat Trilogy consists of Shadows in Paradise [1986], Ariel [1988] and The Match Factory Girl [1990]].) The Blu-ray adds an interview with Sherwan Haji; footage from the 2017 Berlin Film Festival press conference for the film; “Aki and Peter,” a new video essay by Daniel Raim about the friendship between Kaurismäki and film critic Peter von Bagh; music videos to songs in the movie; and an essay by critic Girish Shambu.

Also included in this month’s stack of new releases from Criterion Collection is Frank Borzage’s Moonrise (1949), a small-town fable about violence and redemption that looks, walks and talks like a noir, but has melodrama written all over it. It stars Dane Clark as Danny Hawkins, a Southerner who has been haunted by and bullied over a terrible crime committed by his father ever since his execution. After being constantly taunted by classmates, Danny grew up wondering when his father’s sins might be visited on him. It comes during a fight with one of his prime tormentors, Jerry (Lloyd Bridges), as an adult. Danny inadvertently kills Jerry in a dispute over what amounts to ownership rights to a pretty, young teacher, Gilly (Gail Russell). Believing that his next likely residence will be the same Death Row cell once occupied by his father, he drags the body into the nearby swamp. It will go undiscovered until months later, when, during an annual raccoon hunt, a dog owned by his black friend, Mose (Rex Ingram), sniffs it out. By this time, however, Danny and Gilley have begun dating and she doesn’t suspect him of the crime. After the knife used in the fight turns up in the hands of a crippled mute, Billy Scripture (Henry Morgan), his guilt catches up with him and he freaks out over his deception of Gilley. Before he can iron out his hang-ups, he visits Mose, his grandmother (Ethel Barrymore) and his father’s grave. Finally, Danny’s fate rests in his own trembling hands. John L. Russell’s stark black-and-white cinematography greatly enhances pivotal scenes in the swamp and at a small-town carnival.

Borzage’s long directorial career was in a steep decline by the time he tackled Moonrise, which was adapted from a novel by Theodore Strauss. Twenty years earlier, however, he was one of Hollywood’s most valuable commodities. Influenced visually by German director F.W. Murnau, also working at Fox at this time, he developed his own style of lushly visual romanticism in a popular series of silent or partially silent films starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, including 7th Heaven (1927), for which he won the first Academy Award for Best Director, and Street Angel (1928) and Lucky Star (1929). starring the same two actors. He won a second Oscar for the pre-code drama, Bad Girl (1931) and received critical kudos for The Mortal Storm (1940), one of the few directly anti-Nazi Hollywood films released before the American entry into World War II. Moonrise would be his next favorably received picture, after which he took a 10-year hiatus. Borzage would only be credited for two more films, China Doll (1958) and The Big Fisherman (1959), before his death on June 19, 1962, at 68. In a conversation between author Borzage biographer Hervé Dumont and film historian Peter Cowie, that’s included in the crisply restored Criterion edition, a strong case is advanced for an upgrade in the director’s legacy. Also included is an essay by critic Philip Kemp.

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song: Blu-ray
Even five years ago, Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-ray release of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) might have been considered little more than an interesting, if largely irrelevant reminder of a time when Hollywood began to understand the commercial value of African-American audiences and filmmakers. It wouldn’t last, of course, leaving dozens of black actors scrambling for work and viewers bereft of movies that spoke directly to them. Even so, Melvin Van Peebles’ angry action thriller influenced a soon-to-emerge generation of independent African-American writers and directors that included Spike Lee. “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song gave us all the answers we needed,” Lee observed. “This was an example of how to make a film (a real movie), distribute it yourself, and most important, get paid. Without ‘Sweetback,’ who knows if there could have been a […] She’s Gotta Have It, Hollywood Shuffle or House Party?” Even so, without a $50,000 loan from Bill Cosby and an agreement with two theaters in Detroit, it may not have not have seen the light of day. Despite receiving an X-rating from the MPAA and facing other roadblocks, “Sweetback” grossed $15 million at the box office, which translates into about $90 million today. That’s the number that caught the eye of studio executives.

Although some critics and historians have credited “Sweetback” with initiating the blaxploitation trend, it really doesn’t conform to the working definition of the subgenre. It’s certainly no more representative of blaxploitation than Van Peebles’ nearly concurrent 1970 comedy, Watermelon Man, Gordon Parks’ Shaft, Ossie Davis’s Cotton Comes to Harlem or Gordon Douglas’ They Call Me Mister Tibbs! More frequently than not, the blaxploitation titles that followed were made by white directors and writers, who cardboard depictions of white gangsters and crooked cops made it easy to cheer for and validate the violence dished out by black anti-heroes, including vigilante pimps, pushers, prostitutes and fed-up cops. Audiences ate it up, until the lack of nourishing content and evolving storylines killed the goose who laid all the golden eggs. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, continued video evidence of unfettered police brutality and retaliatory attacks on police, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song hasn’t lost any of the urgency that fueled its popularity in 1971. After all this time, it remains one of the most iconic, notorious, and influential American films of the Black Power and Vietnam War period. Unlike the blaxploitation films to come, there was no “kill whitey” subtext and the behavior of the cops would be reprehensible in any context. Apart from being made “required viewing” for members of Black Panther Party, “Sweetback” neatly fit in alongside other period anti-establishment pictures, including Zabriskie Point (1970), Easy Rider (1969), Billy Jack (1971), Medium Cool (1969) and Punishment Park (1971). Its graphic nudity and unsparing sexuality did differentiate it from most other movies being exhibited at the time, however.

In it, Van Peebles plays the title character, Sweetback, a homeless boy raised by the proprietor of a Los Angeles brothel in the 1940s. Years after the 10-year-old orphan (Mario Van Peebles) is raped by one of the prostitutes, he earns his keep by entertaining customers in a sex show. One night, a pair of white LAPD officers come in to speak to his boss, Beetle (Simon Chuckster). A black man has been murdered, and there is pressure from the black community to bring in a suspect. The police ask permission to arrest Sweetback, blame him for the crime, but release him a few days later for lack of evidence. On the way to the police station, however, the officers arrest a young Black Panther named Mu-Mu (Hubert Scales). When Mu-Mu insults the cops, they take both men out of the car, undo the handcuff that connects them, and kick the crap out of him. In response, Sweetback uses the handcuffs, still hanging from his wrist, to beat the officers into unconsciousness. It sets off a manhunt that turns into a picaresque chase from L.A. to Mexico. A pair of cops are killed at a Hells Angels’ hangout, where the size of Sweetback’s penis causes a white biker chick to trade a roll in the hay for the assistance they need to escape police. Filmed from every possible angle and position, the chase reminds me of Franka Potente’s 80-minute race against time in Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998). “Sweetback” features a rousing score from a then-unknown Earth, Wind & Fire, as well as unorthodox visuals from cinematographer Robert Maxwell. Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-ray edition has been newly restored in 4K from its original 35mm camera negative, and includes commentary with film historian Sergio Mims; a 10-page booklet, with an essay by Travis Crawford; a “career interview” with the 85-year-old filmmaker; a half-hour interview with actress Niva Ruschell, who plays the prostitute who deflowers Sweetback and gives him his new name; a 36-minute Q&A with Van Peebles, taped at the 2013 Black Panther Film Festival; an undated making-of featurette; a “still gallery,” with vintage newspaper ads, reviews and stories that chart the “Sweet Sweetback” phenomenon; and original marketing material.

The Two of Us: Blu-ray
After 50 years, I don’t think I’d be spoiling anyone’s enjoyment of this wonderful film by calling it one of the very few feel-good movies set in Occupied France during World War II. Nor would I be giving much away by saying that The Two of Us’ curmudgeonly co-protagonist, zestfully portrayed by Michel could have served as the model for Archie Bunker, both being lovable bigots whose bark is considerably worse than their bite. Claude Berri, for whom The Two of Us is semi-autobiographical, at least, set the story at a time when everyone in France, including the Nazis, assumes the Allied invasion is imminent and, if it succeeds, freedom will once again be at hand. In Paris, this also means that the Gestapo is rushing to find, arrest and deport every surviving Jew to an extermination camp. The parents of 8-year-old Claude (Alain Cohen) decide they no longer can keep their true identities secret and arrange for refuge away from the city. To further protect their son, they send him to live in the Rhône-Alpes region of southeastern France with the elderly parents of Catholic friends, while they hide elsewhere. (Berri was similarly separated from other family members during the war.) Knowing Claude has an unpredictable streak and could easily say something to tip off authorities, they teach him the basics of Catholicism. Before he’s handed off to Pépé (Simon) and Mémé (Luce Fabiole), Claude is given a new last name, taught a few things about Catholic rituals and forced to memorize the Lord’s Prayer. Most importantly, he’s told to never let anyone see his circumcised “birdie.” The last one is more difficult than it sounds.

Because of Claude’s smallish stature and obvious city ways, he’s an easy target for school bullies, at least until he learns to stand up for himself. He goes to church, befriends a friendly farmgirl and protects his penis from being seen by Mémé at bath time. The only other problem facing Claude is Pépé’s outspoken anti-Semitism and loyalty to his former comrades-in-arms in the Vichy government. Grandfather listens to government-controlled radio broadcasts after dinner, while also explaining why the roundup of Jews isn’t such a bad thing. (There’s no evidence Pépé is aware of Hitler’s Final Solution or that he would betray the confidence of a Resistance fighter.) Claude is clever enough not to challenge his beliefs.

Instead of dwelling on the bigotry, however, The Two of Us becomes a bromance between an old man with a soft heart and a precocious child, who, despite, Grandpa’s flaws, worships him … and his beloved German shepherd. I kept waiting for something horrifying to happen, but, aside from the bullying, Berri allows his characters the dignity that comes with survival. The Two of Us paved the way for numerous other French movies about Jewish children during the Holocaust years, including Les violons du bal (1974), Les guichets du Louvre (1974), Au revoir les enfants (1987), The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008), Europa Europa (1990) and Hope and Glory (1987). René Clément’s Forbidden Games preceded The Two of Us by 15 years. If the name Michel Simon sounds familiar, it’s because he starred or co-starred in such classics as The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932), L’Atalante (1934), Port of Shadows (1938), La fin du jour (1939) and Beauty and the Devil (1950), frequently playing characters made to look as old and unkempt as Pépé. The crisp Cohen Media Blu-ray adds commentary with critic Wade Major; a brief archival piece with Simon reminiscing about coming out of an unwanted screen retirement to tackle the role; and a six-minute conversation between Simon and Jean Renoir.

Cold Turkey: Blu-ray
Laws against smoking in the workplace, hotels, restaurants, parks, beaches, passenger planes, theaters, rental cars, commuter trains and at the entrances to office buildings have become so pervasive that it sometimes seems as if no one smokes anymore. Two of the places young people are almost guaranteed to find smokers today are in Nevada casinos and the movies. One of the most memorable things about the TV series, “Mad Men,” and George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck was the number of cigarettes consumed by the characters. The MPAA ratings certificate is supposed to warn parents whenever a lot of puffing takes place and add a “smoking label” to the rating, but it’s a hit-and-miss policy. Anti-tobacco activists cite movies as a major influence in the acceptance or rejection of smoking by teens. Filmmakers have argued that the blanket elimination of cigarettes, cigars, pipes and vapes from their movies not only would make them less credible in the eyes of viewers, but its eliminates a convenient narrative shortcut. (In teen movies, for example, bad boys and sluts smoke, while good girls and jocks don’t.) By now, I find it difficult to avoid being distracted by chain-smokers, post-coitus puffs and ashtrays overflowing with butts. If a character extinguishes their cigarette in a lumped of mashed potatoes or a cocktail glass, it never fails to make me cringe. (I’m no purist when it comes to smoking, but I can still remember nibbling leftover pancakes on my dad’s breakfast plate, not realizing he was using it as an ashtray. The horror.) I wonder how Norman Lear’s first and only feature film, Cold Turkey – newly released by Olive Films on Blu-ray – will play to moviegoers born before and after 1966, when the government mandated warning labels on tobacco products. Where the incessant smoking in noir and foreign classics still may add a nostalgic or quaint air to Boomer viewers, it might turn off their children and grandchildren.

Borrowing a casting conceit from It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), perhaps, Lear brought together a couple dozen A-, B- and C-list actors, mostly from the television universe, to play citizens of an Iowa hamlet who are challenged to kick the habit, yes, cold turkey. Each actor had a specific reason for being included in the ensemble cast, other than mug for the camera or lure their fans to the theater. Knitting their individual personae into the fabric of Lear’s narrative sometimes resulted in missed stitches and frayed ends, however. In an ill-conceived publicity stunt, a tobacco company offers $25 million to any American town whose citizens sign a 30-day no-smoking pledge. When residents of Eagle Rock accept the challenge, the company’s PR man (Bob Newhart) spends the next month trying to sabotage the effort. Intense media coverage is assured by the presence of various broadcast-news personalities, all of whom are played exceedingly well by the comedy team of Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding. (As famous as they were for their radio and TV routines, Bob may be better known today as the father of comedian Chris Elliott and grandfather of former “SNL” regular, Abby Elliott.) The eloquent Reverend Clayton Brooks (Dick Van Dyke) hopes to use the reward to transform the town into the “jewel of the Heartland.” To ensure victory, all tobacco products are confiscated, and volunteers organize a militia to identify potential cheaters and discourage opportunists from creating a black market. The cast also includes Pippa Scott, Vincent Gardenia, Jean Stapleton, Graham Jarvis Tom Poston, Edward Everett Horton, Bob Newhart, Barnard Hughes and M. Emmet Walsh, among other familiar faces. Working from a novel by Margaret and Neil Rau, Lear allows plenty of room for his “liberal agenda” to emerge. Randy Newman provided the musical score, his first of many to come.

Paws P.I.
If your family’s taste in live-action comedy runs to the anthropomorphic animals, whose lips don’t move when they converse with each other, Paws P.I. might be right up their alley. (Somebody must be buying these DVDs, because a new one is released every month, or two.) Paws P.I. is latest canine-centric title from Grindstone Entertainment, which also has released such direct-to-video fare as “Wiener Dog Internationals,” “Army Dog” and “Bark Ranger.” Here, Peter Williams (Neal Genys) and his dog, Jackson (voiced by Jon Lovitz), are best friends. They enjoy hanging out and skateboarding around town. When Peter’s father, Connor (Eddie Mills), a down-on-his-luck private investigator, is hired by veterinarian Katherine Worthington (Celesta Hodge) to help prove that her aunt’s will was stolen by her corrupt uncle. Peter and Jackson join forces with his pretty neighbor, Madison (Selah Atwood), and her sassy poodle, Cleo, and a stuffy British parrot, Peabody (voiced by Circus-Szalewski). Together, the cross-species squad invades the uncle’s mansion, where they battle his bumbling henchmen and find the document. Paws P.I. has been approved by the Dove Foundation for all ages. Presumably, that includes pets, as well.

TV-to-DVD
PBS: Frontline: Weinstein
MTV/Paramount: Jackass: Complete TV and Movie Collection
The “Frontline” investigation, “Weinstein,” debuted on PBS affiliates in early March, when most of the information collected was reasonably fresh and the former head of Miramax and Weinstein Company was still two months away from being arrested, processed and indicted on charges of rape, committing a criminal sex act, sexual abuse and sexual misconduct. (His guest appearance in coverage of the NYPD’s “perp walk” scene was right out of “Law & Order: SVU.”) Most of what’s documented here on Harvey’s proclivities, perversions and modus operandi is all too familiar, by now. At the very least, he should be put away for being a pig, bully and serial philanderer, no matter how a jury rules on the charges. After all, Weinstein probably still has enough money available to him to pull an O.J. Among the things that are new in “Weinstein” are an on-camera interview with actress Sean Young, who had previously given her account to print media; a new accusation from Suza Maher-Wilson, who worked on his 1981 film, The Burning; the first interview with Tom Prince, who served as the Weinstein Company’s VP/production and signed off on travel expenses for Harvey’s dalliances; and interviews with former U.K. assistant Zelda Perkins and model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez. Putting faces to names adds credibility to their accusations and those of other women, collectively referred to as Jane Does.

Looking for the perfect gift for any recent graduate disheartened by the slim prospects for meaningful work and substantial careers? (A tooled-leather briefcase or fancy pen-and-pencil set might be construed as being too optimistic.) Look no further than “Jackass: Complete TV and Movie Collection,” a tidy re-packaging of seasonal compilations and theatrical films already released a la carte by MTV/Paramount. If the “Jackass” gang could support themselves by shooting Roman candles out of their asses and riding shopping carts down steep hills, there’s hope for all unemployed graduates. As hilarious as some of the gags are, however, amateurs are advised not to copy them at home. The “Jackass” franchise, as represented in this 11-disc boxed set, includes seven movies and three seasons worth of TV episodes and bonus material, the theatrical release, Bad Grandpa, and its ancillary, Bad Grandpa .5, making-of featurettes, deleted scenes and interviews. It is what it is. I suggest placing wagers on how long it takes before disapproving friends and family members break down and enjoy themselves.

Vazante: Blu-ray
For a while, slavery was Hollywood’s subject du jour, with four excellent movies dealing with our country’s Original Sin and resistance by abolitionists and insurgents: Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, Gary Ross’ Free State of Jones and Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation. While the barrage of racial slurs and depictions of torture, beatings and lynching tested viewers’ ability to absorb hateful stimuli, there was no question as to quality of the direction, writing and acting on display, or the films’ enduring relevance. I don’t know if the institution of slavery is a common theme in the cinema of Brazil, the last country in the western world to abolish it, in 1888. If not, Daniela Thomas’ searing period drama, Vazante, effectively opens the door to a broad discussion of the subject … historically and as still practiced today. In American movies about the Civil War and slavery, certain things are taken for granted, beyond the inhumanity of its practitioners. Plantation owners are typically depicted as wealthy and their primary cash crop is cotton. Their families’ genteel manners, adherence to so-called Christian values and posh lifestyles stand in direct conflict to the reality of life among their human chattel. Rarely are the individual backgrounds of the slaves, prior to being captured in Africa, examined. (Just as slave owners separated husbands and wives, they also avoided collecting men and boys who spoke the same language.) Without being at all academic or polemical, Vazante demonstrates just how different the lives of slaves and their owners could be in Brazil, where plantations were carved out of jungle and the country’s variety of resources dictated the terms of labor.

Instead of having to rely on cotton, tobacco or hemp, as was the case in the American South, the Brazilian economy evolved from being sugar-driven, from 1600 to 1650, to relying on gold and diamonds, from 1690 to the second half of the 18th Century, followed by ranching, agriculture, coffee and the mining of non-precious metals. When Portuguese colonists, most notably Jesuit aldeias (missions), exhausted the supply of indigenous labor, midway through the 16th Century, they invested heavily in the African slave trade. (See below …) The country’s proximity to Africa allowed for the collection of slaves from different parts of the continent than those destined for the Caribbean and U.S. They represent a greater number of tribes, languages and native religions. Once purchased, the captives’ duties would include building the roads to the farms, ranches and mines in which they would continue to labor. Each planter was allowed to import 120 slaves per year from Africa, and there was a law that stipulated 50 as the maximum number of lashes that a slave could take a day. Brazil’s immensity contributed to its emergence as the world’s largest importer of men, women and children from Africa. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that as many as 50,000 people are still being forced to work in Brazil’s meat and poultry sectors.

Vazante takes its title from a municipality in a lushly forested section of the state of Minas Gerais, in the north of southeastern Brazil. (It also translates as “surge” or “receding movement of the tide.”) Set in the 1820s, it opens with Antonio (Adriano Carvalho) leading a procession of slaves along a muddy path through the jungle, while his wife is experiencing the difficult delivery of their child at home. Upon his return, he learns that she’s died in labor and his plans for a family have been dashed. Confined to a decaying property in the company of his aging mother-in-law and numerous slaves, Antonio decides to carve a pasture, where he can redirect the farm’s resources to cattle ranching and milk production. Because of his frequent trips to collect cattle and supplies, he’s entrusted the day-to-day operation to a freed black man, Jeremias (Fabrício Boliveira), that he’s come to trust implicitly. It’s possible that Jeremias was born into slavery in Brazil, because the hierarchy within the plantation doesn’t favor new arrivals. The only work the new group has been trained to perform is diamond mining, and farming is as foreign to them as it would be to a lumberjack or accountant. A small rebellion brews when an uncooperative individual, whose language no one on the plantation understands, attempts to lead a mutiny. It’s quickly and forcibly put down by the overseer. Because of the scarcity of available white women in the mountainous region, Antonio decides to marry his wife’s niece, Beatriz (Luana Nastas), who’s yet to reach puberty. Although she understands what’s expected of her in marriage, Beatriz isn’t yet ready to relinquish her friendships with the black children. They include a handsome boy (Vinicius Dos Anjos) she’s known all her life. He’s the son of Antonio’s mistress (Jai Baptista) and, while technically a man, is too young to know when he’s playing with fire.

While Thomas has co-directed several film and television productions with Walter Salles, Vazante is her first entirely solo venture. Because historical fidelity was vital to her vision, she employed a team of historians and tribal experts to reproduce the lifestyles and clothing of the era. This included a group of non-actors who are descendants of the region’s former slaves. Thomas’ commitment to a slow-burn narrative wouldn’t have worked if it weren’t for Inti Briones’s gorgeous monochromatic cinematography, whose every frame demands to be savored. The explosive final scene anticipates Brazil’s pluralistic society to come, even as it demonstrates how difficult it might be to achieve. The interviews included in the DVD package add a great deal of information that otherwise might have been lost in translation.

(Hollywood filmmakers have treaded lightly on the Catholic Church’s role in facilitating slavery in the Americas, perhaps assuming Southern Baptists warrant most of the blame for defending it. I think there might be a good fact-based movie to be made on the clergy’s complicity with the practice and not just in Brazil or Mexico.

(In fact, the Catholic Church didn’t outlaw slavery from its missions in the Americas until 1843. At the time, Jesuits of Brazil were expelled from the country by Spanish and Portuguese emissaries because their priests were protecting Native Indians from slave-hunters’ raids and undermining the slave-based economy. Prior to the expulsion, the practice was justified by the priests’ insistence that their indentured laborers – black and aboriginal — be baptized and, therefore, closer the white man’s God.

(American Jesuits also treated conversions as compensation for the servitude of African laborers. Baptism, itself, was considered a reward beyond money. Even so, after the Vatican’s dictate, some priests profited from the sale of their slaves to Southern planters. The newly sainted Franciscan, Junipero Serra, justified his treatment of California’s aboriginal population they same way. The only movie I could find about him was The Story of Father Juniper Serra [1954], in which the Spanish padre was played Robert Warwick and Lyle Talbot portrayed another one. In the debate over Serra’s canonization, Pope Francis balanced his ability to convert countless “pagans” to Catholicism against his use of slave labor to build and sustain the territory’s missions.

(Native American activists argue that the Franciscans’ push northward from Mexico helped eradicate native culture from the region. It did so by relocating tribes from their native land and conscripting Indians into forced labor on the 17 missions stretching from San Diego to San Francisco. Those who voluntarily converted were spared some, but not all of the harsh treatment directed at those who refused. Disease, starvation, overwork and torture would lead to the decrease in California’s native population from more than 200,000 in the early-19th Century to some 15,000 at its end, mostly from disease. You’d think there was a movie in there somewhere … “Django Goes West,” perhaps.

(Is it possible that Pope Francis confused Serra’s legacy with that of Eusebio Francisco Kino, an Italian Jesuit, who established two dozen missions in northern Mexico and southern Arizona, between 1683 and 1711? He pissed off Spanish authorities and fellow missionaries by opposing slavery and compulsory hard labor in the silver mines. His story was told in Father Kino, Padre on Horseback (1977), with Richard Egan playing the saintly cleric. It’s probably worth noting, as well, that Roland Joffé’s 1986 period drama, The Mission, dealt directly with the enslavement of native Indians in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, while Jesuit missionaries also figure in Martin Scorsese’s Silence, and Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe, albeit ones stationed in Japan and Quebec.)

Early Man: Blu-ray
The latest edition of the FIFA World Cup is just around the corner and the collective lack of enthusiasm shown by average American sports fans is palpable. For the first time since 1986, the United States side won’t be represented, leaving Fox Sports holding the bag for an expensive live-broadcast commitment and more than half of its potential audience lost before the opening ceremonies even begin. To cut its losses, the company has decided to call the games from its Los Angeles headquarters, using its B-team of announcers. Spanish-speaking fans probably would have monitored the games over Telemundo, anyway, so the strategic move can be justified as a bottom-line decision. The exclusive Spanish-language home of the World Cup in the U.S. will have all its commentators on the ground in Russia, with the biggest matches to be called, as usual, by four-time Emmy Award winner, Andres Cantor. “I just don’t know how else you would do it,” said Telemundo Deportes president Ray Warren. “Smelling the grass, the hot dogs, hearing the fans, three dimensions, weather … all of those things. And the full view and the full immersion in those moments. To me, that’s what sports is all about. So, we’re going to do that in as many places as is humanly possible.” If Fox attempted to shortchange its NFL fans by calling all its games in the studio, the decision would be reversed after the first exhibition games. Typically, though, serious American soccer enthusiasts, especially those with foreign roots and allegiances, will flock to sports bars and restaurants. It all begins on June 14, with the Russia-vs.-Saudi Arabia match.

I wonder how much of that lack of excitement diminished any pent-up anticipation over the release of Lionsgate/Aardman’s delightful animated history of British soccer, Early Man. Debuting against the Black Panther juggernaut didn’t help its box-office chances, which were already dampened by lack of World Cup buzz. It opened below mid-single-digit expectations, falling short of Shaun the Sheep‘s $4 million debut, back in August 2015. But, guess what? While its final domestic gross was just short of $8.3 million, Early Man’s non-U.S. tally was a crisp $41.1 million. Anyone looking for a terrifically entertaining way to kill a couple of hours waiting for Cantor’s first, “GOOOOAAAALLLLLL!!!,” could do a lot worse than gathering the family around the telly and popping Early Man into the DVD/Blu-ray box.

In typical Aardman stop-action fashion, it tells the fanciful story of how Dug (Eddie Redmayne), along with his boar sidekick Hognob (Nick Park), unite their Stone Age tribe against a mighty Bronze Age enemy. In this cross-epochal showdown, Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston) intends to use to all resources available to it claim his rivals’ home. At the time, “footie” was barely a game, let alone a sport. Unlike the Bronze team, the Stone Age players had yet to devise a way to keep score and there were almost no established rules. The team’s uniforms resembled hand-me-downs purchased at a Viking or Visigoth thrift store and the balls were short of round. Somehow, though, the citizenry was able to afford the construction of stadiums and broadcast technology. In another familiar Aardman touch, the adorably weird animal characters range from woolly mammoths and other prehistoric critters, to a T-Rex-sized duck and Lord Nooth’s colorful message bird (Rob Brydon), who dutifully takes dictation, parroting back even the most inappropriate of messages.

To fully appreciate the gags, it helps to have a working knowledge of British football. An original title was “Early Man-United,” for example, which certainly would have been changed by the time the movie arrived here. It is a reference to the mighty Manchester United squad. Maisie Williams voices Goona, a tomboyish vendor and football enthusiast in the Bronze City, whom Dug befriends. Goona’s name is a play on “gooner,” a slang term for fans of Arsenal, Manchester’s chief rival. She’s unhappy because her favorite team excludes women, while the Stoners are open to anyone who can tell the difference between a ball and an egg. The deciding game may play out like most other David-vs.-Goliath contests in the movies, but everything else is unpredictably wacky fun. Early Man marks the first feature film that Nick Park will have directed by himself. On Chicken Run (2000) and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), he directed alongside Peter Lord and Steve Box, respectively. One critic noted that “the result is a welcome return to a form of stop-motion that takes pride in the technique’s inevitable imperfections (such as thumbprints in the modeling clay), while putting extra care into the underlying script, with its daffy humor and slightly-off characters.”  Other voices are provided by Richard Ayoade, Timothy Spall, Miriam Margolyes and Johnny Vegas. The beautifully rendered Blu-ray package adds nearly 40 minutes of making-of featurettes.

Elis
Anyone whose knowledge of Brazilian sounds is limited to a few passages from “The Girl From Ipanema,” the score to Black Orpheus and some of the songs on Paul Simon’s “The Rhythm of the Saints,” should find Hugo Prata’s Elis to be an exhilarating entrée to the world-music genre. It’s also will introduce them to the compelling life story of Elis Regina Carvalho Costa, who some consider to be the greatest Brazilian singer of all time. Besides a dynamic portrayal of the artist by Andréia Horta (“Alice”) the biopic pulsates with invigorating Brazilian rhythms and energetic stage performances. Although Elis Regina, as she was popularly known, didn’t share the same difficult rise to fame as Edith Piaf, say, Elie compares favorably in spirit to Olivier Dahan’s La Vie en Rose (2007). The singer was born in 1945, in Porto Alegre, where she began her career at age 11 on a children’s radio show. In 1959, she was invited to Rio de Janeiro, where she recorded her first LP, “Viva a Brotolândia” (“Long Live Teenage Land”), and her second LP, “Poema,” employing a variety of popular musical styles, including samba and the bossa nova. In 1965, after being advised to refine her stage presence, Elis captured her first festival song contest, singing “Arrastão” (“Pull The Trawling Net”), by Edu Lobo and Vinícius de Moraes. When it was released as a single, it made her the biggest-selling Brazilian recording artist since Carmen Miranda. The second album, with Jair Rodrigues, “Dois na Bossa,” set a national sales record and became the first Brazilian LP to sell over 1 million copies. Most of her early history has been compacted here to bring the narrative to the point where Elis’ life becomes complicated by the men in her life and her fevered drive to divahood. No surprise there.

Here, her triumph at the TV Excelsior song contest, only comes after Elis has honed her interpretive skills and stage presence in smoky underground jazz clubs around Rio de Janeiro. Her first husband/manager was a notorious playboy, known for bedding his clients and looking out for No. 1. After shifting her representation to someone familiar with the boxing world, Elis increased her exposure at home, while finding an audience in Europe. At a time when the popularity of bossa nova was on the wane, Elis reluctantly agree to shift from traditional Brazilian instrumentation to a more electrified style that would become known as MPB (Brazilian Popular Music). She would also join the Tropicália movement, advanced by Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gilis. She recorded songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Milton Nascimento, João Bosco, Aldir Blanc, Chico Buarque, Guinga, Jorge Ben, Baden Powell and Rita Lee. Elis’ career reached a crossroads while in Europe, when, in response to a reporter’s question about Brazil’s right-wing government, she said that her country was being run by “gorillas.” This did not sit well with the ruling military junta back home, which made gorillas look like pussy cats. Her popularity kept her out of jail, but she was eventually blackmailed by the authorities into singing the Brazilian national anthem in a stadium show, and this drew the ire of leftists and anyone with relatives who’d been jailed and tortured for their opposition to the junta.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, Elis’ began to feel — incorrectly, it turns out — that she’d been completely abandoned by everyone from her husbands and management, to her core audience. She began recording songs that called for reform and denounced oppression. By this time, however, Elis was an emotional, self-destructive wreck. She died at the age of 36 in 1982, from an accidental overdose of cocaine, alcohol, and temazepam. More than 15,000 friends, relatives and fans held her wake at Teatro Bandeirantes, in São Paulo, with large groups of people singing her songs inside and outside the venue. More than 100,000 mourners followed her funeral procession to Cemitério do Morumbi. None of this would matter much to American audiences if it weren’t for an explosive portrayal of Elis’ life and career by Horta, a splendid actress whose works can sometimes be found on such HBO Latin America series as “Alice” and “Empire.” It prompted me to check out performances by Elis Regina, readily available on YouTube. They demonstrate just how well Horta nailed her character’s exuberant style, ready smile and audience-pleasing style. Otavio de Moraes is credited as composer, but the singing is pure Elis.

Swung
Who knew Glaswegians could be so kinky? That’s the question I came away with from Swung, a relationship melodrama that invites ridicule, but largely succeeds in translating Ewan Morrison’s 2007 novel of the same title. I say “ridicule” only because some critics have compared it unfavorably to the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, movies that not only invite ridicule, but demand it. In Colin Kennedy’s debut feature, David (Owen McDonnell) and Alice (Elena Anya) are a thirtyish Irish/Spanish couple, who’ve been living a reasonably happy life in Glasgow since David left his wife. Storm clouds arrive on the horizon when he loses his job and Alice is forced by her editor to come up with a story idea to save her magazine from ruin. At the same time as he’s struggling to find work, he’s also begun to obsess over his inability to maintain an erection. Alice is patient and sympathizes with David’s problem, which isn’t all that unusual these days. Mostly, she can hardly wait for him to complete his divorce proceedings. Then, she can be introduced to his daughter, without having to worry about saying or doing the wrong thing in her presence and incurring the wrath of David’s wife. They also might be able to realize her dream of moving to the country, where they can carrots … or is that just a euphemism for overcoming impotence? See what I mean about begging ridicule.

It’s at the exact point where David’s problems intersect with Alice’s search for an assignment that things get interesting. After she discovers his habit of making late-night strolls through his favorite porn sites, a lightbulb goes off over Alice’s head. Her idea involves the proliferation and validity of sites promoting swinging and polyamory. It doesn’t take much convincing for David to agree to join Alice on a couple of exploratory “dates.” When it comes time for them to swap partners, however, he gets cold … whatever. Her investigation leads Alice to the seen-it-all Madam Dolly (Elizabeth McGovern), who offers several inventive suggestions as to fixing David’s ED. And, they almost work. When Alice decides to up the ante by participating at an orgy at Dolly’s hotel, his jealousy threatens to ruin everything. The best thing about Swung is how well Kennedy handles the erotic scenes and sexual discussions, without making them seem prurient or gratuitous. Unlike the S&M in “50 Shades,” the characters are allowed to show all their naughty bits and sweat when they participate in group gropes. If the ending is a bit too pat, at least it doesn’t come out of left field.

Negative
I wonder if director Joshua Caldwell and writer Adam Gaines got together one night to watch Blow-Up, before putting the final touches on the screenplay for Negative. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the central mystery in the Antonioni classic appears to have influenced the central mystery here. Beyond that, however, there’s no comparison. In Negative, Katia Winter plays Natalie, a former spook who wouldn’t have been out of place in Atomic Blonde. We’re introduced to her in non-descript Chinese restaurant, where, off-camera, she kicks the crap out of a pair of greaseballs who’ve come out of nowhere to kill her. The next day, she’s hanging out in a Los Angeles park, where a struggling photographer, Hollis (Simon Quarterman), takes a picture of her from afar. Like Vanessa Redgrave in Blow-Up, Natalie follows Hollis to his apartment, where he’s already developed the photo – revealing absolutely nothing remarkable – and she demands the negative. (He’s the only shooter in L.A. who hasn’t upgraded to digital.) Before Hollis can pull a switcheroo with the film cannister and ask why she wants it, two more slicked-back thugs break into his darkroom to tear up the joint. By now, though, Natalie has grabbed the photographer’s hand and led him down the fire escape to temporary freedom. With a little bit of time to spare, they split for Phoenix – making an out-of-the-way pitstop at a shithole motel in Nowhere, Nevada — where her old MI-5 contact might be able to intercede in their situation. Instead, a drug cartel has put a price on her head and intends for one of its gun slingers to collect. It’s still difficult to tell what Natalie did to piss off the cartel or how the assassins manage to find here – nope, they don’t plant a GPS device on her car — but, by now, who cares? Somewhere between L.A. and Phoenix, Hollis grows a pair and actually is able to help Natalie avoid imminent doom. Even if Negative is too full of holes to add up to anything substantial, it’s fun to watch Winter kick ass. For once, the Swedish bombshell even gets to keep her clothes on while she’s doing it.

The October Flowers
I have a feeling that more money and thought were invested in poster and cover art for The October Flowers than anything else in the picture. While the one-sheets for the theatrical release range from serviceable to intriguing – yes, there’s more than one – the DVD cover convinced me that the movie inside was either a supernatural Japanese thriller or a sexy ghost story. Imagine my disappointment when The October Flowers turned out to be just another micro-budgeted idea-gone-to-waste. At 74 minutes, though, it isn’t very painful to watch. Newcomer Aiyana Irwin plays a young woman, Danielle, who inherits a non-descript suburban house from her grandmother. The part grannie left out of her last will and testament, however, is any mention of the ghosts with whom Danielle will be required to share the residence. Moffat wastes no time introducing Danielle to the many noisy, self-absorbed apparitions and poltergeists who wander through the house, at will, and relate to her the stories of how they died. The yarns tend to overlap each other, as do the ghosts. None of them is particularly scary, even if the spooks still wear their wounds like metals of honor. The only advice Danielle is given by her grandma’s loyal gardener is not to cut the flowers growing under the house’s eaves. To the surprise of absolutely no one, there will come a point in the next 70 minutes that Danielle will be tempted to do just that. Some of the interaction isn’t bad, but it suffers from dull deliveries and production values that do nothing to enhance the narrative.

Night Zero
Here’s another undernourished horror/thriller that, at 81 minutes, could have used an infusion of fresh ideas and scary moments. As Night Zero opens, an unidentified object from outer space crashes somewhere on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, causing an explosion that certainly will have something to do with the story. Before that can happen, however, viewers are required to suffer through 20 minutes of small talk and whining at a party being held to celebrate the departure of Sophie (Dawnelle Jewell) and Eric (Vincent Bombara) from George A. Romero’s adoptive hometown, to a new life in Boston. It isn’t until a cop in Hazmat gear bursts into the house that the couples realize that their personal problems don’t amount to a hill of beans when everyone else in town – descendants of the antagonists in Night of the Living Dead, possibly — has suddenly been reduced to eating flesh and sucking human blood. When the claustrophobia grows too great, the couples resort to taking matters into their own hands. Well before that happens, though, the continued bickering between them will make some viewers want to run into the street and take their chances with the undead.

Of Unknown Origin: Blu-ray
When it comes to movies about killer rats, two titles come immediately to mind: Willard (1971) and Ben (1971). Vermin have always played key roles in the horror genre, but, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” notwithstanding, rats have been deployed mostly to telegraph the approach of more ominous forces or as elements of torture. The unexpected success of Willard and Ben triggered a plague of killer-critter flicks that lasted until the slasher/stalker/splatter subgenre took hold. Released rather late in the game, a decade later, Of Unknown Origin suffered from thematic familiarity and a title that suggested sci-fi over horror. Now available in an upgraded edition from Shout Factory, George P. Cosmatos’ underappreciated thriller may be the best in the lot.

Instead of threatening mankind with a hoard of demonic creatures, Of Unknown Origin features a mano a mano, winner-takes-all battle between a yuppie and rat that’s determined to destroy his newly rehabbed townhouse. If there’s no good reason why the rat should so brazenly declare war against a harmless homeowner, it comes down to a series of challenges in which one “king of his castle” uses every means available to him to defeat an enemy who believes that the townhouse belongs to him. To succeed, the homeowner must abandon all sense of honor and humanity and accept the terms of war established by his formidable enemy. Peter Weller is perfectly cast as successful New York advertising executive Bart Hughes. Overworked, but ambitious, Hughes has been assigned the task of wooing a lucrative new client. With his wife (Shannon Tweed) and children away on vacation, he’s assured of a couple weeks alone, absent distractions. It doesn’t take long for the unusually large and matted rat to make its presence known. Instead of relying on the usual tricks associated with a rodent hungry for a piece of cheese, this rat’s tactics have as much to do with tormenting Hughes as ransacking his cupboards. At first, they include chewing through wires and cables; sabotaging the dishwasher; and knocking over picture frames and tchotchkes. Hughes does what any besieged homeowner would do, by consulting a handyman and placing spring-loaded traps in strategic locations. He even brings in a neighborhood cat.

They only serve to irritate the rat, who, we will soon discover, is protecting a nest of newborns in the basement. The more Hughes learns about his enemy, the more willing he is to destroy his castle in order to save it. (A Vietnam reference from the director of Rambo: First Blood Part II, perhaps?) Meanwhile, of course, Hughes has lost all interest in completing his tasks at work, content, instead, to bore his associates with trivia on rat infestations. Finally, he’s reduced to hand-to-paw combat with the unstoppable foe. When it isn’t scaring the crap out of you, Of Unknown Origin is genuinely entertaining. Based on Chauncey G. Parker III’s novel, “The Visitor,” its primary drawback at the U.S. box office may have been its Canadian financial and production roots, and its Montreal setting. A slightly snarky review on Canuxploitation.com suggests, “Of Unknown Origin is not a bad little timewaster at all, and probably represents the absolute pinnacle of Canadian giant rodent cinema.” I think today’s viewers will put aside their anti-Canadian prejudices long enough to savor a long-ignored gem. The Blu-ray adds commentary with Weller and Cosmatos; interviews with screenwriter Brian Taggart, producer Pierre David and co-star Louis Del Grande, whose primary claim to fame may be his iconic turn in Scanners, playing the guy whose head explodes. And, yes, Newfoundland native, Playboy model and future queen of Skinemax fare, Shannon Tweed, is radiant in her brief theatrical debut.

The Return of Swamp Thing: Special Edition: Blu-ray
What do you get when you combine the central conceits of Swamp Thing and The Island of Dr. Moreau, with or without Marlon Brando and Val Kilmore? The Return of Swamp Thing, that’s what. It took seven years for Lightyear Entertainment to commit to a sequel to the surprise 1982 hit. In it, a half-man/half-plant mutation (Dick Durock) commits himself to stopping an evil scientist, Antone Arcane (Louis Jourdan), from using his lab’s research to create bioengineered weaponry, instead of a cure for world hunger, as intended. The title character was generated after scientist Alec Holland tripped and was set on fire, attempting to escape Arcane with a beaker of the formula. Adrienne Barbeau plays a government worker sent to Holland’s Louisiana lab to monitor the project’s progress. As a witness to Arcane’s treachery, she automatically becomes the mad scientist’s enemy and an ally to the revenge-minded humanoid. The movie, its sequel, a live-action television series and five-part animated series, all were based on a popular comic-book series from the DC universe. (A new live-action series is expected to debut in 2019 on the DC Universe streaming service.)

While Jim Wynorski’s 1989 sequel features repeat performances by Durock and Jourdan, the accent is on kooky comedy and PG-13 entertainment. Conspicuously missing are writer/director Wes Craven and Barbeau, whose topless swamp-bath scene made the original a must-see rental for teenage boys everywhere. Arcane somehow escaped death at the end of the first movie and has returned to the bayous to create creatures that are human/animal hybrids. When his estranged stepdaughter, Abby (Heather Locklear), arrives unexpectedly to interrogate Arcane about her mother’s mysterious death, he seizes on the opportunity to use her DNA in an anti-aging experiment with the “Un-Men.” When she escapes into the swamp, Abby is accosted by a creature that resembles an upright elephant. Naturally, Swamp Thing arrives just in time to prevent the pretty young blond from being raped by the monster. They form an alliance designed to put Arcane out of business for good and prevent the Un-Men from escaping into the bayous. The good news is that the special-makeup-effects used to create the hybrid creatures are surprisingly effective. The bad news is that Locklear, while cute as a button, couldn’t hold Barbeau’s bra as the Swamp Thing’s love interest. Her co-star, Sarah Douglas (Conan the Barbarian), would have filled in admirably in this regard, instead.

Genre specialist Wynorski does what he can with Neil Cuthbert and Grant Morris’ anemic script and what must have been a miniscule budget. (The rights to CCR’s “Born on the Bayou” might have broke the bank.) While the sequel tanked at the box office, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it made some money in VHS/DVD. The MVD Rewind Blu-ray benefits from a 2K high-def transfer; original 2.0 and 5.1 stereo audio; new commentary with Wynorski, Cirino, Rosenthal and Lightyear Entertainment executive Arnie Holland; a pair of vintage Greenpeace public-service announcements featuring Swamp Thing; original marketing material; a photo gallery; reversible artwork; and a collectible mini-poster.

Death Smiles on a Murderer: Special Edition: Blu-ray
Anyone unfamiliar with the work of the hyper-prolific Italian multi-hyphenate, Aristide Massaccesi – or Joe D’Amato, foremost among his many aliases – might consider watching the featurette “Smiling on the Taboo: Sex, Death and Transgression in the Horror Films of Joe D’Amato,” before tackling Death Smiles on a Murderer. Also recommended is “D’Amato Smiles on Death,” an interview conducted before his untimely demise at 63, in 1990. In a career that spanned just 30 years, Massaccesi is credited with directing 169 films of varying quality and serving as cinematographer on 167 titles, some of them quite respectable. There isn’t a genre upon which Massaccesi’s fingerprints don’t appear, ranging from giallo, pasta-delic Westerns and horror, to soft- and hard-core sex. No matter the name he chose to work under, it wasn’t difficult to detect Massaccesi’s influence somewhere in the movie. (He used the aliases as a smoke screen to discourage studios and producers from pigeonholing his work and denying him opportunities to pursue his more serious whims.) One of at least eight films he shot or directed for release in 1973, Death Smiles on a Murderer represents his first shot at gothic horror, although it also could be listed in the giallo column. Set in Austria, in the early 1900s, it stars the sexy Swedish import Ewa Aulin, (Candy) as Greta von Holstein, a beautiful young woman abused by her brother, Franz (Luciano Rossi), and left to die alone, in the delivery room, by her illicit lover, the aristocrat Dr. Von Ravensbrück (Giacomo Rossi).  Bereft with grief and guilt, Franz reanimates his dead sister using a formula engraved on an ancient Incan medallion. Greta then returns as an undead avenging angel, who focuses her wrath on several generations of Ravensbrück family members, as well as her manically possessive brother.

Because “Death” isn’t told in a linear fashion, it’s tough, at first, to get a handle on why someone who looks exactly like Greta turns up before one of her nemeses is about to die or be interred. Once the conceit is revealed, it isn’t difficult to follow. Of special interest here is the presence of Klaus Kinski, playing a spooky doctor, who, in a flashback, recognizes Greta’s pendant as something that supersedes science and medicine. As such, it will take more than a stake in the heart to put an end to the Von Ravensbrück curse. Arrow’s 2K restoration, the original camera negative, is excellent. The Blu-ray adds original Italian and English soundtracks; newly translated English subtitles for the Italian soundtrack; commentary by writer and critic Tim Lucas; a third featurette, “All About Ewa,” a newly-filmed, career-spanning interview with the Swedish star; a stills and poster collections gallery; and a limited-edition booklet, with new writing on the film by critic Stephen Thrower and film historian Roberto Curti.

Savannah Smiles: Collector’s Edition: Blu-ray
Bridgette Andersen, the star of this surprisingly entertaining family comedy, began modeling and doing television commercials by the time she was 3 and, less than four years later, made the transition to small- and big-screen movies. Bridgette is said to have had a remarkably high I.Q., a penchant for memorization and was a freakishly quick study when it came to dance and acting. After playing the precocious title character caught up in a doomed-to-fail kidnap drama in Savannah Smiles, Andersen worked steadily for another six years, or so, in episodic- and made-for-television movies and feature films. Then, for the next nine years, nada. If you’ve already guessed that this is one of those child-actor stories that ends badly – not all of them do – you’d be right. And, for the same reasons as other such tragedies in the 1990s. According to Bridgette’s mom in a lengthy interview included here, she filled the lull in her career by running around with a Deadhead and becoming addicted to heroin. The Malibu resident stayed clean for a while, but she succumbed to an accidental overdose on November 17, 1996. I only mention this because, at some point in Savannah Smiles, viewers will all ask the same question: what happened to that cute little girl? Now, you know.

In it, Andersen plays the 6-year-old daughter of a politician too consumed by his re-election campaign to pay her much attention. After Savannah decides to run away from home – a note to her parents slides off her bed — she sneaks into a car used in a jailbreak. Its owner, Boots (Donovan Scott), could have found work as a stand-in for Curly in the Three Stooges, while the escaped con, Alvie (Mark Miller), was scheduled for parole the next week. Their collective I.Q. wouldn’t have come close to equaling that of the little girl. After some close calls, the crooks take shelter in an abandoned house, where you’d expect a “Ransom of Red Chief” scenario to be introduced. It’s to the credit of writer/co-star/producer Miller that Savannah finds another way to endear her to us. While waiting for word of a ransom agreement, an unexpected bond grows among Savannah, Alvie and Boots, creating an approximation of family life the men have never known and she’s always desired. Their relationship is tested as the police dragnet closes in on them and a trigger-happy sheriff treats them like Public Enemies No. 1 and 2. There’s no reason to spoil the ending, except to say that it’s cleverly designed and works. The rugged Utah setting adds a Western feel to the story and the leads get ample support from Pat Morita, Michael Parks, John Fiedler, Fran Ryan and Peter Graves. The MVD Rewind release benefits from an imperfect high-definition transfer from a 35mm print provided by the Library of Congress; “The Making of Savannah Smiles,” featuring Miller, Scott, Teresa Andersen (mother of Bridgette) and composer Ken Sutherland; ”Memories of Bridgette Andersen,” with new interviews with Teresa Andersen, Miller and Scott; ”The Songs and Music of Savannah Smiles,” featuring an interview with Sutherland; and a collectible mini-poster.

TV-to-DVD
PBS: Masterpiece: Little Women
Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Singles Collection
Nickelodeon: The Loud House: It Gets Louder: Season 1, Volume 2
Nickelodeon: Sunny Day
I don’t know enough about Louisa May Alcott or her classic novel, “Little Women,” to say with any certainty if the “Masterpiece” adaptation is an accurate representation of the book or it could have been improved. I do know that I enjoyed all 180 minutes of the mini-series, produced by a largely female cast and crew, and I can easily recommend it to parents whose daughters – its charm would be lost on most boys – have found time to read books, in between texting and taking selfies. Alcott’s books once were considered must-reading for girls facing the challenges of puberty and possibilities of womanhood. Loosely based on Alcott and her own three sisters, “Little Women” was published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. An immediate sensation, it spawned two direct sequels – “Little Men” (1871) and “Jo’s Boys” (1886) – neither of which, I’m told, featured vampires or sorcerers. The novel addressed three major themes of the times, “domesticity, work and true love,” all of which were crucial elements in a girl’s identity. Devotion to family, of course, also is an important aspect of the story, but, at the time, this might have been a given quality in well-established families. As the mini-series opens, four teenage sisters and their mother, Marmee – superbly played by Emily Watson – are living in a neighborhood loosely based on Concord, Massachusetts. Although their situation doesn’t look all that dire, it’s said that they’re living in “genteel poverty,” due to a financial setback experienced by the father, Robert March (Dylan Baker), who, before joining the Union Army and contacting pneumonia, was a scholar and a minister. The women are facing their first Christmas without him. Besides working to support the family, the older girls are beginning to deal with affairs of the heart and the potential for careers. As the story progresses, boyfriends and other men in the neighborhood will play larger roles in the story. Director Vanessa Caswill (“Thirteen”) and credited co-writers (with Alcott) Heidi Thomas and Rainer Stolle encourage viewers to pick favorites, cheer along with their triumphs and share their tears and laughter. The characters are so precisely drawn that it’s easy take sides. It helps, as well, that the young actors (Maya Hawke, Kathryn Newton, Willa Fitzgerald, Annes Elwy, Julian Morris, Jonah Hauer-King) aren’t as familiar to us as the adults, played by Watson, Baker, Michael Gambon Angela Lansbury. The Blu-ray adds a visit to Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House and Museum.

I’m not at all sure how difficult it’s been to find copies of the episodes collected in Shout! Factory’s “Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Singles Collection.” The press material says that they were among the first to be released on DVD, but only on an individual basis, not in the 39 compilations the company started sending out in September 1, 2015. I also know that, as collectibles, they cost a small fortune. The new grouping of cheeseball non-classics includes The Crawling Hand (#106), The Hellcats (#209), Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (#321), Eegah (#506), I Accuse My Parents (#507) and “Shorts, Volume 3.” Among the bonus features new episode introductions by series creator Joel Hodgson; “Man on Poverty Row: The Films of Sam Newfield”; “Don’t Knock the Strock,” a portrait of the director of The Crawling Hand; and “MST Hour Wraps.” All five episodes are from the Joel Hodgson era, which means they were originally issued by Rhino and have been out-of-print until now. “Shorts Volume 3” was a promotional disc, only available on mail order from Rhino. I found the commentaries provided by Joel Robinson and crewmates Tom Servo, Gypsy and Crow – as well as interstitials with Dr. Clayton Deborah Susan Forrester and TV’s Frank — to be as fresh, witty and entertaining as any I’ve seen recently in the compilations.

Gen-Xers, Millennials and Oughts may not find any correlation between Nickelodeon’s hit animated series, “The Loud House,” and a landmark show of the early-1970s, “An American Family,” but Boomer parents and grandparents will wonder if there’s a connection between them. The groundbreaking documentary, considered by many to be TV’s first reality series, recorded the daily life of the Louds, an upper-middle-class family living in Santa Barbara. Ultimately, it chronicled the break-up of the dysfunctional family via the separation and subsequent divorce of parents Bill and Pat Loud. Their son, Lance, is credited as being the first openly gay continuing character on television. The show produced several knockoffs, including Albert Brooks’ 1979 mockumentary, Real Life. The short answer is: probably not. “The Loud House” was created by animator and comic illustrator Chris Savino, who is said to have based it on his experiences growing up in a large family in Royal Oak, Michigan. Lincoln Loud is the only boy and middle child in a family of 11 children, 10 of whom are girls. They all display different characteristics, personalities and interests. The faces of parents Rita and Lynn Sr. aren’t shown until the show’s second season. The introduction of Howard and Harold McBride, the adoptive parents of Lincoln’s best friend, Clyde, have been lauded for being a positive representation of a married same-sex couple, the first to be featured in a Nicktoon. Despite the elimination of Savino from the show’s production team – he fell victim to charges of sexual harassment – “The Loud Family” has been renewed for a fourth season. Plans for a film based on the series have been put on hold. The second volume of first-season shows on DVD, “The Loud House: It Gets Louder: Season 1, Volume 2,” is comprised of 13 double-episodes.

Also from Nickelodeon comes a collection of four episodes from the first season of “Sunny Day,” which follow 10-year-old hairstylist and entrepreneur, Sunny. Along with the help of her best friends Blair and Rox, and her loyal and lovable puppy Doodle, Sunny takes on any challenge thrown her way. The characters in the series celebrate individuality and self-expression, while the show’s social-emotional curriculum highlights leadership, innovative thinking and teamwork. Each episode of “Sunny Day” features an array of content, from original music to the “Style Files,” a live-action tutorial based on Sunny’s creative hairstyles from the show.

Black Panther: Blu-ray/4K UHD
What were Stan Lee and Jack Kirby smoking when they named their new superhero after the militant organization founded by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton? Or… what were Seale and Newton smoking when they named the BPP after a comic-book superhero? Fact is, Marvel introduced the chief of the Panther Tribe of the African nation of Wakanda in Fantastic Four #52 in July 1966, months before the Black Panthers of Oakland unveiled plans to counter police brutality by “policing the police.”  Lee would call the timing “a strange coincidence,” even as the company debated changing its superhero’s name from Black Panther to Black Leopard. That brainstorm was briefly realized in Fantastic Four #119, dated February 1972, but the name was changed back to Black Panther by the time T’Challa was asked to join “Earth’s mightiest heroes” that November in Avengers #105. The character’s development is discussed at length in the featurettes, “From Page to Screen: A Roundtable Discussion” and “Crowning of a New King.”

Black Panther could be considered one of the great no-brainers of all time. In reality, Disney executives had room for a sliver of concern going into its international opening. Historically, foreign audiences have shown a reluctance to embrace movie with largely black casts. As recently as 12 Years a Slave, distributors in some countries promoted minority-themed films with posters featuring white stars. Steve McQueen’s intense drama still collected more money – 69.8% of total lifetime gross –from international sources. It’s also true that Black Panther/T’Challa had yet to crack the upper echelon of the superhero elite.  In 2008, Wizard magazine ranked him the 79th greatest comic book character out of 200 others named in the survey. In 2015, IGN Entertainment elevated Black Panther to No. 51 in their list of 100 greatest comic-book heroes, and No. 10 in its ranking of the top-50 Avengers. In 2013, Comics Alliance ranked the Black Panther as #33 on its list of the “50 Sexiest Male Characters in Comics.” If the same polls were conducted today, he’d probably crack the top five. The latest breakdown by Box Office Mojo shows that domestic revenues beat foreign sales at a 51.9/48.1 percent ratio, roughly dividing the $1.342 billion pot in half. That reverses a trend that’s consistently put international revenues ahead of domestic revenues, at least when it comes to popcorn titles. (The MPAA’s final box-office report for 2017 put the overall split at $29.5 billion/$11,1 billion, in the favor of foreign revenues.)

As pointed out in bonus featurettes, Disney/Marvel deserves credit for entrusting the property to a production team of largely African-American talent, untested outside the independent arena. Foremost among them are co-writer-director Ryan Coogler, whose feature credits were Fruitvale Station and Creed, and writer Joe Robert Cole, who wrote two episodes of FX Network’s “American Crime Story” and the little-seen 2011 thriller, Amber Lake. Earlier this year, DP Rachel Morrison made history as the first woman nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography, for Mudbound. Despite having played such real-life American heroes as Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson and James Brown, star Chadwick Boseman was fortunate to be surrounded by such top-shelf talent as Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Martin Freeman, Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker and Andy Serkis. The same can said for such talented newcomers as Letitia Wright, as T’Challa’s precocious sister; Danai Gurira, as his bodyguard; and Danai Gurira, as a rival warrior. Kudos, all around. The other essential featurette, I think, is “Wakanda Revealed: Exploring the Technology,” which explains how some of the film’s most exciting and visually spectacular scenes were created. Other extras include a director’s introduction, deleted scenes, “Crowning of a New King,” “The Warriors Within,” “Marvel Studios, the First Ten Years: Connecting the Universe,” a gag reel, sneak peek at “Ant-Man and the Wasp” and director’s commentary. If given the choice and opportunity, go with the 4K UHD edition. It does make a difference.

The Forgiven: Blu-ray
Zuri, Forest Whitaker’s character in Black Panther, has been described as Wakanda’s version of Obi-Wan Kenobi. For his Oscar-winning turn as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, Whitaker played one of the worst dictators of the 20^th Century. In The Forgiven, he plays Nobel Peace Prize-winner Bishop Desmond Tutu, who couldn’t be more different from the Ugandan despot and Wakandan elder statesmn. When the African National Congress assumed power in 1994, it wasn’t clear how South Africa’s new leaders would respond to the various human-rights abuses perpetrated by police and military officials, and serious crimes committed by anti-apartheid activists. Having to choose between universal amnesty and unfettered retribution not only could have prevented old wounds from healing, but also keep Nelson Mandela’s government from taking root. After parliament instituted a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Mandela chose Tutu to chair its proceedings. The Forgiven, Roland Joffé’s adaptation of Michael Ashton’s play, “The Archbishop and the Antichrist,” describes just how difficult the process would be. Eric Bana plays Piet Blomfeld, a composite character who represents one of the most extreme cases the TRC is likely to face. He’s being held in Cape Town’s Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison with other hard-core soldiers and militants not yet ready to commit to recanting their sins, let alone make amends to their victims, even in exchange for amnesty. Blomfeld, a former officer in the South African Defense Force and member of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, is a potential witness to murders committed during the time of apartheid, particularly the disappearance and likely murder of the teenage daughter of Mrs. Morobe (Thandi Makhubele). When Tutu approaches Blomfeld

to ask about her daughter, the Afrikaner uses their time together berating the archbishop. At the same time, however, Blomfeld has made himself a ripe target for vengeful black prisoners and guards afraid that his meetings with Tutu might bear fruit. Although the outcome of The Forgiven is largely a foregone conclusion, the interplay between Whitaker and Bana is thrilling. One is a man of hate, while the other has been the country’s flagbearer for peace and reconciliation for decades. For Tutu’s mission to succeed, something approaching a miracle must happen to change Blomfeld’s mindset. It does, but not in the usual way such things happen in inspirational dramas.

The Sweet Escape
Sometimes, a foreign picture or indie will sneak up on me on DVD, making me wonder how it managed not to find distribution here. Twenty years ago, a movie that combined elements of Jacque Tati, King of Hearts, Apocalypse Now and the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” (“Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream …”) might have packed arthouses with audiences looking for something well off the beaten path. As far as I know, however, writer/director/star Bruno Podalydès’ disarming 2015 comedy/romance, The Sweet Escape, is only now making its U.S. debut on a DVD from Icarus Films. In it, Podalydès (Granny’s Funeral) plays a 50-year-old computer-graphics designer, Michel, who daydreams about flying an airmail plane, believing that going on a dangerous solo run will lead him to discover his true self. Michel previously took up the ukulele, believing that old novelty tunes might transport him to more exotic climes. His obsession with flying ends when co-workers gift him with a three-hour flight in a training plane. He thinks they’re making fun of his obsession.

To compensate for the sudden vacuum in his life, Michel (Podalydès) is inspired to take up kayaking. Not satisfied merely to drive to the nearest navigable river and take lessons, Michel purchases a do-it-yourself kit and constructs a kayak in the apartment he shares with his wife, Rachelle (Sandrine Kiberlain), who patiently allows for his idiosyncrasies. To master the complexities of kayaking, Michel reads every available book, including tips on navigation from Huey, Dewey and Louis. It’s at this point in such narratives that daydreamers usually find their comeuppance in the reality of their own limitations and return to their imaginary pursuits. This definitely is not the case with The Sweet Escape. Not only is Michel able to avoid putting his foot through the kayak’s floor on its first test paddle, but he takes to the water like a newborn duckling. With only a week available to him, Michel embarks on a waterborne excursion on a gently flowing stream in rural France.

Just as the crew of Martin Sheen’s patrol boat found unexpected places to explore along the Nung River, so, too, does Michel make the occasional pitstop. Among them are a seemingly enchanted B&B, where he’s allowed to pitch his tent – complete with all the Tati-inspired camping gimmicks that fit inside the kayak’s hold — and enjoy a good meal. Just as Alan Bates’ endangered soldier, Charles Plumpick, found shelter from the Huns in an asylum populated with endearing eccentrics, in King of Hearts, Michel is welcomed by a quirky collection of misfits at the inn. Foremost among them are two women – one of a certain age (Agnès Jaoui), the other (Vimala Pons) approaching 30 – still mourning the absence of lost lovers. Two very odd handymen (Michel Vuillermoz, Jean-Noël Brouté) complete the package. In return for his welcome company and comic relief, they introduce him to the recuperative powers of hand-picked cherries, duck confit and properly served absinthe. When a storm pre-empts his plans for “roughing it,” they share their beds with him. (In this fantasy, Rachelle exists in land far, far away.) No matter how far Michel makes it downriver, something always causes him to return to his new, extended family. Then, when he returns to his home and wife, he discovers a different reality. If it takes a while to pick up on the film’s peculiar rhythm, patience will soon enough be rewarded

The Monkey King 3: Blu-ray
Chinese filmmakers have been blessed with a catalogue of stories, myths and legends whose origins can be traced back hundreds of years before the Grimm Brothers began writing the fairytales that Walt Disney would plunder only a century later. The Monkey King legend, inspired by Wu Cheng’en’s 100-chapter novel, “Journey to the West” (1592), has been adapted several times over the course of the last 90 years, in China and abroad. It is considered by many historians to be one of China’s Four Great Classical Novels and the source of countless sequels, retellings and spinoffs. It’s also said, however, that the Ming Dynasty novelist and poet was inspired by a popular legend that first surfaced 1,000 years earlier. They’re based on the account of a pious T’ang Buddhist monk, Xuanzang (William Feng), who travels from China to India to search for Buddhist scriptures and dharma. The kinks in his plan are provided by his travelling companions, who include Monkey King Wukong (Aaron Kuck), historically referred to as Monkey Aware of Vacuity; the lustful pig demon, Bajie (Xiao Shenyang); and a sand demon, Wujing (Him Law). While chugging their way west, they’re confronted by a River God who picks up their boat and heaves it into the Womanland of Western Liang. Detached from the outside world by steep cliffs and an invisible dome, the colony is comprised of man-hating women.

Their Queen (Zhao Liying) is warned against getting too close to the treacherous intruders, but, after encountering them on her CGI stag, can’t help but fall for Xuanzang. Her protector (Gigi Leung) senses that their arrival might trigger an ancient prophesy, heralding the fall of Womanland, and immediately orders the men executed. Lovestruck, the Queen instead conspires with them to fake their deaths. Although the Monkey King makes a late entry in the story, his antics and acrobatics are worth the wait. With plenty of time left in the nearly two-hour adventure, director Cheang Pou-soi finds all sorts of diversions to keep viewers interested until the Queen and Xuanzang must decide to test fate in the name of love. Like such recent adventure/fantasies as Anthony LaMolinara and Zhao Xiaoding’s Once Upon a Time, Tsui Hark’s Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back and Rob Minkoff’s The Forbidden Kingdom, The Monkey King 3 and its predecessors will take some getting used to for Western viewers. Here’s an idea, though: if Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro want to tackle something other than another J.R.R. Tolkien retread, they should consider something from “Journey to the West,” which would be every bit as fanciful as “LOTR” and “The Hobbit,” and a potential east-west groundbreaker.

Black Venus: Special Edition: Blu-ray
When the screener disc of Arrow Films’ Black Venus arrived in the mail, I immediately assumed that it starred Laura Gemser, one of the queens of Italian sexploitation and star of Black Emmanuelle (1975) and Black Cobra Woman (1976). If the cover art had been included in the delivery, I couldn’t possibly have mistaken Gemser for Yahima Torres, the amateur who Abdellatif Kechiche chose to play his “Hottentot Venus.” Neither could I recall seeing Josephine Jacqueline Jones, a former Miss Bahamas, in her steamy portrayal of the same character in Claude Mulot’s 1983 softcore melodrama of the same title. While both are more or less based on a short story by Honoré de Balzac, Mulot’s film was produced and edited by Playboy Enterprises for its premium cable channel. (An uncut English-dubbed version was released on DVD in 2006.) The woman on the cover of Arrow’s Blu-ray is a much heavier woman than Gemser or Jones, with a protruding backside, decidedly larger breasts, close-cropped hair and an iron collar around her neck. Kechiche’s 2010 version of Black Venus is based more directly on the life of Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who in the early 19th century was exhibited in Europe under the name “Hottentot Venus.” Kechiche (Blue Is the Warmest Color) elected to move the setting of his Black Venus, which wasn’t shown widely here, to a bit later in century. It allowed him to take advantage of the Victorian-era costumes, furniture and backdrops. As lavish a production as it is, and despite much fine acting, Black Venus is not an easy film to watch. The voyeuristic aspects of the story can’t help but make viewers, however sympathetic to Baartman’s plight, queasy. The facts aren’t any easier to stomach.

Here, Baartman (Yahima Torres) is a black domestic who’s been persuaded to leave South Africa with her boss, Hendrik Cesars (Andre Jacobs), with the promise of being able to sing, dance and play a stringed instrument for lots of money. Once they arrive, however, Cesars puts Baartman on display as a freak of nature … sometimes on stage, sometimes as a midway attraction. Although her act is pure fiction, it resembles bear-baiting, with the stocky slave occasionally going into the audience to scare the rubes. By the time we catch up with them, Baartman is beginning to resist Cesars’ inhumane demands, by insisting on more dignified clothing and treatment in her off-hours. Their act catches the attention of British abolitionists, who argue in court that her performance is indecent and that she’s being held against her will. Cesars convinces her to tell the court that she approves of the presentation, citing artistic license. She would later be sold to an animal trainer, Réaux (Olivier Gourmet), who introduces her to curious French socialites and academics. Georges Cuvier (François Marthouret), professor of comparative anatomy at the Museum of Natural History, examines Baartman to find proof that black Africans are the missing link between apes and Homo sapiens. By any name, it’s a theory founded on scientific racism. After leaving the stage, Baartman’s short life turns tragic, with further indignities to come. Kechiche’s depiction of her final years, some spent in a brothel, will leave most viewers spent emotionally and aghast at the arrogance of white Europeans. The Blu-ray adds a new appreciation of Black Venus and other Kechiche films, by critic Neil Young; and an illustrated booklet, featuring new writing on the film by Will Higbee, author of “Post-Beur Cinema: North African Émigré and Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in France Since 2000.”

It’s Alive Trilogy: Blu-ray
The Bloodthirsty Trilogy: Special Edition: Blu-ray
In 1974, the last place one might have expected to find a score by Oscar-winning composer Bernard Herrmann (for All That Money Can Buy, not Psycho) was in Larry Cohen’s evil-baby thriller, It’s Alive. Future Academy Award mainstay Rick Baker was also attached to the film, but his career had just begun, while Herrmann’s was coming to an end. (The special-effects and puppeteering wizard had just shared an Emmy for his work in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.) For his part, genre specialist Cohen was transitioning from writer to writer/director, with the blaxploitation classics Bone, Hell Up in Harlem and Black Caesar. After It’s Alive his focus would shift to such sci-fi and horror pix as Q, Full Moon High and A Return to Salem’s Lot. Still, he was hardly a household name in Hollywood. Herrmann had recently collaborated with Brian DePalma on the blatantly Hitchcockian thrillers, Sisters and Obsession, so it wasn’t that much of a leap for him to score It’s Alive. In fact, immediately after he finished recording the Taxi Driver soundtrack, on December 23, 1975, Herrmann viewed the rough cut of Cohen’s God Told Me To. Following dinner with the director, he returned to his hotel and died from a heart attack in his sleep. Not being one of Cohen’s most memorable works, it’s fair to wonder what contributed more to the composer’s sudden demise, the meal, wine or movie.

Richard Woodley’s subsequent novelization of It’s Alive alludes to the likelihood that the mother of the grotesquely deformed infant – visible on screen for less than a minute, in total – took an inadequately tested fertility drug to facilitate the conception of her second child. Immediately after taking its first breath, the child uses its fangs and claws to tear into the doctor and nurses in the delivery room. It eludes hospital security, leaving a trail of carnage as it heads for his parents’ home. Although a representative for the pharmaceutical company that supplied the fertility drug recommends killing the infant – rather than face a bevy of wrongful-death lawsuits – Frank Davis (John Ryan) and his wife, Lenore (Sharon Farrell), begin to develop a weird parental attachment to the little monster. Frank tries to prevent a mob of vigilantes from killing the baby, but, when it attacks the fertility doctor, the little tyke is killed by police. Soon, thereafter, we learn that another murderous kid has been delivered in Seattle.

In hindsight, you’d think that a sequel would immediately be put on the drawing board, and it was. Funny thing, though. In between the time Cohen pitched and completed production on It’s Alive, Warner Bros. brought in a new team of executives, none of whom were enthusiastic about it. The studio gave the film a one-theater showcase in May 1974, in Chicago, and a limited release five months later. Despite doing respectable business, the company shelved the picture in the U.S. for three years. It did boffo business in foreign markets, however, prompting another new set of WB executives to agree to Cohen’s request for a second opinion. Thanks to a completely new marketing campaign, It’s Alive went on to become a cult classic. It was followed by two sequels, It Lives Again (1978) and It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987) – included in the new ScreamFactory box — and a straight-to-DVD remake, It’s Alive (2009), which was disowned by Cohen. When WB decided to rush the sequel, Cohen was accorded an 18-day shooting schedule. It required him to divide post-production duties between It Lives Again and another theatrical project. By now, the number of evil babies has risen, sparking a curious debate between pro-lifers and abortion advocates, as to their fate. Frank Davis attempts to convince expectant parents, Jody and Eugene Scott (Fredric Forrest, Kathleen Lloyd) to protect their child from a lynch mob and turn it over to researchers. Naturally, a chase ensues.

It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive takes place a decade after the events of the first two installments and is largely set on a remote island, where the surviving babies have been quarantined. Michael Moriarty plays Jarvis, the father of one of the mutant children, to whom he pays a visit five years later as part of a scientific mission. The children have grown quickly into adults, with talents all their own. Jarvis’ son has fathered a child and wants nothing more than to return to the mainland and introduce the baby to its grandmother, Ellen (Karen Black). Before that can happen, though, Jarvis and the mutants are required to make a detour to Cuba. Oy vey! The trilogy arrives in Blu-ray, backed by 2K remasters from original film elements. Among the new bonus features are “Cohen’s Alive: Looking Back at the It’s Alive Films,” featuring interviews with the director, actors James Dixon, Michael Moriarty and Laurene Landon; “It’s Alive at the Nuart: The 40th Anniversary Screening,” with Cohen; a fresh interview with special-effects-makeup designer Steve Neill; and ported-over commentaries and marketing material.

Arrow Video’s “The Bloodthirsty Trilogy: Special Edition” is noteworthy primarily for its value to horror buffs and fans of Japanese genre fare. The films reflect the influence of Hammer Films, giallo and such American classics as James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932) on two generation of J-horror specialists. Even the titles of the films in Michio Yamamoto’s trilogy — The Vampire Doll (1970), Lake of Dracula (1971) and Evil of Dracula (1974) – betray the western influence. Although the emphasis is more on the supernatural than Old World bloodsuckers, a case is made for the likelihood that the vampires here aren’t native to Japan, at all. The gothic tone is emphasized by stormy nights, ghostly mansions, hellish prophesies and unexpected guests, who wonder what happened to friends who disappeared after visiting the spooky inhabitants. Kim Newman provides lively analysis of the trilogy, which arrives with a reversible sleeve, featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Matt Griffin, and a collector’s booklet, with new writing by Japanese film expert Jasper Sharp.

Bruce’s Deadly Fingers: Blu-ray
After Bruce Lee’s untimely death in 1973, at 32, purveyors of Hong Kong chopsocky flicks wasted little time before unleashing a flood of pictures exploiting his memory. Enter the Dragon had become a posthumous box-office smash, world-wide, and studio executives wondered how and when they could replace such a charismatic personality. At first, attempts were made to cannibalize the titles and footage from Lee’s four features – that’s right, four – and pad the concoction with stock footage. Among the titles were “Re-Enter the Dragon,” “Enter Three Dragons,” “Return of Bruce,” “Enter Another Dragon,” “Return of the Fists of Fury” and “Enter the Game of Death,” as well as clip-job biopics with Lee’s name in the title. Actors representing Lee were shot in shadow and inserted in existing footage. Some were asked to change their screen names to Bruce or variations of Lee. They included Bruce Le, star of Bruce’s Deadly Fingers, Bronson Lee, Bruce Chen, Bruce Lai, Bruce Li, Bruce Lei, Bruce Lie, Bruce Liang (a.k.a., Bruce Leung), Saro Lee, Bruce Ly, Bruce Thai, Bruce K.L. Lea, Brute Lee, Myron Bruce Lee, Lee Bruce, and Dragon Lee. If the actors resembled the Real McCoy and could use their fists of fury, so much the better.  One of Lee’s fight choreographers, actor-director Sammo Hung, satirized the Bruceploitation phenomenon in his 1978 film, Enter the Fat Dragon. The fad faded when Jackie Chan emerged as the leader of the pack in such kung fu comedies as Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master. It’s safe to say that the recent spate of Ip Man movies benefited greatly from his student’s legacy.

In Joseph Kong’s 1976 actioner, Bruce’s Deadly Fingers, crime boss Lee Hung (Lo Lieh) covets a perhaps mythical fighting manual, “Bruce Lee’s Kung Fu Finger Book.” Hung already considers himself to be a martial arts master, even bragging to his girlfriend that he would kick Lee’s ass if he were still alive. Even so, acquiring the book would put the cherry on Hung’s ice-cream sundae. One of Lee’s students, Bruce Wong (Le), returns to Hong Kong from the U.S., after receiving a letter begging him to return home before the book falls into the wrong hands. Before he’s able to begin his search, however, Wong’s required to free his sister – Lee’s ex-girlfriend — from the clutches of gangsters who believe she’s hoarding the book. Bruce’s Deadly Fingers is jam-packed with kung-fu action, illogical dialogue, ridiculous kills, the requisite amount of rapes and nudity, and other clichés, including an unpleasant scene in which a woman is tortured with a live reptile. The VCI Entertainment Blu-ray benefits from a new 2K transfer from the original widescreen 35mm film negative; a photo and poster gallery of this and other Bruceploitation films; trailers of Bruceploitation titles; learned commentary by author/director/actor Michael Worth; and interviews with some of the actors.

Landing Up
Sadly, while there are several believable characters in Daniel Tenenbaum’s Landing Up, the protagonist isn’t one of them. That’s a real problem, especially when the character is a young prostitute, attempting to survive in New York by hooking up with guys she spills drinks on in bars, then persuades to give her a place to crash and a few bucks. There’s nothing unusual about that setup, which we’ve seen a hundred times. It’s entirely possible, however, that Tenenbaum and writer/star/spouse Stacey Maltin didn’t do more than a few hours of research on working girls in the Big Apple or, if they did, it came after watching Pretty Woman and some Cinemax movies. For no good reason, other than the fact that she’s reluctant to spend the money she makes, Chrissie (Maltin) sleeps in the streets when she isn’t staying with her friend, Cece (E’dena Hines), and her junkie boyfriend, or passes out on the bed of a trick. The fact that Chrissie also has a phone-sex number isn’t known to us until well into the second half of the movie. The revenues from that enterprise, alone, could have afforded her and Cece an apartment in one of the boroughs, at least. She carries the money she earns in her purse, which, even outside New York, is an invitation to be robbed. Landing Up’s biggest mistake, though, is allowing Maltin to turn Chrissie into an all-American girl, with a cute face, good teeth, hearty laugh and wonderful personality. If she had watched a couple of episodes of Starz’ “The Girlfriend Experience” – or, better, Brent Owens’ Pimps Up, Ho’s Down — Chrissie might have turned out several shades more genuine. Her biggest dilemma comes when she finds a real boyfriend, David (Ben Rappaport), who’s moderately well-off, extremely nice, good looking and has an eye toward the future. When she isn’t staying over at his apartment, Chrissie competes with homeless people for cardboard and patches of concrete. Either way, she can’t make any money. When his vindictive roommate blows the whistle on Chrissie, David freaks out. Can this relationship be saved? Does it matter? Landing Up was Hines’ last movie. The promising young actress and step-granddaughter of actor Morgan Freeman was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in August 2015, at 33. Two weeks ago, a New York jury found Lamar Davenport not guilty on charges of second-degree murder. He was, however, convicted of manslaughter, based on defense claims that he was in a “drug-induced psychosis during the brutal slaying, brought on by his use of PCP.”

Desolation: Blu-ray
In their feature debut, director Sam Patton and writers Matt Anderson and Michael Larson-Kangas, have combined all the ingredients necessary for a first-rate thriller, but pulled it out of the oven only half-baked. Timing in at a far too brisk 78 minutes, Desolation would have benefitted from another 15 minutes of suspense or one or two more false alarms. At its best, Desolation is a compelling study of bonding between a grieving widow and her supportive BFF, and a mother and her 12-year-old son, all devastated by the untimely death of a loving husband, father and friend. Jaimi Paige plays Abby, the mother of Sam (Toby Nichols) and close friend of Jen (Alyshia Ochse). Together, they’re hiking to remote spots in the forests of Upstate New York that were favorite destinations of the dearly departed. After a swim in a scenic lake and trek to the top of a mountain overlooking it, they intend to spread his ashes and bury a few mementos. Unbeknownst to the two women, they’re being followed – OK, stalked – by a villain straight out of a 1970s slasher picture: a disheveled mute, wearing a black, hooded coat; dark slacks; combat boots; and shades with copper-colored reflector lenses. The Hiker (Claude Duhamel) carries a staff and says nothing when summoned from afar. Clearly, he isn’t there to protect them from hungry bears and rabid raccoons. By the time the Hiker makes his first aggressive move against the trio, he’s so familiar to us that his ability to shock has dissipated. Eventually, though, he’ll have to attack the campers and do something so shocking we’ll want to turn our heads. If only … Patton reserved that moment for an off-screen deliverance, leaving viewers to guess when Sam’s preordained date with destiny will arrive. By then, the results are a foregone conclusion. If Desolation is a letdown in suspense department, it rewards viewers with some truly lovely scenery and a couple of scenes in which Abby and Jen reminisce about better times and act like a couple of teenage girls at a cookout. It’s when the picture comes most alive. There’s no reason to think that the filmmakers’ sophomore outing won’t by an improvement on the debut.

The Manor
Low-budget genre films don’t have to be logical to be enjoyable. They shouldn’t, however, insult viewers willing to cut first-time directors some slack. Jonathon Schermerhorn probably should be allowed to share the blame for The Manor, considering that four writers are credited with the script and none of them are named Schermerhorn. The story opens with Jane, the mother of an 18-year-old mental patient, Amy (Christina Robinson), insisting that the girl be allowed to leave the hospital under her guardianship. The administrator (Rachel True) advises against the move, but she’s helpless to prevent it. Instead of driving straight home, however, mom (Tanja Melendez Lynch) drags Amy to the exquisite country home of a guy who appears to have suffered childhood trauma while being taught how to play chess by his dogmatic father. Jane has deluded herself into thinking that Amy is ready to reunite with her aunt and cousins, with whom she shared some laughs as a kid. That was before Amy experienced something so disturbing that it would cause her to experience hallucinations and nightmares for years to come. Not surprisingly, her family does Amy more harm than good. To complicate matters, the proprietor has also booked rooms for a trio of sociopathic hillbillies masquerading as hunters. One of them, at least, immediately commits his energies to raping Amy and her horny cousin, Blaire (Danielle Guldin). He’s not the only guest with the same ambition. A couple of hours later, a large group of hippies arrives to set up what appears to be a mini-carnival. Their leader, played by WWE veteran Kevin Nash, takes it upon himself to protect Amy from harm. When he hears the name of the demon that’s been tormenting her, he agrees that it’s not a hallucination and deserves to be feared. Nothing really makes literal sense in The Manor, but, maybe that isn’t its point and I missed the joke.

Bent: Blu-ray
Rugged Kiwi action star Karl Urban plays Danny Gallagher, a disgraced narcotics detective, who has just been released from prison for shooting another cop he couldn’t possibly have known was also working undercover. Hey, mistakes happen. Usually, a cop will get a pass for not being aware of the circumstances before trying to arrest a bad guy. If Danny had suspected that his partner would be killed in the same bust, he certainly wouldn’t have rushed the drug traficker’s boat. That would have made for a short and largely pointless movie, however. Instead, Bent becomes one of those flicks in which everyone within a 50-mile radius is crooked, including police, federal agents and forensics investigators. Turns out, while Danny’s partner wasn’t exactly dirty, he did owe a substantial debt to a bookie. To buy back the IOU, he borrowed money from someone who was just as bent as everyone else in the picture. Now, the dough has disappeared, and everyone thinks Danny has it. There’s enough action here to satisfy most tastes, as well as the requisite number of minutes spent inside a strip club. Sofia Vegara (“Modern Family”), who plays another corrupt agent, has said that her shower scene with Danny contains her first screen nudity. Technically, that might be true, but the glass door of the shower is so clouded with steam that she might as well be wearing a bikini. Andy Garcia, Vincent Spano, and John Finn also appear in key, if undernourished parts. The Blu-ray adds an interview with writer/director Bobby Moresco (10^th & Wolf) and other cast and crew members, and a making-of featurette.

Docs-to-DVD
Disruptive Film: Everyday Resistance to Power, Vol. 2
The Secret Life of Lance Letscher
Divine Divas
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
Finding Oscar
It’s Not Yet Dark
Dayveon
At some point in the last 30 years, or so, documentaries evolved from being strictly formulated vehicles for education, enlightenment and consensus building, into films that can stand on their own as entertainment, provocation and counterweights to the shortcomings of the mainstream media. Indeed, some of the best documentaries have provided the source material for studio-backed adaptations. If most American docs made during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl period came approached their subjects from the left, it’s worth remembering that propagandist non-fiction was advanced first by Leni Riefenstahl, to sell Hitler’s fascist agenda to everyday citizens wearing red Make Germany Great Again caps. I kid. Recently, the right wing’s efforts to discredit President Obama and Hillary Clinton on film have been feeble, at best. The 16 films from 11 countries that are included in Disruptive Film: Everyday Resistance to Power, Vol. 2 represent 50 years of political activism on film. Most were made before the introduction of lightweight, handheld digital cameras. The 8mm and 16mm films show their age, as do the causes being forwarded by activists. According to its founders, the overall aim of the Disruptive Film Project is to help construct an “alternative history of experimental, political nonfiction media, specifically from the perspective of the short film.” Curators Ernest Larsen and Sherry Millner put the two volumes together for political and educational purposes, “to offer film and media makers and scholars a chance to review unaccountably under-appreciated works of film, video, animation — from France to Chiapas, from Serbia to China, to Nigeria — works that propose various strategies of resistance to power.” If audiences weaned on the work of Errol Morris and Michael Moore find the selections a tad too primitive for their taste, they should know that Kartemquin Films – producers of such highly accessible docs as Hoop Dreams, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, The Trials of Muhammad Ali, Milking the Rhino – made its bones in the non-fiction game 10 years before Hoop Dreams, with films that look virtually the same as these. Its titles left little room for guess work, anyway: Women’s Voices: The Gender Gap (1984), The Last Pullman Car (1983), Taylor Chain: A Story in a Local Union (1980) and The Chicago Maternity Center Story (1976).;

Otherwise, the folks at FilmRise have pretty much cornered this week’s market on docs on DVD.

Sandra Adair has been Richard Linklater’s go-to editor since Dazed and Confused (1993), garnering an Oscar nomination in 2015 for Boyhood. Her first directorial credit came last year with The Secret Life of Lance Letscher, a warm psychological portrait of the celebrated Austin-based collage artist. Told through memories of trauma and triumph, the brilliantly colored film provides a doorway into the artist’s insights on creativity, the subconscious, work ethic and spirituality. It coincides with Letscher’s determination to craft a large metallic mural along South Congress Avenue, in one of Austin’s busiest commercial districts. The documentary features detailed images of more than a hundred of his collages, sculptures and installations.

Brazilian actress Leandra Leal didn’t have to travel very far afield for inspiration when she decided to make her directorial debut. Her feature-length documentary, The Divine Divas, recalls the grit and determination of the country’s first generation of transvestite entertainers. They performed at Rio de Janeiro’s Rival Theater, which, in the 1960s, was run by her grandfather. It was one of the first clubs to openly feature men dressed as women – an activity frowned upon by the military government — and the film catches up with eight of them, during a performance marking their 50th anniversary.

Winner of three 2015 Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special, “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief” is Alex Gibney’s penetrating examination of the controversial religion, which, some insist, doubles as a cult and pyramid scheme. The HBO-produced film profiles eight former members of the Church of Scientology, exploring the psychological impact of blind faith and how the church attracts new followers and keeps hold of its A-list celebrity devotees. “Going Clear” is informed by exclusive interviews and never-before-seen footage featuring Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman and John Travolta, as well as a comprehensive history and intimate portrait of the church’s founder L. Ron Hubbard. It came on the heels of Gibney’s Peabody Award-winning documentary Mea Maxima Culpa, an investigation into the Catholic Church.

Ryan Suffern’s Finding Oscar takes us back more than 35 years, to the Central American killing fields, when right-wing dictators and their enforcers were granted carte blache to eliminate anyone – and everyone – deemed to be an enemy of the state. Frequently, the victims included innocent men, women and children, many of whom were native Guatemalans. In 1982, a band of Guatemalan soldiers entered the tiny village of Dos Erres, hunting anti-government guerrillas. Finding none, they settled for raping and murdering the residents. More than 200 bodies, some still alive, were thrown into a well and buried. Only two young boys, one named Oscar, were spared, to be raised by soldiers who killed their families. Nearly 30 years after the tragedy, a dedicated team of forensic scientists, led by a young Guatemalan prosecutor, sought to bring justice to those responsible. First, they were required to find Oscar, who had moved to the United States and wasn’t aware of his familial roots or the massacre. Sadly, atrocities and mass graves were commonplace occurrences during much of the 20^th Century. This story, at least, leaves hope for the future.

Frankie Fenton’s debut feature, It’s Not Yet Dark, tells the remarkable story of Simon Fitzmaurice, a young Irish filmmaker struck down in his prime by Motor Neuron Disease (ALS). He was diagnosed with the debilitating disease shortly after his second short film, “The Sound of People,” premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Once he became completely paralyzed, Fitzmaurice typed the script for My Name is Emily (2015), through the movement of his eyes and the iris- recognition software, Eye Gaze. This is also how he communicated while directing the film during its five-week shoot in August and September 2014. Narrated by Colin Farrell, It’s Not Yet Dark describes how such a seemingly impossible thing was accomplished, before succumbing to the disease last October. My Name is Emily is currently available through streaming services.

Also new from FilmRise is Amman Abbasi’s freshman film, Dayveon, which could easily be mistaken for a fly-on-the-wall documentary. It involves 13-year-old Dayveon (Devin Blackmon), who lives in poor town outside Little Rock with his older sister, Kim (Chasity Moore), her boyfriend, Bryan (Dontrell Bright), and their 3-year-old son. Dayveon’s older brother died recently in a gang-related shooting. His loss drove their mother mad and still haunts Dayveon. Left to his own devices, he soon falls in with the local gang members. If he can survive the initiation rites, he might live long enough to face the same fate as his brother.

TV-to-DVD
Lifetime: Cocaine Godmother: The Griselda Blanco Story
PBS: Masterpiece Mystery!: Unforgotten, Season 2: Blu-ray
PBS: GI Jews: Jewish Americans in World War II
PBS: NOVA: Great Escape at Dunkirk
PBS: NOVA: Prediction by the Numbers
PBS: Frontline: The Gang Crackdown
Spike: The Shannara Chronicles: Season Two: Blu-ray
PBS Kids: Pinkalicious & Peterrific: Pinkamagine It!
Not knowing how much money Catherine Zeta-Jones was paid by Lifetime to portray the infamous drug lord Griselda Blanco, I’ll resist the temptation to describe her decision as a step up, down or sideways. With an Oscar, Tony, BAFTA already under her belt, it would be all too easy to quip, “How the mighty have fallen,” and dismiss “Cocaine Godmother: The Griselda Blanco Story” as an attempt to piggy-back on the proliferation of movies and mini-series based on Colombian drug cartels, their lifestyles and smuggling networks, and the law-enforcement officials who pursued them. Academy Award-winning cinematographer Guillermo Navarro (Pan’s Labyrinth) directs “Cocaine Godmother” in a serviceable, paint-by-numbers way that suits the cable network’s female-centric format and probably didn’t cost too much money to make. (Zeta-Jones told Parade magazine, “I didn’t want to make her likeable or acceptable in any way. But, I have to admire her having power and also abusing that power. She made it big in a very dangerous world.” That’s one way of sizing up a monster.) According to Molly McAlpine and David McKenna’s screenplay, which isn’t to be strictly believed, Griselda was pimped out by her mother as a child. She’s shown here taking a beating from Mommie Dearest for allowing herself to be cheated by a customer, who she went back and killed. At 17 or, maybe 30, depending on which bio one believes, Griselda made her way to Queens, New York, with a fake passport and a dispensable second husband. She worked for a dealer who admired her ability to forge documents, becoming his partner when she devised numerous ways to smuggle blow into the U.S. in the underwear and false-bottom suitcases of beautiful women, children and invalids.

After eluding capture there, she ended up in Miami in late 1970s. Griselda’s links to Escobar assured her a steady supply of cocaine and the money necessary to afford luxuries and a small army of assassins. It is widely believed that she directly ordered the killings of 200 people during Miami’s Cocaine Cowboy era. Likewise, her greedy sons took to the family business like flies to shit. “Cocaine Godmother,” one of three such projects on tap, tells her story from the perspective of the DEA agent who chased Blanco around the country for years, hoping to make an arrest. Considering that she only served a grand total of 10 years behind bars, before being sent back to Medellin, it hardly seems worth the effort. The movie’s biggest stumbling block is the casting of Zeta-Jones, a former A-lister whose roots extend east to Wales and Ireland, not south to Colombia and the rest of Latin America. Besides being too thin and beautiful to represent La Madrina, even with a minimal amount of makeup, Zeta-Jones’ accent isn’t always on point. It begs the question as to why a dozen other fine Hispanic actresses weren’t chosen for the part. (Answer: star quality.) Still, she doesn’t embarrass herself. Zeta-Jones has gone public about her struggles with depression and bipolar II disorder, which have caused her to take long breaks from her acting career. She’s enjoyed only sporadic success at the box-office in recent years – Reds 2 comes to mind — so, maybe, television is a better bet for her right now. Last year, the mother of two children with Michael Douglas, worked alongside Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon in the entertaining FX mini-series “Feud.” In it, she won critical praise playing actress Olivia de Havilland, a contemporary of co-protagonists Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.

A couple of weeks ago, in my review of the first season of the “Masterpiece Mystery!” presentation, “Unforgotten,” I suggested that the crime at the heart of the six-part series might have taken “Law & Order” only a week or two to solve. I didn’t really mind the padding, however, as the acting and writing were sufficiently compelling for binge viewing. The Season Two package is newly available on Blu-ray and on PBS affiliates, in hi-def. This time, the complexity of the murder and subsequent investigation might have warranted a seventh episode, simply to add some air to the extremely tight narrative. In the first go-round, police detectives were called to a construction site, where the skeletal remains of a young man are found under the footings of a house demolished 39 years after his murder. This time, bones and seriously damaged watch are found in a suitcase dug up from the silt covered-floor of a river by a dredging tool. Police use the damaged watch to help them identify the corpse and link it to several old codgers who begin acting strangely when called in for questioning. They’ve had several decades to get their alibis straight, and they’re all good.

Also on PBS, “GI Jews: Jewish Americans In World War II” tells the story of the 550,000 Jewish American men and women who served in World War II. Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Henry Kissinger are among the veterans who relate their war experiences, while also describing what life at home was like for the children of recent immigrants as they prepared to fight for their adopted country. Living in New York, where the Jewish population was high, was an altogether different experience from sharing a barracks with rednecks and other homegrown bigots who had never met a Jew and didn’t want to bunk alongside one, in any case. Neither were they encouraged to wear their dog tags into combat, because the stamped “H” could tip off a German captor and result in their execution. Their recollections of what some of the veterans found when they liberated the death camps makes for extremely powerful viewing.

Two new DVDs from PBS’ “NOVA” demonstrate the series’ ability to keep audiences guessing as to what the producers will next. “Great Escape at Dunkirk” picks up where Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour left off, by adding 50 years’ worth of insight into how the evacuation was able to succeed, against all odds. The show’s correspondents joined government-commissioned archaeologists and divers as they recovered the remains of ships and planes lost during siege and rescue. They also provide new evidence of the ingenious technology that helped save Allied forces from defeat by the encircling Germans at sea and in the air. “Prediction by the Numbers” examines how predictions based on mathematics and odds-laying underpin nearly every aspect of our lives and why some succeed spectacularly while others fail. The show is enhanced with entertaining real-world challenges that tackle the age-old question: Can we forecast the future?

PBS’s “Frontline” tackles “The Gang Crackdown” from the viewpoint of citizens of a Long Island town who would love to see President Trump make good on his promise to rid the U.S. of the scourge that is MS-13. A slew of killings linked to Central American-born gangbangers has prompted a crackdown that not only has led to the arrests of legitimate suspects in crimes, but also the jailing of innocent bystanders who ICE agents have mistaken for gang members. Justice hasn’t come easy for those whose only crime happened to be wearing the wrong color clothes to school or speaking Spanish in front of the wrong people. The constitutional protections afforded every other American don’t apply to people our great leader recently called “animals,” even those completely innocent of any crime. And, of course, no one in Washington or in law-enforcement feels compelled to blow the horn on such illegal detentions.

Self-inflicted wounds sometimes are the most difficult to heal. That appears to be the case with Viacom Media Networks’ decision to move “The Shannara Chronicles” from its first-season perch on MTV, to Spike in Season Two. While MTV’s youthful, largely female audience probably was the appropriate demographic for the fantasy/drama series, company executives misjudged the ability of the show’s hot actresses to keep male viewers tuned in. Consequently, the numbers didn’t add up for a third-season go-ahead. Unable to sell the New Zealand-based series – adapted from Terry Brooks’ “The Sword of Shannara” trilogy of fantasy novels – to another network, it was deemed expendable. Maybe. instead of punishing the fans for not migrating with the show, the executives who OK’d the move should have been deemed expendable.  For the record, though, the second season is newly available on Blu-ray. When it kicked off on Spike, chaos had overtaken the Four Lands, as a body called “The Crimson” began to hunt down magic users. As is the case with so many fantasy and Cosplay series, it’s often difficult to ascertain whether violence is downright medieval or futuristic.

In PBS Kids’ “Pinkalicious & Peterrific: Pinkamagine It!,” children are encouraged to join Pinkalicious and her brother, Peter, on adventures in the arts, creativity and self-expression. In the best-selling children’s book, a little girl named Pinkalicious wakes up to discover her whole body has suddenly turned pink, which makes her ecstatic, but isn’t without its downside. This collection is comprised of six stories that take place in Pinkville, “a pink-loving town with a touch of whimsy.”

La Belle Noiseuse: Blu-ray
“Take My Word for It” might be a better title for this column, especially as it applies to movies that went to straight-to-video or streaming or are made by filmmakers yet to establish reputations. Jacques Rivette’s 1991 masterpiece, La Belle Noiseuse, doesn’t fit those categories, but, with its four-hour length and ready availability of an inferior 125-minute cut, La Belle Noiseuse: Divertimento, Cohen Media’s upgraded Blu-ray may benefit from any endorsement. La Belle Noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker) won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes and was nominated for a Palme d’Or. Roger Ebert called it “the best film I have ever seen about the physical creation of art, and about the painful bond between an artist and his muse.” The great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa named it one of his two favorite movies of the 1990s — with Takeshi Kitano’s Fireworks – calling it the best filmed display of a struggle of an artist doing his craft, as well as a movie he would have liked to have directed. The four-hour length didn’t bother them or most of the other mainstream critics who saw La Belle Noiseuse in its first release. Michel Piccoli plays the artist, Frenhofer, who, judging solely from his lovely countryside chateau/studio in Provence, did very well for himself before developing a crippling creative block a decade earlier. At the time, his wife, Liz (Jane Birkin), served as his principle model and muse. Although they’re still married and supportive of each other, something is missing in that part of their relationship.

When a young artist, Nicolas (David Bursztein), visits the reclusive artist with his beautiful, if slightly aloof girlfriend, Marianne (Béart), Frenhofer is inspired to return to a painting he long ago abandoned, using her as his model. Liz recognizes the spark and encourages Marianne to stick around. She’ll be asked to pose nude for long periods of time and in positions that will test her patience and strength. It would be easy for viewers to assume that sometime in the laborious process, Frenhofer will try to use patriarchal status to coerce her into having sex. While there’s plenty of contact between them, including the occasional shared cigarette, things don’t progress in that way. And, in the era of #MeToo correctness, we’re happy they don’t. This isn’t to say, however, that Marianne and Frenhofer don’t begin to develop a shared obsession for the work, “La Belle Noiseuse,” or that it doesn’t impact negatively on their relationships with Liz and Nicolas. It’s also reflected in the artist’s process, which Rivette depicts in painstaking detail. Like everyone else in the movie, except Frenhofer, viewers are left guessing as to how the final painting might look. The paintings and sketches to which we’ve been made privy are as disturbing as they are revealing of the artist’s tortured state of mind. La Belle Noiseuse is based on Honoré de Balzac’s short story, “The Unknown Masterpiece,” and inspired, as well, by elements of Henry James’ “The Liar,” “The Figure in the Carpet” and “The Aspern Papers.” The Blu-ray adds commentary by film historian Richard Suchenski; an archival interview with Rivette; and an interview with co-writers Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent.

Fifty Shades Freed: Unrated Edition: Blu-ray: 4K UHD
Here’s a spoiler you won’t read anywhere else: you can tell when Anastasia is truly angry at her demanding husband when she chooses to wear pantyhose, instead of the black thigh-highs she favors while being tortured by Christian, working at the office and hanging out in one of Seattle’s many coffee shops. It may be a small point, but in this, the final chapter of the “Fifty Shades” series, she’s given precious few ways to declare her independence. It’s about time. Few franchises have been more immune to the opinions of critics, who probably hoped they could clip this turkey’s wings before they would be forced to review the other two installments of E.L. James’s Teflon Trilogy. Like Ronald Reagan, whose presidency was compared to the chemical used to coat cookware, nothing negative sticks to the “Fifty Shades” franchise. Fifty Shades Freed is no different in this regard. Despite reviews that would make some filmmakers weep, admirers of the best-selling book pushed the trilogy past the billion-dollar barrier, based on global ticket sales. Consider this, as well: despite Metacritic scores of 46, 33 and 31, viewers’ opinions on CinemaScore rose from Fifty Shades of Grey’s C+, to the B+ shared by Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. Grades for sequels rarely improve. The opening weekend audience for “Freed” saw the highest ratio of female-to-male audiences yet in the series, with women making up 75 percent of opening-weekend moviegoers and women under the age of 30 comprising 55 percent of that audience. It’s safe to assume that male viewers bailed on their dates after being dragged to the first part, disappointed by the lack of below-the-belt nudity and a realization they could never measure up to Christian financially or sartorially. (It’s almost impossible to maintain a two-day growth of facial hair, without shaving every so often.) Women, even those with an aversion to nipple clips and whips, apparently found the highly fictionalized romance to their liking. I wonder how many of them have graduated to Barbet Schroeder Maîtresse, Just Jaeckin’s The Story of O, Steven Shainberg’s Secretary or Radley Metzger’s The Image, all of which do a better job of depicting the pleasures of pain.

In Fifty Shades Freed, it doesn’t take Christian more than a couple of minutes to show his true shades of gray. His unwarranted jealousy surfaces at the wedding reception and continues throughout most of the film’s remaining 110 minutes. And, while he gives Ana every reason to doubt his fidelity – with his real-estate agent and, of course, Mrs. Robinson (Kim Basinger) – her anger at his callous behavior lasts only so long as it takes Christian to purchase an ever-costlier gift … like a private jet at their beck and call, an expensive sports car and top-shelf whips, dildos and butt plugs. (Unlike the novel, Ana isn’t depicted using the latter.) Christian buys a fabulous bayside mansion – seen in an earlier film – without even bothering to consult his better half. Neither does his sexy interior designer (Arielle Kebbel) ask Ana about her plans to gut the Old World interior and replace it with the latest look favored by subscribers to Architectural Digest. For once, though, Anastasia stands up for herself, by insisting the designer piss up a rope. Later, she’ll forgive Christian for berating her on a French beach for shedding her top to sunbathe, while every other woman has her ta-tas on full display. In “Freed,” Christian turns out to be nothing more than just another grumpy and overly possessive guy, who treats his wife like property. When Anastasia informs him of their accidental pregnancy, Christian freaks out and demands she get an abortion. It isn’t until an old nemesis, Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson), threatens to kill Ana and his sister, Mia (Rita Ora), that he pulls up his big-boy pants and rides to her rescue. Blessedly, it isn’t accompanied by Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero.”

The very capable director James Foley (Glengarry Glen Ross) returns to the director’s chair, but he appears to have been handcuffed by a cliché-ridden script. I should have guessed that the screenwriter, Niall Leonard (“Wire in the Blood”), is married to author/producer James and that his only other big-screen credit is for Fifty Shades Darker. His background as a writer of television mini-series – some quite good — is pretty obvious. John Schwartzman’s cinematography enhances the Blu-ray and 4K UHD additions, as does Danny Elfman’s complementary score. From what I can gather, the difference between the rated and unrated versions of Fifty Shades Freed is the inclusion of a couple of brief scenes that were shown in the trailer, but, then, trimmed for the theatrical release. Bassinger appears in a couple of those very brief segments. The bonus package adds the self-explanatory deleted scene, “Hickey and Apology”; a 33-minute making-of featurette, “The Final Climax”; “Christian & Ana by Jamie & Dakota,” in which the actors discuss their characters; “An Intimate Conversation,” with James and actor Eric Johnson; and music videos, “For You (Fifty Shades Freed)” by Liam Payne and Rita Ora, “Capital Letters” by Hailee Steinfeld x Bloodpop, and “Heaven” by Julia Michaels. If James ever runs out of money, she’s left a bit of room for a third sequel.

Saving Private Ryan: Blu-ray/4K UHD HDR
Braveheart: Blu-ray/4K UHD HDR
Gladiator: Blu-ray/4K UHD HDR
Source Code: Blu-ray/4K UHD
Paramount’s impeccable 4K upgrade of Steven Spielberg and writer Robert Rodat’s Saving Private Ryan: Commemorative 20th Anniversary Edition couldn’t possibly improve upon the film’s gut-wrenching depiction of the Omaha Beach assault on D-Day. Nor does it enhance the heart-wrenching drama that accompanies the search for PFC James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon), the last-surviving brother of four servicemen killed in the Normandy invasion. How could it? Even so, Spielberg’s graphic portrayal of the slaughter – accented by sonic effects that made some viewers dodge imaginary bullets – could hardly be more impactful, no matter the video or audio format. What makes the new UHD edition of Saving Private Ryan an essential purchase for owners of the latest home-theater technology is a 12-bit Dolby Vision presentation that comes as close to replicating the big-screen experience as is currently possible. The Dolby Atmos audio track makes the sounds of war that much more frightening and the dialogue more legible. Two decades later, it’s fun to see how many of the cast members would go on to enjoy substantial show-business careers. It’s also worth recalling the controversy that erupted after Saving Private Ryan inexplicably lost out to Shakespeare in Love for the Best Picture Oscar. It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, winning 5:  Best Cinematography, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Film Editing and Best Director for Spielberg. Credit for the upset went to Miramax’s unprecedented promotional campaign and the faulty memories of academy voters, who had no trouble remembering their reactions to the December release of Shakespeare in Love, but who forgot what drove audiences to Saving Private Ryan five months earlier. The upset was one of the things that helped turn Harvey Weinstein into the notoriously untouchable bully he would become, until being cut down to size for sexual abuse two decades later. The separate 4K UHD disc doesn’t include any new bonus features. The Blu-ray-combo disc contains previously issued featurettes, interviews and commentaries.

And, while we’re discussing advanced technology, it’s worth noting ahead of time that Paramount is also about to re-release a pair of its monster hits from 1995 and 2001, Mel Gibson’s Braveheart and Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, in Blu-ray/4K UHD HDR. Unlike “Private Ryan,” both won the Best Picture Oscar they so richly deserved, along with a bunch of other trophies and nominations. All three are enhanced by the addition of 2160p/Dolby Vision and a new Dolby Atmos soundtrack. Fans who purchased earlier Blu-ray editions – including the subpar transfer of Gladiator, since repaired – should know not to expect any new bonus material on the 4K UHD. The already adequate featurettes have been ported over to the Blu-ray discs included in the package. Superfans will have to decide for themselves if the noticeably better audio/visual presentation – closer to the theatrical experience — is worth another investment in money and time. Most, I think, will say it is.

Also new to Blu-ray 4K UHD is Duncan Jones and writer Ben Ripley’s high-voltage action/thriller, Source Code, from Lionsgate. In it, Jake Gyllenhaal plays U.S. Army pilot Captain Colter Stevens, who wakes up one morning on a commuter train headed to Chicago. Because the last thing he can remember is being on a mission in Afghanistan, Stevens is completely disoriented and annoyed about his inability to figure out what’s happening to him. His traveling partner, Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan), is more amused by his confusion than alarmed. When Stevens looks at himself in the bathroom, he appears to be someone else: a school teacher named Sean Fentress. As he attempts to come to grips with this revelation, the train explodes, killing everyone aboard. This time, when Stevens regains consciousness, he’s inside a dimly lit cockpit, communicating with Air Force Captain Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga). She verifies Stevens’ original identity and insists he stay “on mission” to find the train bomber, before a second bomb explodes in downtown Chicago. Turns out, Stevens is trapped inside the “Source Code,” an experimental device designed by scientist Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright). In the computer-generated realm, he experiences the last eight minutes of another compatible person’s life within an alternative timeline. It’s tricky, but, once the gimmick is revealed, viewers shouldn’t have any problem playing along with it. It, too, benefits from a 2160p UHD and Dolby Atmos upgrade. It adds commentary with Jones, Ripley and Gyllenhaal, and “5 Crazy Details You Might Have Missed.”

Blood and Glory
If most sports movies are founded on certain clichés and tropes, it’s refreshing to find a guard-vs.-prisoners flick that breaks new ground. The first iteration of Robert Aldrich The Longest Yard (1974) certainly did, as it captured the anti-establishment fervor of the period. So did the rigged football game in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1972), which added a couple of Vietnam-era touches. Although John Huston’s 1981 soccer drama, Victory (a.k.a., “Escape to Victory”), pitted Allied prisoners of war – including Sylvester Stallone and Pele — against a team of German all-stars in occupied Paris, it was inspired by two European movies, released in the early 1960s. The Hungarian black-and-white drama, Two Half-Times in Hell, and Soviet Tretiy taym (a.k.a., The Last Game) honed much closer to eyewitness reports from an actual soccer game, known as the Death Match. During the German occupation of Kiev, several members of Dynamo Kiev formed a team with other bakery employees, playing in a league against teams supported by the Ukranian puppet government and German military. After they beat a team from a local German Air Force base, the league was disbanded and several of the team members were arrested by the Gestapo, with four reportedly executed. It’s entirely possible, as well, that the Death Match inspired the central conflict in Sean Else’s Blood and Glory, which is set in 1901, during the Second Boer War. The compelling, if all-too-familiar drama follows Willem Morkel, a Boer/Afrikaans farmer who is captured and sent to a British P.O.W. camp on St. Helena Island, halfway between Argentina and Namibia, in the Atlantic Ocean.

The prisoners are treated harshly, forced to break rocks from morning until evening, and fed poorly. While the guards are preoccupied, watching their mates partake in a game of rugby, one of the prisoners sneaks behind them to steal a uniform. He’s caught, of course, and sentenced to be executed. The film’s protagonist, a farmer named Willem Morkel (Stian Bam), offers a deal to the brutal Australian camp commander, Colonel Swannell (Grant Swanby). If the prisoners can beat the soldiers in a game of rugby, Swannell must agree to postpone the execution. If not, Morkel agrees to be executed alongside his fellow P.O.W. As is typically the case in these David-vs.-Goliath setups, the prisoners will have to be taught how to play the game and practice only after their work day is done. Swannell also ensures that the prisoners are undernourished, underequipped and unprepared to lose a key player when one mysteriously drowns. I’m sure you can guess the rest, except for the fact that the island’s British governor (Michael Richard) and his daughter (Charlotte Salt) are appalled by the mistreatment of their temporary Afrikaner guests by fellow Brits. Blood and Glory alludes to the possibility that South Africa’s national team, the Springboks, evolved from that game and one of the players went on to play for the South Africa National Rugby Union team. I couldn’t find anything to back up those assertions, however. Nonetheless, anyone who’s a sucker for such movies should enjoy this one.

Valentina’s Wedding
Lionsgate and Pantelion’s latest cross-border collaboration, “La Boda de Valentina” (Valentina’s Wedding) did pretty well in its opening weekend in 331 U.S. theaters. It would go on to collect nearly $2.8 million here, while raking in another $8.3 million worth of pesos in its concurrent international run. While the stars are largely familiar from Mexican telenovelas and English-language soaps, I don’t know if the distributors focused their marketing efforts on those viewers. Recent Pantelion titles I’ve reviewed are Everybody Loves Somebody, How to Be a Latin Lover, 3 Idiots and the animated feature, Condorito: La Película. None would be confused with high-brow fare, but arthouse audiences don’t watch soap operas … except on PBS. The title character is played by the very appealing Marimar Vega (Daniel and Ana), whose telenovelas include “Silvana Sin Lana Amor,” “Cautivo” and “Eternamente tuya.” Valentina has the “perfect” life in New York, with the perfect job and a perfect American boyfriend, Jason (Ryan Carnes). They plan on getting married, but Jason can’t understand why she refuses to do it in Mexico, surrounded by her family. It isn’t until her thoroughly dysfunctional and scandalous relatives demand that Valentina return to Mexico City, and pretend to be married to her ex-boyfriend, Angel (Omar Chaparro), do we fully appreciate why she’s keeping them at a distance. Naturally, as romcom conventions demand, she reluctantly agrees to return home and go along with the ruse, to protect her father’s political campaign. If you’ve already guessed that Valentina’s proximity to Angel will test her devotion to Jason, give yourself a pat on the back. When she asks Angel to show Jason around the capital, it’s also safe to assume that the two men either will kill each other or find bromance. By the end of the movie, one of the three characters will be left standing at the altar, but it wasn’t the one I would have chosen. Too bad. Coincidentally, perhaps, Vega’s next picture is “La Boda de la Abuela,” in which she plays a character named Ana, from another series of rom-coms.

The Devil Incarnate: Blu-ray
Widely considered to be the dean of Spanish horror films, in the Golden Era of European exploitation, at least, Paul Naschy (a.k.a., Jacinto Molina Alvarez) has been overshadowed here by the purveyors of Italian Westerns, giallo and cannibal epics. To the extent that Naschy is known outside Europe, it’s for his portrayal of the tormented werewolf Waldermar Daninsky, a character he introduced in Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror (1968) and reprised in a dozen subsequent sequels. Like his hero, Lon Chaney Jr., Naschy also played such horror mainstays as the Mummy, Jack the Ripper, Dracula, the Hunchback, the Frankenstein monster, Phantom of the Opera and, in The Devil Incarnate (1979), the ruler of all that’s dark and evil in the universe. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to John Belushi, the devil has decided to follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, by impersonating a mere mortal to investigate what’s happening on Earth. He couldn’t have picked a more appropriate time or place than16^th Century Spain, which was embroiled in the Spanish Inquisition. It was a time when the monarchy entrusted priests with the responsibility of maintaining Catholic orthodoxy and, in doing so, could easily be mistaken for emissaries of Satan. Together with a human companion, Tomas, Leonardo wanders through the countryside like Don Quixote, encountering all sorts of local gentry, nuns, knights and prostitutes, who are ripe to be plucked of their riches and virtue. Neither is Leonardo reluctant to delegate his authority to underlings willing to do his dirty work for him. Eventually, though, the devil finds he’s no match for the devious desires and unbridled greed of God’s earthly creations. Unlike most of Naschy’s horror films, The Devil Incarnate can stand on its own as a bawdy picaresque that doesn’t rely on makeup effects and gore for its appeal. Besides Naschy, it stars Sara Lezana, David Rocha, Ana Harpo, Blanca Estrada, and Irene Gutiérrez Caba. The Mondo Macabro edition, the first to be released on Blu-ray here, was created from a 4k scan of the original negative. It includes an introduction by Naschy; interviews with Rocha and sons Sergio and Bruno Molina; a tour of Naschy’s study and home; and commentary by Troy Howarth. The Mondo Macabro previews are almost worth the price of a rental, themselves.

The House That Dripped Blood: Blu-ray
House of Evil
Forty years after Amicus Productions quit producing genre films in England, it’s easy to confuse its output with that of Hammer Film Productions, which, by the end of the 1960s, was starting to lose market share. While they shared many of the same stars and themes, Amicus favored the anthology format. In this regard, The House That Dripped Blood fits neatly alongside Tales From the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Torture Garden, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors and From Beyond the Grave. While some worked better than others on the big screen, the format does better on DVD/Blu-ray. The segments in The House That Dripped Blood not only share an overarching setting and other connective tissue, but they also were written by Robert Bloch (Psycho) or based upon his stories. The film is a collection of four short stories linked by the association of each one’s protagonist with the eponymous building, which existed for a time on a far corner of the Shepperton Studios lot. Their title and source are, “Method for Murder” (Fury #7, July 1962), in which a hack writer of horror stories (Denholm Elliott) moves into the house with his wife (Joanna Dunham), only to be haunted by visions of the psychopathic central character of his latest novel; “Waxworks” (Weird Tales #33, January 1939) features

a retired stockbroker (Peter Cushing) and his friend (Joss Ackland), who become fixated with a wax museum that appears to contain a model of a lady they both knew; “Sweets to the Sweet” (Weird Tales, Volume 39 #10, March 1947) with Nyree Dawn Porter playing a private teacher hired by a wealthy widower (Christopher Lee) to mind his strange young daughter (Chloe Franks); and “The Cloak” (Unknown, May 1939), in which a temperamental actor (Jon Pertwee) moves into the house, not far from where he’s shooting a vampire film, already occupied by a voluptuous vampire (Ingrid Pitt). The Shout Factory upgrade adds commentaries by film historian/author Troy Howarth and with director Peter Duffell and author Jonathan Rigby; a new interview with second assistant director Mike Higgins; the vintage featurette, “A-Rated Horror Film,” featuring Duffell and actors Geoffrey Bayldon, Ingrid Pitt and Chloe Franks; and original marketing material.

In addition to being the title of a 2017 Italian horror flick newly released into DVD, House of Evil practically defines the subgenre in which it exists, Evil Houses. In Marco Ristori and Luca Boni’s follow-up to Zombie Massacre 2: Reich of the Dead (2015), a young married couple is turning their back on city life by moving to a spacious mansion outside Florence. Eighty-five minutes doesn’t leave much room for exposition, so things begin to take a turn toward the weird almost immediately, with sightings of people who shouldn’t be standing in the field outside and the occasional ghost. Unbeknownst to the couple, their new home was the scene of a heinous crime and the perpetrator — or his spirit – doesn’t appear to have left the premises. As time passes, the husband, John (Andrew Harwood Mills), grows more and more distant from pregnant wife, Kate (Lucy Drive). Finally, when Kate’s best friend, Corrine (Désirée Giorgetti), and a seemingly innocuous local priest (David White), reveal the house’s sad history, House of Evil begins to resemble an all-too-obvious cross-fertilization of Rosemary’s Baby and The Amityville Horror. If it doesn’t break any new ground, at least it looks good and offers more than a few old-school chills.

Paradox: Blu-ray
When the teenage daughter of Hong Kong police negotiator Lee Chung-Chi (Louis Koo) goes missing in Thailand, her trail leads to an American gangster, Sacha (Chris Collins), who is operating an organ-smuggling ring in Bangkok. The 16-year-old went there to visit a friend after she informed Chung-Chi that she’s pregnant and Daddy Dearest had her boyfriend arrested. With his conscience weighing heavy on him, the cop travels to Thailand, where he’s confronted with a thick wall of political and governmental corruption. Fortunately, he’s met there by fellow Chinese cop Tsui Kit (Yue Wu) and his Thai partner, Tak (Tony Jaa), presumably the only two honest police officers in Southeast Asia. A series of clues not only leads Chung-Chi to the gangsters who hold his daughter’s fate in their hands — it hinges on the teetering health of a top city official — but he also finds himself in a position to expose the smuggling ring and take out Sasha. Any more information would qualify as major spoiler. The bottom line is that Paradox (a.k.a., “Kill Zone 3”) overflows with action – choreographed by Sammo Hung – and it’s more violent than usual. Wu and Jaa contribute as much of their considerable skills to the mix as Koo. If any of this sounds familiar, it might be because Paradox is the third installment in Wilson Yip’s “SPL” series, after Kill Zone and A Time for Consequences, or that it could describe a third sequel to Taken, with Koo sitting in for Liam Neeson. Yip also directed the “Ip Man” trilogy. The Blu-ray adds interviews and making-of material.

Manifesto
In Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, an extremely versatile Cate Blanchett portrays 13 individual characters, recounting 12 artists’ manifestos in as many different disguises. In doing so, she recalls Anna Deavere Smith, in “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992”; Lily Tomlin, in “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe”; and Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, in which a half-dozen disparate characters embody a different aspect of Bob Dylan’s life. In the latter, Blanchett played Jude Quinn, an alias for the Dylan represented in D.A. Pennebaker in Don’t Look Back (1967). In retrospect, Manifest makes I’m Not There look like an episode of “Biography.” Originally a video installation, with all 13 sections playing simultaneously, on a loop, on 13 different screens, Manifesto was exhibited first at the Australian Centre of the Moving Image, in Blanchett’s hometown, Melbourne, alongside one of her two Oscars. It draws on the writings of Futurists, Dadaists, Fluxus artists, Suprematists, Situationists, Dogma 95 and other artist groups, as well as the musings of such individual artists as Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Kazimir Malevich, Andre Breton, Elaine Frances Sturtevant, Sol LeWitt and Jim Jarmusch. Blanchett performs these “new manifestos” as “a contemporary call to action,” while inhabiting the personae of a school teacher, puppeteer, newsreader, factory worker and homeless man, among others. On film, at least, it’s a tough slog. Extras include a conversation with Blanchett and Rosefeldt.

Went to Coney Island on a Mission From God … Be Back By Five: Special Edition: Blu-ray
Several years before Jon Cryer hit the jackpot playing Alan Harper in Two and a Half Men, he was still known primarily as the scene-stealing Duckie, in Howard Deutch and John Hughes’s Pretty in Pink (1986). And, truth be told, if it weren’t Cryer’s hilariously passionate dance to Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” he might only have been remembered for bit parts in sitcoms. Now, he’s as recognizable as anyone in Hollywood. In between those two career highlights, though, Cryer co-wrote and starred in Richard Schenkman’s intriguingly titled The Pompatus of Love and Went to Coney Island on a Mission From God … Be Back By Five, which was probably too long to fit on any exhibiter’s marquee. Today, both the independently made pictures probably would fall under the category of “bro’s will be bro’s,” but, in the mid- to late-1990s, they offered decent alternatives to big-budget studio films. “Went to Coney Island” spent two years on the festival circuit before being accorded a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical release in 2000. It’s been given a fresh Blu-ray polish by MVD for its Rewind Collection, with a new introduction by the principles and vintage commentary, interviews, a making-of featurette, Schenkman’s short comedy, “The Producer,” and a mini-poster. The movie follows three childhood friends as they grow into men in one of New York City’s slow lanes. None is particularly successful, but Cryer’s character, at least, doesn’t have the added burden of an alcohol/gambling addiction and bipolar disorder. When Richie (Rafael Baez) mysteriously disappears, Daniel (Cryer) and Stan (Rick Stear) take it upon themselves to find him and report back to his mother. The invisible trail takes them to the Coney Island, which, in the dead of winter, more closely resembles a slum than an amusement park. Only a few attractions and restaurants are open, and they’re mostly populated by people who don’t want to be there. When they do find Richie, he’s been off his meds for some time and clearly off his rocker. Meanwhile, Stan’s bookie has run out of patience with him and is threatening bodily harm. Being an indie dramedy, “Went to Coney Island” doesn’t guarantee a happy ending. It does, however, deliver a well-acted story, with some clever dialogue and an unusual setting. Other recognizable contributors include Ione Skye, Frank Whaley, Dominic Chianese, Leslie Hendrix Judy Reyes and Peter Gerety.

TV-to-DVD
Netflix: Dear White People: Season One
PBS: Nature: Sex, Lies and Butterflies
PBS: The Art of the Shine
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In: The Complete Fourth Season
Nickelodeon: Bubble Guppies: Bubble Puppy’s Awesome Adventures
It isn’t likely that most viewers have been exposed to the Netflix series, “Dear White People,” let along Justin Simien’s feature film of the same title, upon which it’s based. It describes the day-to-day experiences of a diverse group of black students at a fictional Ivy League college that “isn’t as post-racial” as it considers itself to be. The Netflix series opens with a party thrown by the white, male staff of Winchester University’s satirical magazine, Pastiche. For some ungodly reason known only to themselves, the overindulged students think it might be fun to attend in blackface. Apparently, their intent was to protest the controversial campus radio show, “Dear White People,” hosted by black student Samantha White (Logan Browning), during which she points out the many racist occurrences on campus and how white people should respond to them. It also examines concerns about such timely issues as appropriation, assimilation, elitism and exiting various closets. Samantha is a bundle of contradictions, herself. They include having a white lover and being a rabble-rouser, when a little logic and patience might have worked better. She exasperates the turmoil caused by the party, which was banned by the African-American dean, but somehow managed to go on, nonetheless. After a popular black BMOC is held at gunpoint after another party, the overriding issue becomes police brutality. When the protests threaten the school’s tranquility, key benefactors threaten to pull $10 million from the minority-enrollment program. Sam must decide whether to continuing making waves or appease the school’s backers. “Dear White People” could have been a cliché-ridden mess, but it feels completely real and original. Season One episodes depict the growing furor through the eyes and personalities of other students. “Dear White People” plays out over 10 lively half-hour episodes. Season Two has already begun on the premium Netflix streaming service.

Watching PBS’ spectacularly photograpahed “Sex, Lies and Butterflies,” I was once again reminded how far we’ve come in the last couple of decades when it comes to learning about the wonders of science and nature. Take moths and butterflies, for example. Who can forget taking pop quizzes that, first, required students to spell “metamorphosis” correctly and, then, relate how it applies to the life cycle of butterflies and moths, naming each new stage of development. Given that most students already had a rudimentary knowledge of how such beautiful creatures come to be, it wouldn’t be the greatest challenge we’d faced in high school. Still, most of what we learned was gleaned from textbooks or collections of insects pinned to a board. Compare those memories to what’s revealed in a single 60-minute episode of “Nature,” whose producers were able to follow scientists on research missions around the world and eavesdrop on findings once impossible to imagine. In one visit to Africa, the scientists used hyper-sound and macro-filming techniques to study a concentration of moths being attacked by bats, guided to their prey by sonar. What they didn’t know going into the investigation was that the flying insects weren’t nearly as defenseless as we previously thought they were. Far from being sitting ducks, if you will, apparently they’re able to block the bat’s radar, using audio responses not unlike those employed by stealth weapons. Butterflies and moths have survived for more than 50 million years, and in a dazzling array of nearly 20,000 different species, so they must be doing something right. Also examined are their 360-degree vision, deceptive camouflage, chemical deterrents and ability to take advantage of high-altitude winds to travel from continent to continent in a relative flash. The Blu-ray presentation is splendid. The episode is narrated by Paul Giamatti.

Among the rites of passage that have pretty much disappeared over time are those related to boys and their grown-up shoes. Before Nike, Adidas and Puma began manufacturing footwear that would henceforth be deemed appropriate for all occasions, dads insisted that their sons learn how to spit-shine their shoes until they could pass muster in a lineup at boot camp. Some would even go so far as to purchase do-it-yourself kits, complete with buffing rags, brushes and daubers, cleaning soap, various creams and waxes, scraper, shoehorns, foot grips and polishes in several different colors … maybe, even, a couple of spare sets of laces. Unlike the stiff, black leather shoes we were forced to wear to special events, the ritual could be fun. The next step in a boy’s transition to manly footwear typically arrived with a surprise visit to a shoeshine parlor or “smoke shop,” where you sat on a chair high above the resident bootblacks and let a pro take care of business, with a snap of the buffing cloth and tap on the toe upon completion. A boy could learn a lot while waiting his turn for a shine – such institutions were replete with such adult toys as tobacco, cigars and condoms — but rarely in the company of his dad. At one time, it also was possible for hotel guests of both genders to leave their shoes outside their door at night and wake up to newly shined shows in the morning, next to the day’s newspaper. Today, it’s widely considered to be a lost and largely unnecessary discipline. Or, is it? The delightful PBS presentation, “The Art of the Shine,” argues against the total disappearance of shoeshine professionals, outside the occasional train station or casino lobby. It does so by visiting some of the men and women who still make their living from it. They include the brash street shiners of New York City, the masked shoe shine boys of La Paz, a survivor of the Sarajevo sniper war and old pros who now command $8 per shine in barber shops and boutique operations. Not surprisingly, perhaps, some of the men and women we meet gave up lucrative jobs and college degrees for the relative freedom of shining the shoes of a never-ending variety of customers.

Time Life/WEA has reached Season Four (1970–71) in its a la carte rollout of “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” episodes. The regular cast now includes Henry Gibson, Arte Johnson, Alan Sues, Lily Tomlin, Johnny Brown, Dennis Allen, Ann Elder, Nancie Phillips, Barbara Sharma, Harvey Jason, Richard Dawson and Byron Gilliam. It opens with the inclusion of guest celebrity Art Carney and includes such goodies as a boxing match between Sammy Davis Jr. and Wilt Chamberlain; Goldie Hawn’s return, after winning an Oscar for Cactus Flower; Ernestine’s calls to Aristotle Onassis and Gore Vidal; and Don Rickles impersonating Arlene Francis, a then-famous game-show contestant that no one under 80 is likely to remember. Look for cameos by Joey Bishop, William F. Buckley, Truman Capote, Johnny Carson, Carol Channing, Tim Conway, Bing Crosby, Phyllis Diller, David Frost, Andy Griffith, Peter Lawford, Rich Little, Bob Newhart, Vincent Price, Carl Reiner, Debbie Reynolds, Rod Serling, Orson Welles and Flip Wilson. The package is comprised of seven DVDs, containing all 26 episodes, plus bonus interviews with Lily Tomlin and Arte Johnson. Sensitive souls should know that the term “politically correct” didn’t exist in 1970 and many of the jokes wouldn’t make the cut today.

The latest release of episodes from Nickelodeon’s “Bubble Guppies” puts a tight focus on “Bubble Puppy’s Awesome Adventures.” Voiced by Frank Welker (“Scoobie-Do!”), their “rambunctious pet” is Gil’s adopted pet puppy and best friend. He has orange and white fur, and a green collar with a yellow fish license. The third and fourth season episodes include “Temple of the Lost Puppy,” “Wizard of Oz-Tralia,” “The New Doghouse,” “Sheep Doggy” and “Bubble Kitty.”

In the Fade: Blu-ray

In Fatih Akin’s award-winning drama, In the Fade, we’re asked to share the grief of a woman whose husband and son are murdered in a racially motivated bombing so intense that police say they were burned beyond recognition. German-born Katja Sekerci (Diane Kruger) is married to a Turk – once convicted for selling hashish, not that it matters – whose business is in a part of Hamburg where the immigration community has been vulnerable to attacks by nationalist and anti-immigration groups. Just after she drops her son off at his dad’s office, Katja cautions a young woman against leaving her bicycle unlocked on the street. By the time she returns to pick them up, the bomb has already been detonated and the damage done.

The police promise to explore every possible avenue to identify the perpetrators, of course, and Katja provides their sketch artist with a remarkably accurate description of the woman she saw. Well before the investigators are willing to commit to a suspect, Katja assumes correctly that neo-Nazis were responsible. It wouldn’t be the first time Hitler’s bastard grandchildren used violence to terrorize guest workers. Thanks to the dead-on sketch, it doesn’t take police long to make arrests and hand prosecutors what they consider to be an airtight case against the woman and her husband.  In the film’s second of three chapters, however, their case springs a leak that allows a demonic defense attorney to introduce a slim shadow of doubt in the minds of the judicial tribunal. While the young neo-Nazi couple couldn’t even convince family members of their innocence, the judges bought into the defense’s claim that they were in Greece, enjoying the company of a member of that beleaguered country’s fascist party. A jury probably would have seen right through the ruse, but, in the judges’ minds, the prosecution hadn’t proven beyond a doubt that the defendants’ signatures on a ledger weren’t forged. It nullified fingerprint evidence, Katja’s memory and compelling testimony by the male defendant’s father. The outburst of joy shared by the defense team trips the same kind of wire inside of Katja that devastated the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman when O.J. Simpson celebrated his acquittal in open court.

In an interview contained in the DVD/Blu-ray’s bonus package, Akin articulates the dilemma faced by Katya and, by inference, all survivors of such man-made tragedies. What happens to a woman when her primary source of happiness and self-esteem – her husband and child – is stolen from her in little more than a heartbeat? For the rest of Katja’s life, when she looks at herself in mirror, she’ll see a victim in the place where a wife and mother once stood. Worse, perhaps, how can she strive to live a normal life, knowing that the people whose action triggered the greatest pain a wife and mother can endure won’t be penalized? Suffice to say that Akin provides Katya not only the opportunity to avenge the crime – and time to consider her options — but also the possibility of a successful appeal of the verdict. If Akin makes it clear that Katya can never be made whole again, he demands of viewers that they bear part of Katja’s burden, at least, by taking a stand on the option she chooses. Because we may be forced to make the same choice someday, it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Even though Kruger was named Best Actress at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and Akin was nominated for a Palme d’Or, neither made the cut in Academy Award competition. (In the Fade was named Best Foreign Language Picture by the HFPA.) It’s an extremely powerful movie, even if some of the narrative points could have been sharpened. The supplemental package includes “Behind In the Fade: The Story,” with Kruger and Akin, and separate interviews with the writer and director.

Aside: With each new mass murder of children in schools and terrorist attack in Europe, it becomes easier for jaded adults to compartmentalize the horror and write it off as something else we can’t control. The companies that manufacture the weapons that are purchased by teenage sociopaths risk nothing for such extreme manifestations of their greed and suicidal militants don’t concern themselves with opinion polls. The students who’ve been marching to call attention to their very real fears of being gunned down outside their lockers shouldn’t despair when our lawmakers do what they’ve always done when NRA lobbyists take them to lunch. Congress and state legislatures, but they shouldn’t despair if nothing comes of their efforts. Ballots can be as effective as bullets when it comes to getting some jobs done. As much as we empathize with the families of the victims, most of us will never feel the same pain or bear the same emotional burden as they do. That’s a good thing.

The Insult: Blu-ray
Like In the Fade, Ziad Doueiri’s provocative drama, The Insult, asks viewers to follow two proud men’s pursuit of justice to the point where the tether breaks and the court’s verdict is finally rendered meaningless. Set in today’s Beirut, where the scars of a long and bloody civil war are still visible, a Lebanese Christian and Palestinian refugee exchange insults that re-open scars that should’ve healed long ago. In the U.S., such verbal exchanges occur every day, especially in traffic jams and acrimonious political debates. Typically, even the worst insults are protected by the First Amendment and libel suits are rarely worth the cost it takes to file one. Here, auto mechanic Tony Hanna (Adel Karam) gets into a squabble with a construction foreman, Yasser (Kamel El Basha), over some water that dripped on him from Tony’s balcony. On closer examination, Yasser notices that the drainage pipe has been illegally installed and offers to fix it. Even though Tony slams the door in his face, Yasser tells his men to replace the gutter, as stipulated by law. Infuriated by the gesture, Tony smashes the plastic pipe to smithereens, causing Yasser to call him the Arabic equivalent of “fucking prick.”

At that precise moment, their argument ceases to be about an illegally installed drain pipe and who’s responsible for repairing it. Tony demands an apology for the insult, but Yasser isn’t about to relinquish the high ground. Worried about lost time and money, Yasser’s boss convinces him to apologize, however insincerely. Enflamed by a televised speech by the slain Christian leader Bachir Gemayel, Tony responds to Yasser’s advance by saying, “I wish Ariel Sharon had wiped you all out.” Yasser then punches the mechanic, cracking two of his ribs. This time, Yasser is arrested and charged with assault, which could prompt a small fortune in fines. Since Palestinians aren’t allowed to hold jobs that a Lebanese worker wouldn’t consider to be beneath him, Yasser could be ruined, whether he wins or loses. Frustrated, the judges pretty much throw up their hands, effectively absolving Yasser from any guilt. This doesn’t sit well with Tony, of course, and he accepts an offer from a highly placed lawyer, Wajdi Wehbe (Camille Salameh), to appeal the case. His tactics include dredging up memories of 40-year-old atrocities and antagonisms barely suppressed since the civil war.

Because Yasser’s lawyer just so happens to be Wajdi’s daughter, Nadine Wehbe (Diamand Bou Abboud), it’s difficult not to sense how much of the disposition of the case is invested in their familial rivalry and potential for lost pride. As things heat up, the Palestinian and Christian spectators begin to hurl insults at each other that dwarf the “fucking prick” that set everything off. A reporter captures this on an iPhone, setting off fights in the streets of Beirut. Even the prime minister is rebuffed when tries to intervene. Doueiri and co-writer Joelle Touma, who collaborated on the underseen Lila Says, devise some interesting ways to pull this pot of hot water off the front burner before it boils over. Two of them involve out-of-court encounters between the two men, and they should come as a complete surprise to viewers. The Insult was Lebanon’s first-ever Oscar finalist in the Best Foreign Language Film category. The Cohen Media package adds the wide-ranging “Conversations From the Quad,” with Doueiri and Richard Pena.

In Between
Although I’m reluctant to compare Maysaloun Hamoud’s remarkable debut feature, In Between, to HBO’s “Girls” and “Sex and the City,” I will risk the guffaws if it means that some adventurous readers will take a chance on something new and very different. It follows three strong and independent-minded Palestinian women, who share an apartment in Tel Aviv, largely unburdened by the constraints of conservative parents and oppressive religious dictates. I say “largely” because one of them, Nour (Shaden Kanboura), who’s introduced early on as a graduate student from a small village, dutifully wears a hijab and is engaged to a fundamentalist who despairs of her roommates. The other two are equally fluent in Arabic and Hebrew, and dress in a way that makes them completely indistinguishable from their Jewish contemporaries. Ultra-chic lawyer Layla (Mouna Hawa) and lesbian disc jockey Salma (Sana Jammelieh), are part of a Palestinian cultural underground, which means they partake in drugs, alcohol and boogey until the cows come home. At first glance, it would appear as if Nour is there to spark debate and ridicule about her traditional ways and the juxtaposition between the roommates’ opposing views of propriety. The absence of such discord is as refreshing as it is surprising. It isn’t until Nour’s fiancé begins to show his true colors that the hypocrisies of religious life in modern Israel and Palestine are addressed.

They’re revealed, as well, when Layla’s seemingly perfect boyfriend refuses to introduce her to his conservative family. Salma makes the mistake of bringing home her new girlfriend, a doctor, for a dinner meant to introduce her to yet another clueless male suitor. When Salma’s Christian mother discovers them in a casual embrace, she brings it to the attention of her intolerant husband, who, after smacking her in the face, forbids his daughter to return to Tel Aviv. Her detention doesn’t last any longer than it takes for her parents to fall asleep. The region’s politics and discord are handled in the subtlest way possible. No one is required to pass through any roadblocks or be frisked by handsy Israeli soldiers. The nightclubs they frequent could be found anywhere outside the Middle East and there are no explosions or sounds of gunfire in the distance to remind us of the cold realities of life for Israelis and Palestinians in Tel Aviv. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot more of the lead actors, especially Hawa, whose exotic beauty and wild hairdos are almost unique in the Middle Eastern cinema. It will also be interesting to see if Hamoud will be able to make pictures that continue to surprise us with diverse characters and atypical situations. Bonus features include a behind-the-scenes featurette and short film, “Scent of the Morning,” by Hamoud.

Please Stand By
What do you think are the odds of a young autistic savant, with a “Star Trek” obsession, to find herself lost in a strange city and be rescued by a cop, who, like her, speaks fluent Klingon? Not great, I’ll admit, but of such unlikely coincidences are some delightfully offbeat dramedies born. Because autism isn’t one of those disorders that can be depicted in a one-size-fits-all performance, I’m willing to believe that Dakota Fanning did the research necessary to portray the “Star Trek” obsessive, Wendy, not only to her satisfaction but director Ben Lewin and writers: Michael Golamco, who adapted the screenplay for Please Stand By from his stage play. Patton Oswald’s too-brief take on the Klingon-literate cop is such a treat that it practically demands a sequel of its own. Wendy lives in an assisted-living facility in San Francisco, where the resident psychiatrist, Scottie (Toni Collette), has found a job that she can handle with few frustrations and convinced her to keep a notebook with all the tips she needs to get to and from work at the local Cinnabon, without crossing Market Street. Making eye-contact with other people is something that comes and goes, and she still gets temperamental when denied the ability to move back home with her sister, Audrey (Alice Eve), and her newborn daughter. As a lover of all things “Star Trek,” Wendy dedicates all her free time to winning a screenplay competition. To do so, she must get her epic 500-page script into the Paramount mailroom, no later than 5 p.m. four days hence. When a tantrum threatens to blow the deadline, Wendy decides to hop a bus to L.A. and hand-deliver it. Not surprisingly, the 400-mile journey presents more than a few miscues. Scottie and Audrey locate Wendy, thanks to the Klingon cop, but she comes close to blowing the deadline, anyway. If you think that it’s a foregone conclusion she’ll win the $100,000 prize, think again. Please Stand By won’t conform with everyone’s concept of a good time, but Fanning’s fans shouldn’t mind the contrivances and Oswald’s contribution is worth the wait.

Kaleidoscope: Blu-ray
There may be no more versatile actor in the world than Toby Jones, who, somehow, at 5-foot-5, stands out in any crowd of actors that surrounds him. Written and directed by his brother, Rupert, Kaleidoscope is a claustrophobic thriller that largely takes place within the head of a schizophrenic ex-con, Carl, who lives in a cramped apartment atop a crowded London housing estate. The less literally viewers take what happens to Carl in the first 15-20 minutes of the film, the more likely they’ll be to accept what happens to him thereafter. Carl has arranged an Internet date with a woman, Abby (Sinead Matthews), who is either out to steal his money or earn it on her back. With an accent that betrays her working-class roots, Abby is wonderfully exuberant and playful with Carl. It isn’t until she notices the surgeon’s saw below the sink and books never returned to the prison library that she begins to worry. So, do we. After Abby is locked in the bathroom and Carl returns from a quick trip outdoors, the apartment looks as if it were torn apart by burglars searching for an elusive prize or a damsel in extreme distress. Very soon, Carl’s mother, Aileen (Anne Reid) appears almost out of thin air, making him very nervous and defensive. Someone claiming to be Abby’s husband also knocks on the door of the apartment. Meanwhile, Carl is shown washing clothes that we’ve seen on Abby and carrying a large duffel bag around the estate. Clearly, screenwriter/director Jones wants us to believe actor Jones has committed a heinous crime and Aileen is interrupting his plans to dispose of the evidence. On closer investigation, though, nothing is quite what it seems to be inside the apartment or Carl’s head. Fortunately, the three central performances are good enough to warrant instant replays and repeat viewings. It pays to watch the bonus interviews and making-of featurette.

The Unwilling: Blu-ray
This nifty little horror/thriller (81 minutes) has been making the rounds of specialty festivals since 2016, probably in search of a distributor that knows how to market genre-straddlers and cares enough about its products to spend some money on them. Finally, however, The Unwilling was released straight-to-DVD/Blu-ray. There’s nothing wrong with Jonathan Heap’s cast, which includes Lance Henriksen, co-writer David Lipper, Dina Meyer, Jake Thomas, Robert Rusler, Bree Williamson, Austin Highsmith and Levy Tran. Henriksen’s name on the packaging, alone, should be enough to boost sales and downloads during the opening week. He plays the evil patriarch of a family whose members suffer from such things as OCD, narcissism, drug addiction and the great equalizer, greed. After the old man dies, they gather at his residence for the reading of the will. Shortly after their arrival, a strange antique box is delivered to the house and the son, David (Lipper), places it on the coffee table. David recalls seeing the chest in his father’s office as a child, but he doesn’t know what it contains. Six long needles protrude from the box, which appears to have a mind of its own. When the family members prick their fingers on them, a wish is granted. One seeks wealth and is rewarded with a gold bar that could be used in an expensive game of hot potato. Another one desires drugs to feed his habit and they kill him. Meanwhile, the house itself appears to be haunted by apparitions and other things that go bump in the night. Not all the loose ends are tied by the time the end credits begin to roll, but viewers shouldn’t be disappointed by the special effects and highly efficient acting. The package adds several interviews with cast and crew.

Once Upon a Time: Blu-ray
Epic Chinese fantasies have become an exportable product in the same way that American comic-book adventures now are one of this country’s most profitable commodities. They do very well in the movie-hungry PRC and are attracting niche audiences here theatrically and on DVD/Blu-ray. If Chinese authorities really wanted to retaliate against President Trump’s call for punitive tariffs on its products, they could add a fee to the sale of tickets to see Hollywood blockbusters there. MPAA and studio executives would scream bloody murder, of course, as would representatives of the Chinese exhibition industry. It’s taken years of tough negotiations just to get Chinese officials to raise the quota of foreign-made movies to 34. What’s sexier … a punitive tariff on Chinese steel and Mardi Gras beads or a retaliatory strike summer popcorn movies? Talks were going smoothly until Trump got a bug up his ass one morning and launched an ill-considered tweet storm. If talks fail, the studios could round up its A-listers and put on a charm campaign modeled after the NRA. Because cinematic exports from China are currently so marginal, any tit-for-tat tax would be meaningless. Such a scenario came to mind after watching Once Upon a Time, a big-budget CGI fantasy that attracted large crowds at Chinese theaters and is indicative of the progress being made in competing with American pictures. Such impressively staged epics aren’t the only kinds of movies that have improved over the last decade, or so. So, too, have historical and crime dramas made by filmmakers once forced to work outside the PRC or in Hong Kong. Censorship has limited the import and production of romances that are deemed to risqué for Chinese audiences. While the 50 Shades trilogy has done boffo business overseas and along the Pacific Rim, it’s been banned from exhibition in China and Malaysia. That hasn’t prevented pirates from circulating bootlegged copies, of course, and profiting from them.

All of that speculation is a roundabout way of delaying my comments on Once Upon a Time, a film that risks sensory overload and requires a Wikipedia scorecard to keep the characters straight. It is based on Qi Tang’s best-selling fantasy novel, “Three Lives Three Worlds, Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms,” which has already inspired a 58-episode maxi-series, “Eternal Love,” and an English translation titled “To the Sky Kingdom.” Being unfamiliar with the source material, it’s difficult for me to say with any certainty if I’ve grasped all the subtleties of the story. All I needed to know, really, is that it is the story of Bai Qian (Yifei Liu), a goddess and monarch from the Heavenly Realms, who, in her first life, was the disciple of the God of War, Mo Yuan (Yang Yang). After a devastating conflict, Mo Yuan’s soul was destroyed while sealing the ghost lord Qing Cang (Yikuan Yan). Seventy thousand years later, while Bai Qian is trying to prevent the Demon Lord from breaking free, she is sent to the mortal realm to undergo a trial to become a High Goddess. There, she meets Ye Hua (Mark Chao), with whom she falls in love and eventually marries. However, their love ends tragically. Three-hundred years later, the two star-crossed lovers meet again as deities, but all her memories have been erased. By the way, crown prince Ye Hua is 90,000 years younger than Bai Qian. That’s only a rough outline of what happens during the 109-minute course of Zhao Xiaoding and Anthony LaMolinara’s effects-laden movie. The Blu-ray adds a making-of featurette. Apparently, it was almost entirely made inside a studio where the color presentation, wire work and green-screen activity were closely monitored and tightly controlled.

Schlock: Blu-ray
Actors in gorilla costumes have been entertaining moviegoers ever since the 1918 silent film, Tarzan of the Apes. Even as the suits have become more realistic, knowing that there’s a human being inside impacts our enjoyment of a movie, TV show or comedy sketch. (David Warner’s impersonations in Karel Reisz’ Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment are still my favorite.) Adding a cigar, sunglasses or hat to the mix – as Ernie Kovacs did in his Nairobi Trio skits — only makes the gorillas funnier. In Schlock, John Landis’ 1973 debut as writer/director, he also donned a gorilla suit to play the title character, a long-slumbering “banana monster” who awakens after spending 20 million years in a cave below the surface of the San Fernando Valley. The beast can’t seem to decide if he wants to be cute and cuddly or a menace to humanity. With no more reason to exist than Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), Schlock benefits greatly from Landis’ appreciation of timeless Hollywood genre clichés and B-movie tropes. After escaping from his hole in the ground below modern-day Agoura, Schlock falls in love with a blind teenager who thinks he’s a large dog. When she regains her sight and realizes her mistake, the girl’s horror sparks a massacre. He must be stopped. Not only did the personally-financed no-budget flick introduce Landis to Hollywood, but it also gave makeup artist Rick Baker his first big break. It didn’t take long for Landis to be handed the reins to Animal House and The Blues Brothers, and Baker would begin contributing to such blockbusters as The Exorcist, King Kong and Star Wars. Schlock has just been released on a limited-edition Blu-ray by the German distributor, Turbine Media Group, through its Facebook page. It offers several entertaining featurettes, including a lengthy dialogue with Landis and some fellow film nerds, in which he covers his early career in Hollywood and Europe, making Spaghetti Westerns.

Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell
For those of you who’ve grown weary of keeping score at home, Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell is the sixth entry in a franchise that began in 1990 and has also spawned a couple of TV series and several video games. As far as I can tell, the common denominators are star Michael Gross, as Burt/Hiram Gummer, and his invertebrate nemeses, the Graboids. For 25 years, Gummer has been the only thing standing between the subterranean worm-like creatures and Armageddon, or something closely resembling the end of the world. Here, Burt and his son, Travis Welker (Jamie Kennedy), find themselves up to their ears in Graboids and Ass-Blasters, when they head to Canada to investigate a series of deadly attacks. Arriving at a remote research facility on the frozen Arctic tundra, Burt begins to suspect that Graboids are secretly being weaponized. Before he can prove his theory, however, he is sidelined by Graboid venom. With just 48 hours to live, the only hope is to create an antidote from fresh venom. To do that, someone will have to figure out how to milk a worm. Yes, Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell is every bit as silly and stupid as it sounds. If one is in the mood for such brain-numbing entertainment, however, it probably will do the trick. The bonus material adds “The Making of Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell,” “Anatomy of a Scene” and “Inside Chang’s Market.”

Followers
For his first theatrical feature, Follower, Ryan Justice has elected to make a found-footage “thriller” about the dangers of living one’s life in the crowded fast lanes of social media. For no good reason that I can discern, Brooke and Caleb (Amanda Delaney, Justin Maina) are known far and wide for her work as a yoga and lifestyle guru, and his reputation as a celebrity boyfriend. As such, they intend to webcast their celebration of a special anniversary, which they’ve arranged to take place on a camping trip in the backwoods of Florida. The problem is, of course, that neither of them account for the possibility that they will be stalked by two of their followers, hence the title. Conveniently, Nick and Jake (Sean Michael Gloria, Nishant Gogna) are two aspiring filmmakers intent on making a documentary on how easy it is to track someone down through social media … and kill them. Pretty easy, I’d say. Another problem arises when the two couples are confronted by a group of swamping-dwelling cultists, wearing white togas and wielding mad cutlery. The cautionary tale about social-media surveillance doesn’t kick in until well after most viewers will have stopped watching.

Maya the Bee 2: The Honey Games: Blu-ray
With the world’s honey-bee population in danger of being snuffed out, it’s comforting to know that one century-long hive is thriving and shows no sign of being extinguished. The roots of Maya the Bee 2: The Honey Games extend all the way back to 1912, when Waldemar Bonsels’ 200-page book, “The Adventures of Maya the Bee” was published in Germany. It has since been re-printed in many other languages and revised to tone down the author’s more militaristic undertones. The first adaptation into film was German director Wolfram Junghans’ 1924 silent feature – it “starred” real insects — which was restored in 2005. In 1975, a 52-episode anime series aired on Japanese television and around the world. It wasn’t shown on American television until 1990, when it joined the Nickelodeon lineup. A second series was commissioned 1979, but it didn’t enjoy the same positive response as the original.  In 2012, Studio 100 Animation produced 78 episodes of 13 minutes in length. It was shown here on Netflix, until a parent noticed the outline of a penis etched on a log in the background of a scene and it was canceled. A 2014 film, rendered in 3D CGI animation, was based upon the 2012 series. There’s also been an opera, puppet musical, stage musical and video games based on “Maya the Honey Bee.”  Shout Factory’s straight-to-DVD/Blu-ray Maya the Bee 2: The Honey Games – co-directed by Noel Cleary, Sergio Delfino and Alexs Stadermann – borrows elements of The Hunger Games, after an overenthusiastic Maya accidentally embarrasses the Empress of Buzztropolis. Maya and Willy are required to accept the benefits of teamwork, if they’re going to save the hide. The package adds the featurette, “The Making of Maya The Bee 2: The Honey Games.”

Van Wilder: Unrated Version: Blu-ray
In its wisdom, Lionsgate has decided to re-release its rated/unrated Blu-ray edition of National Lampoon’s Van Wilder (a.k.a., “Van Wilder: Party Liaison”), a comedy that could be dismissed as sophomoric if the protagonist wasn’t a seventh-year student, who has no plans to graduate. At this point in his college career, Wilder (Ryan Reynolds) is content to be a full-service party planner, pimp, facilitator and all-around ne’er-do-well. That is, until his father learns that his tuition money is being flushed down the toilet and he decides to turn off the tap. Moreover, his behavior is embarrassing the school’s administration and a cute cub reporter at the school’s paper (Tara Reid) has been assigned an expose on how such a thing is possible. The simple answer would be: anyone who can afford to pay tuition can stay in school for has long as he or she maintains a certain grade average or continues to show forward momentum. If a lack of interest in claiming adulthood were all it takes to warrant an investigation, half of the nation’s graduate students and most our professional athletes would be eligible for the cover of Time magazine. Here, it’s simply a ruse to endear Wilder to the reporter, whose boyfriend is a complete dick. If Van Wilder is guaranteed to elicit laughter from each incoming class of college freshman, all most adults will be left with are some bulldog-testicle sight gags and two more minutes of risqué humor in the unrated version. They presumably include several extended flashes of coed boobs and poo-poo gags. While Reynolds’ career has survived Van Wilder – Deadpool 2 opens in a couple of weeks — poor Tara Reid, who’s very cute here, has had to settle for starring roles in the Sharknado series.

TV-to-DVD
Capitalism: A Six-Part Series
Marx Reloaded
PBS: Spying on the Royals
Smithsonian: Civil War 360
One of the great fallacies of American life is a top-down confusion of the terms “democracy” and “capitalism.” Schools have done a pretty good job explaining how our democracy works and differs from other forms of government. What is overlooked is the role capitalism has played in the shaping of our democracy and maintenance of the status quo, from an early acceptance of slavery and discrimination against women and minorities, to the bailout of the banks after the 2008 Depression and current return to laissez-faire principles … or, lack thereof. From French television, “Capitalism: A Six-Part Series” delivers a college-level exploration of how the economies of the world’s most stable democracies work and how vulnerable they are to the whims … not of capitalism, but capitalists. Ilan Ziv’s documentary is neither an indictment of capitalism, nor an endorsement of communism or socialism. It traces the evolution of capitalism from the great thinkers who influenced Adam Smith, through the academics who interpreted “The Wealth of Nations” for future generations, and on to bankers who brought the world to its knees in 2008. What emerges most clearly, however, is the sad reality that capitalism couldn’t have survived and flourished without colonialism, slavery, greed, fear and corruption to prop it up. A bit more time devoted to the allure and failures of communism might have been useful, but the time devoted to a closer reading of Karl Marx’s theories is extremely useful. The 2014, pre-Trump documentary took two years to produce. It was filmed in 22 countries and features interviews with 21 of the world’s leading economists, historians, sociologists and political scientists. They include Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, James Kenneth Galbraith, Kari Polanyi Levitt, Lord Robert Skidelsky, Dr. Kwame Osei and Dr. Wang Ming. As someone who resisted taking any economics courses in colleges, I found “Capitalism” to be a surprisingly accessible and frequently eye-opening experience.

Also from Icarus Films, Marx Reloaded is a 2011 German documentary short, written and directed by the British writer and theorist Jason Barker, which appeared on several European networks and symposiums. It features interviews with several well-known philosophers and economists, who manage to put a human face on a figure known principally for his great beard and utopian vision. In fact, his critique of capitalism has stood the test of time and may be as relevant today as it has ever been. If that sounds ridiculous, especially in light of the collapse of Soviet-style communism in Europe and rise of market-based communism in China, it’s worth a second listen. In the United States, workers who rejected their unions now are forced to kowtow to the greed of plant owners whose roots in American soil have proven to be very shallow, while also having to listen to pundits extol the virtues of a robotic society. There’s certainly no dismissing Marx’s observations of commodity fetishism. At 53 lively minutes, “Marx Reloaded” asks questions that are becoming increasingly relevant in a world of haves and have nots. It arrives with Bob Godfrey’s short animated film, “Marx for Beginners,” adapted from a graphic novel by Mexican cartoonist Ruis.

Perhaps, because of Wallis Simpson’s American background, the abdication of King Edward VIII has been looked upon as an affair of the heart, pure and simple. We were more willing to forgive the couple for their political indiscretions before and after World War II, because they were considered harmless and fun to observe in social settings. They survived nicely for the next 25 years, largely on the fruits of the British Empire and the kindness of peers. The PBS presentation, “Spying on the Royals,” examines their story stripped of romanticism and schmaltz. Classified documents that have gone unseen for more than 70 years bring to light the secret story of the stunning events of 1936, detailing what could have devolved into the most controversial espionage operation in British history. As it is, the spying, wire-tapping and cooperation between intelligence agencies – in Britain, throughout Europe and the U.S. – went undiscovered by the press for decades. If the would-be monarch had, in fact, favored Adolph Hitler over the leaders of other European nations, it’s possible that German troops might have been allowed to invade England without a struggle. Edward might have been retained as figurehead leader of the country and rubber stamp for Nazi policies. That’s the worst-case scenario, anyway. As it was, the prince and duchess were uprooted from their live of luxury in Portugal – officially neutral, but a haven for fascists – and sent to the Bahamas to count coconuts and monitor the comings and goings of U-boats.

Ken Burns’ “The Civil War” was successful, in part, because it employed a bit of artistic chicanery, zooming and panning across still images of Mathew Brady’s photographs; having celebrities with lovely voices read excerpts from letters, diaries and journals written by soldiers, officers, politicians and spouses; and backing them up with music that triggered emotional responses from viewers. In the Smithsonian Channel’s similarly fascinating, if less riveting, “Civil War 360,” fresh insights into the conflagration are provided through the displays of historical objects, memorabilia and artifacts in the collections of the Smithsonian museums. Some have been put on display, while others have been deemed too fragile for exhibition. The three-part series explores famous and little-known aspects of the Civil War, from the perspectives of the Union, the Confederacy and the millions of enslaved people struggling for freedom. It is hosted by Ashley Judd, Trace Adkins, and Dennis Haysbert, all of whom had ancestors greatly affected by the war.

Hostiles: Blu-ray, 4K UHD
Writer-director-actor Scott Cooper’s behind-the-camera career began auspiciously, in with the award-winning drama Crazy Heart in 2009. Jeff Bridges won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as a broken-down country-music singer in dire need of redemption, while Ryan Bingham and T-Bone Burnett’s “The Weary Kind” was awarded Best Original Song and Maggie Gyllenhaal was nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category. At the Independent Spirits’ beach party, Crazy Heart was named Best First Feature; Bridges won Best Actor; and Cooper was nominated for Best First Screenplay. It should have been a tougher act to follow, but Out of the Furnace (2013) and Black Mass (2015) proved his freshman success was no fluke. Based on a manuscript by Donald E. Stewart (The Hunt for Red October), who died in 1999, Hostiles presented Cooper with a larger-than-life challenge, not only because it’s a traditional widescreen Western shot almost entirely outdoors, but also because the independently produced and distributed picture was targeted from the get-go for awards consideration. We know that because it was put into limited release on December 22 and forced to compete for the eyes of critics, awards committees and big-city audiences during the year’s busiest week and against studio-financed marketing campaigns. It’s difficult to argue that Hostiles was snubbed by the Academy, but outstanding performances by Christian Bale and Rosamund Pike deserved more consideration than they got, as did cinematographer Masanobu “Masa” Takayanagi (The Grey). Cooper took full advantage of the most beautiful and rugged locations northern New Mexico and Arizona have to offer, including locations near Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch. While good, old-fashioned American bigotry and genocide are on full display in Hostiles, Cooper’s balanced depictions of Native American customs, language, culture and, yes, cruelty to settlers and other tribes were lauded by the National Congress of American Indians for the film’s “authentic representation of native peoples.”

The picture opens with the slaughter of a family of homesteaders by a rogue band of Comanches. Pike’s Rosalee Quaid barely survives the attack, but she is deeply scarred by the loss of her husband and children. At approximately the same time, a short distance away, Army Captain Joseph J. Blocker and his men have captured an Apache family that escaped from detention at Fort Berringer, New Mexico. They resist the temptation to beat or hang the head of the family, which was less a threat to their safety than a stray coyote or angry prairie dog. Upon his return to the fort, Blocker is ordered – very much against his will — to escort the desperately ill Cheyenne war chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) and his family back to their tribal lands in Montana. Along the way north, Blocker’s platoon chances upon the Quaid’s burned-out cabin, where they find Rosalee grasping the dead body of an infant. Yellow Hawk and his son, Black Hawk (Adam Beach) volunteers to help Blocker track down the renegade Comanches, but he refuses the offer. His intransigence will soon cost him the life of one of his trusted soldiers and the use of another. When they reach Fort Winslow, Colorado, the camp commander asks Blocker to escort a disgraced sergeant (Ben Foster) to a fort further north, where he’ll be court-martialed and hanged for actions no longer approved by the army. Both men participated in the slaughter at Wounded Knee and other atrocities, so the sergeant begs for mercy and frontier justice. No dice. In addition to having to escort the Indians and angry captive north, the widow Quaid has decided to accompany Blocker all the way to Montana.

As if to demonstrate the Comanches don’t have a monopoly on shameless behavior, a ragtag group of miners kidnap Rosalee and Black Hawk’s wife, for the sole purpose of beating and raping them whenever the mood strikes. With Yellow Tail’s help, Blocker rescues the women, but not before they’re traumatized emotionally. Cutting to the narrative chase, Hostiles then provides Blocker and Yellow Hawk – who’s committed his own fair share of war crimes – to weigh their past actions, seek forgiveness for their sins and, for lack of a better term, bury the hatchet between them. They know they’ve reached the end of a bloody era and the fate of the West rested in the hands not of warriors, but lawyers, robber barons and thieves. Hostiles is a long picture and viewers looking for non-stop action may find their patience tested by the many contemplative parts that fans of revisionist Westerners will like better. When Cooper and Takayanag make the time to linger on the magnificent western landscapes, the beauty and goodness of nature overwhelm the follies of men. The final scenes, which include a bloody skirmish at a sacred burial ground, will leave audiences dizzy with mixed emotions. Viewers with 4K UHD units will especially appreciate Takayanag’s wide-screen cinematography, as Hostiles looks as if it were chosen by advocates of the format to showcase its benefits. The lengthy making-of featurette is well worth perusing, as well.

Moon Child: Blu-ray
Loosely inspired by a novel written by British occultist Aleister Crowley in 1917, Moon Child was invited to compete for the Palme d’Or at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, but it pretty much disappeared immediately thereafter. It isn’t that difficult to see why it could find distribution, really. Thirty years later, though, it’s easy to see how an adventurous distributor, such as Cult Epics, might take a chance on Agusti Villaronga’s mystical fantasy on Blu-ray. (A version duped from a European VHS tape was passed around a few years ago, but it was a mess.) Moon Focus’ focus is on 12-year-old David (Enrique Saldana), an orphan who’s been placed in a research facility for kids with extraordinary mental powers. There’s no reason to think that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, creators of the X-Men comic books, were inspired by Crowley’s book, but certain parallels can be drawn between the facility here and Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters in X-Men. David has reason to believe that he’s the Child of the Moon, whose arrival has long been prophesized by shamans gathered at a central African watering hole. They agree that the boy will be of a pale-white complexion, possibly an albino, and his arrival will be telegraphed by something resembling a fire storm emanating from the full moon. The despotic administrators of the school have been made aware of the same prophesy and, as occultists, are anxious to make it work to their benefit.

They orchestrate the forced impregnation of a dimwitted female student (Lisa Gerrard) by the grandson (David Sust) of the expatriate mystic who delivered the prophesy to them. David’s ESP causes him to anticipate just such a scheme, which requires the couple to have sex on a table positioned under a hole in the ceiling, directly in line with the moon’s path. After Georgina and Edgar seal the deal, David convinces them to escape with him to Africa, where the shamans will either recognize him as the Moon Child or the baby being carried by the increasingly weak Georgina. Hoping to short-circuit David’s plan, the administrators ask a sympathetic teacher, Victoria (Maribel Martin), to follow the trio’s trail, by plane, as they make their way from oasis to oasis through the Sahara Desert. It isn’t likely that Georgina will ever be strong enough to return to the institute, but Victoria devises a plan to make the plane work in David’s favor and satisfy the shamans. At two hours, Moon Child probably could have benefitted from more time spent observing the students’ telekinetic powers and determining how they could be exploited by the administrators. Even so, Villaronga (In a Glass Cage) capably establishes a tone of sinister intent and mystery, while also taking advantage of some extraordinary African settings and music by the ethereal Australian band, Dead Can Dance. The Blu-ray has been remastered from original 35mm elements and adds a new interview with Villaronga, a lobby-cards gallery and isolated score by Dead Can Dance.

A Violent Life
Among the world’s storied organized-crime organizations, the Corsican mob has claimed a niche disproportionate to its numbers and the size of the island that its members call home. You could trace the history of today’s crime families back to Louis and Lucien Franchi, twin protagonists of Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 novella, “The Corsican Brothers,” but the book’s vendettas, greed and lusting for power probably didn’t originate in the authors imaginations. Some grudges have kept families on Corsica and Sicily feuding – like our Hatfields and McCoys –for much longer than 180 years. Besides their fondness for evening scores, Corsican criminals have gained a reputation for making sure that they get a cut of whatever illegal commerce passes through the island’s ports and markets, and their willingness to cut deals with crime families from the European mainland, Africa and the Middle East. Their notoriety has inspired filmmakers to use Corsican criminals in dozens of movies and TV mini-series, including MHz Choice’s “Mafiosa,” Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, Peter R. Hunt’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, the Japanese anime series, Noir, and Thierry de Perett’s Apaches. In some of them, Corsican assassins travel far and wide to perform onerous tasks for crime families of many different nationalities. In A Violent Life, Corsican native De Perett revisits the island’s violent nationalistic and separatist struggles of the 1990s. Jean Michelangeli plays Stéphane, an 18-year-old student who’s busted after agreeing to carry a bag loaded with weapons from the mainland on a ferry. During his incarceration in Bastia, Stéphane is radicalized by members of a nationalist splinter group, hoping to provide an alternative to the government’s commercial ambitions for the island, an established separatist organization and the traditional interests of organized crime. Stéphane isn’t accorded a position of authority within the fledgling nationalist group, but he gets caught up in the maelstrom triggered by the assassination of one of it leaders, during a wedding reception. Another fiery assassination, this time of a relative, demands of Stéphane that he remain in hiding – possibly forever – or stand up for his convictions, by returning to his home town for the funeral. I initially expected A Violent Life to more closely resemble Gomorrah or The Mafia Kills Only in Summer, but, like Corsica, itself, it is more French than Italian, favoring narrative over action. It’s well made, however, and more than a little bit suspenseful. I recommend watching it before sampling the more contemporary Apaches.

Last Seen in Idaho
Typically, when an actor plays the protagonist in a thriller they wrote and was directed by a spouse, the result is a movie that errs on the side of promoting the character’s virtues and dialing up the threats from less-than-credible villains on the way to a contrived ending. I expected as much from Last Seen in Idaho, which debuted on DVD this week and promised nothing more than an interesting title. Although there’s nothing particularly new here, Eric Colley’s no-frills direction nicely complements Hallie Shepherd’s taut script, providing ample room for suspense. Shepherd plays a financially strapped young woman, Summer, who works in an automotive garage frequented by shadowy characters. One night, she witnesses a murder and flees the scene, carrying a cellphone containing video evidence of the crime with her. Summer doesn’t get very far before she’s involved in a fiery crash that should have killed her, but leaves her in coma, absent any memories of the night’s events and the whereabouts of the phone. Not long after she awakens, she starts having shocking premonitions of a kidnapping and murder, both involving her future safety. And, yes, some of them are realized. Casper Van Dien, Wes Ramsey and Shawn Christian are among the men – some posing as undercover cops and lovers – who present threats to the safety of Summer and her ditzy sister, Trina (Alexis Monnie). The DVD adds a half-hour making-of feature, a shorter backgrounder on the action sequences and a blooper reel.

Backstabbing for Beginners: Blu-ray
If there’s one thing upon which most cynical Americans agree, it’s that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Even if they’ve never heard of British politician Lord Acton, what he said in 1887 still rings true. What voters can’t seem to agree upon is whether it’s safer to retain the crook you know or elect someone new, whose inevitable corruption might work in your favor. Newspaper columnist Mike Royko condensed Acton’s observation to explain how things have always worked in Chicago. He proposed that Chicago’s official motto, Urbus en Horto (“City in a Garden”) be changed to Ubi Est Mea (“Where’s Mine?”). Unfortunately, both sentiments apply directly to America’s post-World War II foreign policy, which appears to be based on a belief that the easiest way to assure the support of foreign leaders is to allow them to “wet their beaks” by siphoning off a generous percentage of the money we send them in aid packages. If a tinhorn despot decides to steal more than we feel is due him – or threatens to shift allegiances to someone willing to raise the ante – it’s been easy enough to install someone who would play ball. Or, as happened in Cuba, politicized insurgents would find ways of dealing with blatant corruption on their own terms. We all know how that turned out.

Per Fly’s riveting diplomatic procedural Backstabbing for Beginners, which debuts on Blu-ray/DVD and DirecTV this week, describes how corporations and political leaders around the world wet their beaks in the UN’s humanitarian Oil-for-Food program when sanctions were imposed on Iraq after the first Mideast war. Cynical Americans assumed that Operation Desert Storm was intended less to contain Saddam Hussein’s power grab than to maintain the flow of moderately priced oil from the region to the U.S. and its allies. Reinstalling the royal Kuwaiti family and protecting Saudi Arabia’s rulers was the easiest way to do that, short of a full-blown invasion of Iraq. After he left the Defense Department, where he oversaw that war, Dick Cheney became Chairman and CEO of Halliburton Company, which profited mightily from business done with Iraq in the wake of Desert Storm. As Vice President to George W. Bush, Cheney made sure Halliburton was free to make its beak even wetter by controlling the supply lines to allied forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. None of this was lost on participants in Oil-for-Food, who found ways to rig the allocation of oil exports, send expired pharmaceuticals to Iraqi hospitals and overcharge for all imported products. Hussein not only received his cut, but he made sure that aid packages were divvied unevenly between Shiites and Sunnis, and different ethnic populations within his borders. In a nutshell, that’s what aspiring diplomat Michael Soussan (Theo James) discovers after being hired as an assistant to Pasha (Ben Kingsley), a seasoned diplomat and Michael’s boss at the UN.

It doesn’t take Michael long to smell a rat in the Oil-for-Food program or to find the nest of vermin directly under the nose of Pasha’s boss, Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Pasha should have known better than to hire an idealistic young diplomat whose father was killed in a terrorist bombing in Lebanon, but he lets hubris get in the way of pragmatism. He believes that he can convince Michael of the efficacy of compromising the Oil-for-Food program to benefit of everyone, including, eventually, the people who needed the food. If, he reasoned, the graft was eliminated, no one at the UN, Pentagon, Baghdad or on Wall Street would have any reason to keep it active. And, Pasha was probably right. On the other hand, the corruption was so onerous to other diplomats – including Jackie Bisset’s Christina Dupre – that they threaten to risk toppling the house of cards to advance reform and protect the Kurdish population, upon whose population Hussein had unleashed toxic gases. Michael is confronted with so much conflicting information that he nearly gives up trying to get to the bottom of things. When Pasha’s chief rival is assassinated, however, he decides to spill the beans to the Wall Street Journal, whose reporters perform the legwork necessary to expose the scheme. When one spigot is shut down, however, another is allowed to flow unchecked. Today, billions of dollars in aid money continue to disappear into Swiss and Panamanian back accounts. Although Backstabbing for Beginners is a tad dry and talky, it should appeal to fans of Syriana and The Constant Gardener. It includes the featurette, “The Truth Behind Backstabbing for Beginners.”

The Final Year
It’s difficult to imagine any liberal Democrat being able to sit through Greg Barker’s fly-on-the-wall documentary, The Final Year, without shedding a tear, or two, in anticipation of its inevitable ending. The film revolves around President Obama’s foreign policy team as they travel the world, attempting to solidify and “lock in” policies they believe will define their legacy, promote diplomacy over large-scale military actions and fundamentally alter how the U.S. government confronts questions of war and peace. The key players include such seasoned diplomats and dedicated politicians as Secretary of State John Kerry, U.N. ambassador Samantha Power, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes and national security adviser Susan Rice, with their boss appearing every so often to deliver pep talks and words of wisdom to young and old, alike. Even though the GOP presidential primaries have begun to swing in the direction of a Trumpian juggernaut, no one is ready to acknowledge what the Republican candidate’s team already knows: Hillary Clinton is vulnerable in traditionally Democrat strongholds, where voters have lost faith in their leaders and are willing to gamble on a man who openly flaunts their core beliefs. What the people we meet here can’t possibly know, even when it becomes clear that Trump has won the electoral college, is how much of their work in Obama’s name will be nullified in the coming months. Neither could anyone in Washington have imagined how truly inept Trump’s revolving-door replacements would prove to be, especially by comparison to the diplomacy on display here. The Final Year doesn’t reveal any greater truths than that, however.

War of the Planets
If this truly silly Italian sci-fi drama had been released in the early 1950s, instead of 1977, it might be remembered as a reasonably prescient precursor to Star Wars, “Star Trek,” 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barbarella and John Carpenter’s wonderfully do-it-yourself space-comedy, Dark Star. As it is, however, War of the Planets incorporates ideas from all these pictures – including Spock’s ears, Roddenberry-inspired uniforms and insignias – without adding anything more intriguing than a zombie twist at the end. How this public-domain extravaganza has managed to avoid being lampooned on “MST3K” is anyone’s guess. Distributed by Cheezy Flicks Entertainment, War of the Planets (a.k.a., “Cosmos: War of the Planets,” “Cosmo 2000,” “Cosmo: Planet Without a Name” and “Year Zero: War in Space”) is not only considered to be a remake of the Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires (1965), but also the first of four films in Alfonso Brescia’s rapid-fire sci-fi series: Battle in Interstellar Space (a.k.a., “Battle of the Stars”), War of the Robots (a.k.a., “Reactor”) and Star Odyssey (a.k.a., “Seven Gold Men in Space”). The film begins with the crew of an Earth-based craft reporting explosions in space and asteroids flying by it. They are afraid that they are going to be hit, but their vessel’s computer, named Wiz, tells them that they were seeing the “refraction” of an event that took place millions of years ago. Meanwhile, a mysterious signal from deep space reaches Earth, disturbing all communications, and a UFO appears above the “Antarctic Sea.” Captain Alex Hamilton (John Richardson) and his crew are tasked with finding the origin of that signal, finally reaching a planet where a crazed and short-circuited robot has enslaved an entire population of humanoids by sapping their psychic energies. A fiery climax reminded me of how some bad little boys dispose of the toys they no longer want. Hint: firecrackers and lighter fluid.

Strings
Forever My Girl: Blu-ray
Movies that extol the redemptive powers of country music have become a subgenre of contemporary melodrama. Some moderately budgeted films, like Forever My Girl, carry a faith-based message and enjoy the backing of the Dove Foundation. Others tell stories about musicians whose lives hinge on making it big in Nashville, a task only slightly less challenging than being discovered at a soda fountain on the Sunset Boulevard. Almost everyone involved in the creation of Strings is making his feature-film debut, including recording artist Jason Michael Carroll, co-directors Patrick Dunnagan and Robert Wagner, and writer Adam Tarsitano. It’s a familiar tale, Jimmy Ford has grown weary of living the life of a rock-’n’-roll road warrior and hopes to change his luck in Music City. Rock and country music are practically interchangeable today, so all some artists require to make the transition is a change in shoes and hats. Despite his obvious talent and expectations, Ford will run into barriers unique to the commercial music mills in Nashville. Success proves elusive until Malinda Price (Katie Garfield), an up-and-coming singer, takes an interest in him. As their relationship blossoms, so do his musical prospects. Just as his career and personal life begin to take off, however, Ford is forced to face past issues. How he deals with them could make the difference between happiness and despair. T’was ever thus.

Bethany Ashton Wolf’s super-sappy Forever My Girl is based on Heidi McLaughlin’s first novel, of the same title. The romantic drama enjoyed a decent theatrical release in January, making enough money to cover its production costs and then some. This, despite a formulaic premise and a relatively unknown cast … and temperatures averaging between 110-115 degrees on the frequently stormy Georgia location. The movie opens as future country-music superstar Liam Page (Alex Roe) is about to leave his lovely fiancé stranded at the altar of his father’s church. We won’t know why he pulled such a cruel trick on Josie (Jessica Rothe) until much later in the film. Presumably, he decided that the pursuit of fame and fortune was more satisfying than marriage and small-town life. What he didn’t know is that she was carrying their bun in her oven.  Eight years later, Liam returns home for the funeral of a close friend. His reunion with Josie doesn’t go well. It should come as a surprise to no one that Liam will learn that he’s father of Josie’s delightfully precocious daughter, Billy, who shares his gift for music. His father tried to inform him of this blessed gift, but Liam was too preoccupied with his drug-and-booze-fueled career to answer phone calls and letters from home. Forever My Girl adds a twist or two – a helicopter trip to New Orleans that’s straight out of Fifty Shades of Grey — before conjuring a best-of-both-worlds outcome in which Liam is forced to re-consider what it takes to be a dad and superstar simultaneously. Despite some very negative reviews, however, it’s safe to surmise that fans of the book won’t be disappointed.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: In Concert: Blu-ray
When it comes to snubbing great artists and repeatedly recognizing the same tried-and-true acts – individually and as members of noteworthy bands — the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is right up there with the Academy Awards and Hollywood Walk of Fame. After a few years of clearly warranted inductions, the foundation began putting a premium on record sales and longevity over innovation and underground credibility, and label executives with chips on their shoulders could veto musicians simply to punish past bad behavior. When the foundation was established in 1983, there was no guarantee that rockers known for throwing televisions out of hotel windows and destroying the instruments on stage would agree to show up for gale induction ceremonies or donate memorabilia without being reimbursed in kind … as was the practice with the Hard Rock Café and, later, Planet Hollywood collections. Well, it didn’t take long before labels, agents and publicists convinced their acts of the financial benefits of appearing on the televised awards ceremony and happily accepting the trophies. Thirty-five years later, most of the more egregious snubs have been corrected and the Cleveland landmark is a major tourist attraction … just like the far-less-legitimate Hollywood Walk of Fame. One thing that’s remained consistent, however, is the enjoyment that comes from watching the live performances and jam sessions that accompany the frequently moving induction speeches and shots of stars in funky formal wear. From Time Life/WEA comes the latest edition of “The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: In Concert,” in DVD and Blu-ray, which covers ceremonies from 2014-2017. There’s something for everyone in this generous package, including fans of groups who probably could have waited a few more years for induction. Among the highlights are Bruce Springsteen joining belated inductees, the E Street Band, for the deep-cut classic, “The E Street Shuffle”; Pearl Jam delivering thundering performances of “Alive,” “Given to Fly” and “Better Man”; also from Seattle, Nirvana survivors Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic being joined on stage by Lorde, Annie Clark, Kim Gordon and Joan Jett; a long-exiled Yusuf Islam (a.k.a., Cat Stevens) performing a version of “Father & Son” that drew tears from the Barclays Center crowd; Journey performing “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart),” “Lights” and “Don’t Stop Believin’”; previous inductee Ringo Starr being welcomed into the hall as a single act, with a little help from Paul McCartney; Zac Brown doing a killer version of Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s “Born in Chicago”; and induction speeches by Coldplay’s Chris Martin, for Peter Gabriel; Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, for Deep Purple; Patti Smith for Lou Reed; Stevie Wonder, for Bill Withers; Fall Out Boy members, for Green Day; and Glenn Frey, for Linda Ronstadt.

Grease: 40^th Anniversary Edition: Blu-ray, 4K UHD HDRDoctor Detroit: Blu-ray
I don’t suppose there’s anything to infer from the almost simultaneous hit runs of pop musicals “Hair” and “Grease” on Broadway and, nearly a decade later, on film. Tonsorial architecture played key roles in both entertainments, demonstrating how much hairdos changed in little more than a decade. Brylcreem and hair spray gave way to a more natural, often shaggy look. Because mainstream America looked askance at all deviations from the norm, teenagers used extreme hairdos to declare their independence. The styles worn by the teenagers in Grease — Olivia Newton-John being the sole exception – looked prehistoric by the time the musical was adapted for the stage and screen. Hair only felt outdated when the military draft was eliminated and no one in the audience faced the same fate as Claude Hooper Bukowski and his surrogate, George Berger. Both musicals were honed at nightclub theaters, before reaching Broadway, and they’ve enjoyed dozens of revivals, re-mountings and reconsiderations ever since. More to the point, they remain exceptionally entertaining in their various iterations. In February, Olive Films released a no-frills DVD of Hair, while Paramount is celebrating the 40^th anniversary of Grease with a 4K UHD HDR upgrade and enhanced Blu-ray, supervised by director Randal Kleiser. The bonus package is dominated by ported-over features, but it also includes “Grease: A Chicago Story,” which features new interviews with writer Jim Jacobs and original cast members of the Chicago show, itself revived in its original form in 2011; an alternate ending salvaged from the original black & white 16mm print, discovered by Kleiser; and alternate animated main titles. Both versions are markedly improved over previous Blu-ray versions. In addition, a “Grease Collection” is available in a Steelbook Locker, containing the 40th Anniversary Blu-ray of Grease, as well as Grease 2 and Grease: Live! on Blu-ray for the first time.

Arriving three years after The Blues Brothers, Universal expected Doctor Detroit to tap into the same audience that made the “SNL”-spinoff act an oddball sensation in-concert and on big and small screens. Several things worked against those expectations, though: 1) John Belushi’s death put a damper on the production and marketing plans; Dan Aykroyd’s unproven ability to carry the weight of a lead role; anticipation over the release of “Return of the Jedi” had already begun to build; and complete absence of positive buzz. Based on a Bruce Jay Friedman story, the adaptation whitewashed the original characters by making them pimps and whores with a heart of gold … white gold, that is. It effectively dulled the edge built into Friedman’s story. When fast-talking pimp Smooth Walker (Howard Hesseman) finds himself in hot water with Chicago crime boss Mom (Kate Murtagh), he claims that there’s a new player in the game: Doctor Detroit. There isn’t, but the ruse buys him the time he needs to find someone who can be molded into a bad-ass pimp and merciless enforcer. He arrives in the form of a nebbishy college professor, Clifford Skridlow (Aykroyd), who jogs to work and worships the chef at the local Indian restaurant. A night spent partying with Smooth and his girls convinces Skridlow that it might be fun to join the gang, even if he couldn’t tell the difference between a prostitute and a Girl Scout selling cookies. Meanwhile, he’s expected to fulfill his responsibilities to the school, which is run by his father (George Furth) and is in desperate need of a cash infusion. The setup ensures all sorts of slapsticky gags based on crossed wires and mistaken identities, none of them particularly funny. The best moments in Doctor Detroit arrive courtesy of a pair of set pieces choreographed to a James Brown rave-up and the festive atmosphere of a Pimps-and-Hos’ Ball. In my opinion, Doctor Detroit would have fared better if it had been handed to Ralph Bakshi and he adapted the original story more faithfully as an animated feature. As such, there would be no pressure on him to cast the working girls — Fran Drescher, Donna Dixon, Lynn Whitfield and Lydia Lei — as freshly polished graduates of a finishing school. The Blu-ray includes commentary with director Michael Pressman and pop culture historian Russell Dyball; a separate interview, in which Pressman details the development of the movie from serious novella to “a Dan Aykroyd comedy” and tactical revisions in the soundtrack. He shares a story about Glenne Headly’s deleted role, clarifies what the “The Wrath of Mom” sting was all about and talks extensively about his 1979 movie, “Boulevard Nights,” which was recently selected for preservation by the Library of Congress.

A Pistol for Ringo/The Return of Ringo: Two Films by Duccio Tessari: Blu-ray
One tell-tale sign that a Western is of the spaghetti or Euro variety, and not one made in the American west, is the presence of windmills more appropriate in an adaptation of “Don Quixote.” That, of course, and the slippery dubbing. There’s one such windmill, at least, in A Pistol for Ringo (1965), a movie that, despite its Andalucian locales, looks very much like it might have been shot in the American Southwest or Durango, Mexico. Alongside The Return of Ringo (1965), Duccio Tessari introduced another iconic hero to the genre, dominated by such brand names as Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, Terrence Hill’s Trinity and Franco Nero’s Django. Here, Ringo (Giuliano Gemma, as Montgomery Wood) is a clean-cut sharpshooter, who, for much of movie, has been stripped of his gun. After wiping out an entire family of bad guys — in self-defense, of course – and being thrown in jail, Ringo cuts a deal with the sheriff. Ringo can earn his freedom by infiltrating a ranch taken over by Mexican bandits and freeing their hostages, one of whom is engaged to the lawman. It’s no contest. Ennio Morricone’s music adds to the fun.

In The Return of Ringo, which isn’t easily identifiable as a sequel, the title character has been transformed into a former Civil War captain named Brown. He’s forced to enter his home town incognito, because a different gang of Mexican banditos, led by Esteban Fuentes (Fernando Sancho), has seized control of it. To Brown’s consternation, he’s been declared dead and his wife, Helen (Hally Hammond), may be forced to marry the jefe. Both films set the foundation for a flood of Ringo flicks to come, perhaps, even, the animated Western, Rango. The refurbished Arrow Video package adds commentaries for both films by Spaghetti Western experts C. Courtney Joyner and Henry Parke; the 38-minute “Revisiting Ringo,” with learned and entertaining analysis by Tony Rayns; a pair of archival featurettes, “They Called Him Ringo,” with Giuliano Gemma, and “A Western Greek Tragedy,” with Lorella de Luca and camera operator Sergio D’Offizi; original trailers and promotional images; and a reversible sleeve, featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Gilles Vranc.

Killer Klowns From Outer Space: Special Edition: Blu-ray
Him
I don’t know if the folks at Arrow Video planned to release this special edition of the cult classic – or kult klassic, if you prefer — Killer Klowns from Outer Space in anticipation the phenomenal international success of New Line’s It. If so, their timing was impeccable. Unlike too many other killer-clown movies being sent out in the wake of It – including Him, a.k.a. “The Devil’s Warehouse” – the re-release of the Chiodo brothers’ movie can be justified for all sorts of reasons. Most of all, it’s entertaining. On a dollar-per-dollar basis, it can stand on its own against most pictures costing 10, 20 or 30 times as much to make. Next month, Killer Klown’s 30^th anniversary will be celebrated at Los Angeles’ Montalban Theater with multiple performances, as well as fortune tellers, contortionist Bonnie Morgan (Rings), a Q&A with the cast and crew, and a screening with a live-score accompaniment from the Hollywood Chamber Orchestra, conducted by John Massari. Most movies of that vintage must settle for a re-release on Blu-ray and a few fresh featurettes. Moreover, the Chiodos are pursuing a series for cable. “We wondered, should we do a sequel to the first one or do we do a remake? We came up with a ‘requel’ – it’s a sequel and a remake. It follows the continuing adventures of new people who are experiencing this phenomenon of a Klown invasion, and, once in a while, you see some of the old guys pop up and hear their stories … find out what happened over the last 25 years.” That should be something. The Arrow Video edition has been restored from a 4K scan of the original camera negative and newly remastered stereo 2.0 and 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio. Among the extras: vintage commentary with the Chiodos; “Let the Show Begin,” a new interview with the original members of the American punk band, the Dickies; “The Chiodos Walk Among Us: Adventures in Super 8 Filmmaking,” a documentary highlighting the making of their childhood films, from the monster epics made in their basement to their experiments in college; fresh HD transfers of the complete collection of the brothers 8mm and Super 8 films; “Tales of Tobacco,” an interview with star Grant Cramer; “Debbie’s Big Night,” with Suzanne Snyder; “Bringing Life to These Things,” a tour of Chiodo Bros. Productions; deleted scenes and bloopers; and a reversible sleeve, featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sara Deck.

Luis Antonio Rodriguez and Humberto Bocanegra’s 80-minute non-thriller, Him, is only likely to appeal to Killer Klown Kompletists, I’m afraid. When a businessman fails to keep his end of a deal with a mysterious emissary from hell, his warehouse becomes the property of the devil. When some young paranormal investigators decide to spend the night at the warehouse, they soon find that the rumors of its haunting by a mysterious clown “are not only real, but they can also be deadly.” Evil-doll completists might also find something useful here as they’re scattered around the warehouse as warnings of the devil’s presence.

Joe: Blu-ray
Just as presidential-candidate Trump prompted his blue-collar followers to attack protesters and journalists at his rallies, President Nixon encouraged patriotic construction workers to confront anti-war protesters in the streets of New York. The symbolic difference between the two groups of aggrieved patriots is represented in their choice of hats. Nixon’s legions were known by their “hard hats,” decorated with American-flag decals, while Trump supporters prefer red baseball caps with “Make America Great Again” embroidered on them. Back in the day, protesters preferred to let their “freak flags” fly in defiance of the status quo, and it made them easy targets. As a symbolic rebuke of Trump’s infamous “grab them by the pussy” comments, tens of thousands of protesters headed for the Women’s March on Washington wearing “pussy-power hats,” created by an army of knitters, crocheters and needlesmiths from coast-to-coast. With this in mind, I re-watched John G. Avildsen’s era-defining drama, Joe, for the first time in nearly 50 years. Employing an Us-vs.-Them scenario and dialogue that would be deemed prohibitively inappropriate today – on either side of the political divide — Norman Wexler’s script set viewers up for a confrontation between stereotypes so diametrically opposed to each other that they shouldn’t be able to co-exist in the same country. But, they did, in the same way that the cardboard villains in Death Wish would come alive, four years later. Credit for this belongs to the amazing portrayals of polar-opposite characters by Peter Boyle and Susan Sarandon, in their theatrical debuts.

If Wexler’s interpretation of Boyle’s Joe Curran now feels like a parody of blue-collar ideals and attitudes, the actor stops well short of caricature. He finds a kindred spirit in Bill Compton (Dennis Patrick), an advertising executive who makes Joe’s acquaintance at a neighborhood bar, boasting that he killed a drug-dealing hippie (Patrick McDermott). Pressed for facts by the intrigued hard-hat, Bill attempts to retreat from his boozy confession, saying that he was merely joking. When, a few days later, a news report confirms the rage-induced murder, they form an unlikely vigilante alliance. Before the incident occurred, Bill had determined that the long-haired pusher had kidnapped, brainwashed and forced the non-fatal overdose of his flower-child daughter, Melissa (Sarandon), on a smorgasbord of psychedelic drugs. After she learns of her father’s culpability in her boyfriend’s death, Melissa leaves the hospital prematurely. After confronting her parents, she splits the city for an Upstate commune. Joe and Compton search for her in the Village, finally locating a group of hippies who might know her whereabouts and plying them with drugs Bill stole from the pusher. An unlikely “orgy” leads to a confrontation in which the hippies are forced to give up the location of the commune. It’s where Joe and Bill will be given the opportunity to put up or shut up. If any of this sounds silly, I can assure you that it was taken very seriously by audiences and critics in 1970. Boyle and Sarandon would go on to become major Hollywood stars, while Avildson’s credits would include Rocky and The Karate Kid, and Wexler would pen Saturday Night Fever and Serpico. Absent any bonus features, viewers are allowed their own parallels to the 2016 presidential campaign and the current air of provocation.

Disney Z-O-M-B-I-E-S
Dead Justice
Cyborg: Blu-ray
Apparently, we live in a cinematic universe in which humans not only must learn to defend themselves against flesh-eating, foot-dragging zombies, but also how to co-exist with Disney Z-O-M-B-I-E-S. Just as there’s a huge difference between the plague-carrying mice now spreading death and disease throughout the American Southwest and Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, there are significant differences between these legions of the undead and the ghouls terrorizing an Old West town in Dead Justice (a.k.a., “Cowboy Zombies” and “Walking Dead in the West”). They’re recognizable by the way they shuffle their feet, attack with their arms raised and pointing forward, and a hunger for human flesh that causes them to approach mortals in suicidal waves. The eponymous creatures who populate the Disney Channel’s “Z-O-M-B-I-E-S” are based on an unaired TV pilot, “Zombies and Cheerleaders,” purchased by Disney, and they could hardly be more dissimilar. Although their origin story resembles that of the protagonist in The Toxic Avenger, the characters more closely resemble those in Disney’s “High School Musical.” Fifty years after an explosion at a local factory covered half of the city of Seabrook with a toxic lime slime, the undead survivors have co-existed peacefully with human survivors in parts of the city separated by fences and other barriers. A cure for their condition arrived in the form of “smart bracelets” that allow zombies to quell their appetite for flesh and enjoy some semblance of normalcy.

Except for the strictly enforced segregation, Seabrook qualifies as the kind of idyllic suburban city Walt Disney intended Celebration, Florida, to be. This is the year that the Seabrook school board has decided to integrate the local high school, by transferring the zombie kids from their separate, unequal facility across town. To reduce the fear of the human kids, the school is maintaining its segregation of the computer class, pep squad and sports tryouts. When the aspiring zombie football player, Zed (Milo Manheim), makes a love connection with the fiercely determined human cheerleader, Addison (Meg Donnelly), all attempts to deliver a subtle, understated message about diversity, tolerance and equality will disappear. That’s because Addison has been hiding a deformity of her own from her friends and fellow students, suspecting that their bigotry will come to the fore and she’ll be ostracized. As anomalies go, Meg’s prematurely white hair isn’t really all that weird. Teenagers can be cruel, however, even on the Disney Channel. Not only have the zombies in “Z-O-M-B-I-E-S” been rendered more of less harmless, but they also can sing, dance, cheer and play football as well as anyone else in the school … better, in some cases. They’re also clean, happy, conscientious and friendly. If George A. Romero hadn’t died last year, Paul Hoen’s light-hearted “Z-O-M-B-I-E-S” might have killed him. The DVD package adds a blooper reel and deleted scenes; audition footage, with Milo Manheim and Meg Donnelly; “Survival Guide to High School,” hosted by Donnelly and Manheim; music videos; a dance tutorial, with Donnelly, co-star Kylee Russell and choreographer Christopher Scott; and glow-in-the-dark temporary tattoos.

Dead Justice is a traditional Western in most ways, except that the 1870’s town is being terrorized by the undead, instead of rampaging Indians, drunken survivors of a long cattle drive, kinfolk determined to spring a son or brother from the hoosegow, or outlaws waiting for the stagecoach to arrive. It is the 27th film to be shot on the Cowtown Studios Old West, in Arizona, and the town, indeed, looks as if it might double for a dude ranch attraction. Co-writer/director Paul Winters plays the town’s marshal, Frank Wilcox, who, along with a Buffalo Soldier from the 10th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army (Calion Maston), must galvanize a group of survivors to fight back when the living dead rise and seek the flesh of the living. They’re joined by an Apache chief, outlaw prisoner, preacher, a dwarf and a couple of bar girls. The zombie makeup isn’t bad, though, and the unusually diverse cast makes up for some of the structural missteps.

In 1989, Cannon Group’s dystopian martial-arts actioner, Cyborg, described what happens when, in the not-so-distant future, a plague cripples civilization. Known as the “living death,” its victims behave very much like zombies. Dayle Haddon plays half-human/half-cyborg scientist Pearl Prophet, a gorgeous blond capable of developing a vaccine. Her quest is cut short, however, after being captured by cannibalistic Flesh Pirates, who plot to keep the antidote for themselves and rule the world. It’s left to the saber-wielding mercenary (a.k.a., slinger) Gibson Rickenbacker – Jean-Claude Van Damme in an early starring role — to rescue her and save civilization. Cyborg is full of the kind of improbable action and despicable characters that would mark Albert Pyun’s tenure with Cannon. The post-apocalyptic sets serve nicely as backdrops for fights and hiding places for zombies. There’s also a terrifically entertaining fight staged in a salt marsh. The movie did well enough to inspire two sequels: Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow (1993), starring Elias Koteas and Angelina Jolie, and Cyborg 3: The Recycler (1995), a direct-to-video release, with Zach Galligan and Khrystyne Haje. The Shout Factory collector’s edition features a 4K remaster of the film; new commentary with writer/director Pyun; “A Ravaged Future: The Making of Cyborg,” featuring interviews with Pyun, actors Vincent Klyn, Deborah Richter and Terrie Batson, director of photography Philip Alan Waters and editor Rozanne Zingale; “Shoestring Fantasy: The Effects of Cyborg,” with visual-effects supervisor Gene Warren Jr., Go-Motion technician Christopher Warren and rotoscope artist Bret Mixon; and extended interviews from Mark Hartley’s documentary “Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films,” with Pyun and Blood Sport writer Sheldon Lettich.

Henry Miller: Asleep & Awake
Filmed when the author was 81, “Henry Miller: Asleep & Awake” opens the door to what must have been the coolest bathroom in America. Miller turned it into a shrine, celebrating his life, loves and many friendships with photos and drawings collected over the course of his travels and career. Graciously, in his unmistakably raspy voice, Miller points out the highlights of his improvised gallery decorated with images of philosophers, writers, painters, mad kings, women and friends … naked and clothed. He says that guests frequently disappear for an hour or more after paying a visit to the loo, just to study the memorabilia. Along the way, Miller’s muse, Brenda Venus, makes an unforgettable cameo. Director Tom Schiller also was able to get Miller to travel to his onetime home in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. This selection from IndiePix is part of a recent series of vintage releases currently available to subscribers via streaming and DVD platforms. It’s always nice to see a purveyor of arthouse titles join the fray. Recent offerings include Daniel Hoesl’s Soldate Jeannette; Paola Mendoza and Gloria LaMorte’s Entre Nos; Rayya Makarim and Ravi Bharwani’s Jermal; Anurag Kashyap’s That Girl in Yellow Boots; Joël Lévy Florescu and Michaël Lévy Florescu’s So Bright Is the View; and Syllas Tzoumerkas’ Blast. The ones I’ve seen are very good.

TV-to-DVD
ITV/PBS: Masterpiece Mystery!: Unforgotten, Season 1: Blu-ray
PBS: Bill Nye: Science Guy: Blu-ray
PBS: Nature: Animals With Cameras
PBS: Impossible Builds, Volume 1
PBS: Survival Guide for Pain-Free Living
Digimon Adventure tri 4: Loss: Blu-ray
Currently holding a secure place on PBS’ Sunday-night lineup, “Masterpiece Mystery!: Unforgotten” debuted on Britain’s ITV in October 2015 and has already completed a second-season run. It was created by Chris Lang (“The Tunnel”), a former actor with two more mini-series already on the drawing boards for the network, besides a third stanza of “Unforgotten.” If it isn’t likely to make anyone forget “Prime Suspect,” “The Vice” or “Endeavour,” it’s a solid procedural that features two of British television’s most popular stars: Nicola Walker (“MI-5”) and Sanjeev Bhaskar (“The Kumars”). When the skeletal remains of young man are discovered, buried in a derelict building, first-responders immediately suspect that they might have been lying there since Roman times. A little more digging uncovers a rusty key for a sports car of more recent vintage. DCI Cassie Stuart and her partner, DI Sunil “Sunny” Khan, use its markings to identify the car to which it belonged, if not its owner. Once that question is answered, the detectives are led to a farm outside London, where they discover the car’s decaying frame, wheel covers and a bag containing a barely legible diary. A tad more sleuthing leads the team to four elderly suspects, each with something to hide. As their deceptions are discovered, the people they love most begin to wonder what else they might have done. It’s likely that same mystery would have been solved within one or two episodes of “Law & Order,” but Lang keeps the story moving in forwardly direction with explosive revelations, crude deceptions and great writing. The veteran cast, which includes Tom Courtney, Peter Egan, Trevor Eve, Gemma Jones and Ruth Sheen, does the rest. The UK version of “Unforgotten, Season 2” will be released on May 15.

At a time when President Trump and his Cabinet members are working hard to prove that all science is fake science and good things happen to dumb people, it’s nice to know that “Bill Nye: Science Guy” is here to disabuse our children of such notions. Nye has made it his personal mission to stop the spread of anti-scientific thinking around the world. In this behind-the-scenes portrait, Nye sheds his lab coat to take on those who deny climate change, evolution and a science-based world view. The former host of a popular kids’ show on PBS now is CEO of the Planetary Society, where he’s leading a project to launch LightSail, a satellite propelled by sunlight, while, in turn, fulfilling the legacy of his late professor and Planetary Society co-founder Carl Sagan. As Bill Nye: Science Guy, he also continues to inspire millennials to participate in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) programs. Also appearing are astrophysicist, author and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson and “Cosmos” co-writer Ann Druyan.

The “Nature” presentation “Animals With Cameras” may, at first, bring back memories of David Letterman’s monkey-cam, which, when affixed to the head of a hyperactive primate, came to symbolize the anarchic side of the host’s personality. He recently recalled the time the monkey bit comedian Sandra Bernhard by quipping, “Actually looking back, maybe it wasn’t that much fun.” Technically, there isn’t a world of difference between the original monkey-cam and the cameras worn by the animals – a cheetah, chimp, seal, bear, sheep dog, penguin, meerkat, chacma baboons and Chilean devil rays – which take viewers to places they’ve never seen and in real time. We follow them as they hunt, hide, evade predators and settle into their hidey-holes. It’s a simple concept, but one that’s thoroughly engrossing.

“Impossible Builds” examines the creation of some of the world’s most technologically advanced and architecturally imaginative construction projects, from sub-aquatic homes to futuristic towers and pencil-thin skyscrapers. These are structures nobody thought could be committed to a blueprint, let alone built. Now, however, revolutionary technology and cutting-edge construction materials are being used on five improbable projects taking shape across the world. They include Miami’s curvaceous Scorpion Tower; six islands off the coast of Dubai, designed to remind visitors of Europe; and a floating villa with living spaces above and below the surface of the sea … where else, but Dubai.

Yoga is as commonplace today as doing sit-ups and push-ups was for several generations of GIs and high school weaklings. For 40 years, Peggy Cappy has been teaching yoga to students of all ages, abilities, shapes and sizes. In the PBS special “Survival Guide for Pain-Free Living,” Cappy and neuromuscular therapist Lee Albert demonstrate how easy-to-do stretches and other yoga moves can help relieve pain in your back, knees, hips and head, including chronic migraine headaches. The four-disc set features four separate yoga regimens that are easy – yeah, easy for you to say – and effective in controlling pain.

“Digimon Adventure tri: Loss” is the fourth in a series of six feature-length movies produced by Toei Animation to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Akiyoshi Hongo’s Digimon franchise. They serve as a direct sequel to the first two television series, “Digimon Adventure” and “Digimon Adventure 02.” After the “reboot” and Meicoomon’s rampage, Tai and friends arrive in the Digital World. They reunite with their fellow Digimons, who have all lost their memories. As everyone discusses what they should do from here in the Digital World, Meicoomon suddenly appears and then disappears. Meanwhile in the real world, Nishijima receives word that Himekawa has gone missing. Special features include “The Evolution So Far,” in which Joshua brings fans up to date on the series.

The Commuter: Blu-ray, 4K UHD
As high-concept pitches go, “Liam Neeson on a train” is right up there with “snakes on a plane” and “MTV cops.” What else would any screenwriter need to know to fill the blanks? Nothing that it should take three separate screenwriters to formulate, probably. To make Neeson’s latest actioner, The Commuter, as needlessly complicated as it became, however, three was plenty. In a scenario that frequently recalls Jaume Collet-Serra’s 2014 thriller, Non-Stop – a.k.a., “Liam Neeson on a plane” — The Commuter finds the 65-year-old onetime Oscar-nominatee (Schindler’s List) playing a former cop, whose tortuous day at the office only gets worse on the ride home, when he’s forced to do battle with terrorists/extortionists/gangsters … take your pick. Since leaving the force, Michael MacCauley has been taking the same train to and from work in Manhattan, as an insurance salesman, every day for 10 years. On the same day that MacCauley is unceremoniously laid off, however, he’s approached by a mysterious fellow commuter, Joanna (Vera Farmiga), who inexplicably offers him $100,000 to locate someone on the train and put a tracking device in his or her bag. To convince him to cooperate, Joanna offers proof that his family is being held as collateral. Before disappearing from the train, she tells MacCauley that he should look for someone named “Prynne,” who may or may not have a connection with Hester Prynne, in “The Scarlet Letter.” Soon enough, dead bodies begin to turn up in unlikely places and MacCauley narrows his search to faces he doesn’t recognize for his 10 years of commuting. Alfred Hitchcock would have handled the same situation – innocent man in extraordinary circumstances — differently, but, with Neeson on board, action takes precedence over intrigue. The Commuter marks Collet-Serra’s fourth collaboration with Neeson — including Unknown, Non-Stop and Run All Night — so the action, while sufficiently convincing, might have been too familiar to ticket-buyers in a competitive post-holiday lineup. Ironically, last fall, the actor told a gaggle of critics gathered in Toronto that he had reached the age where action stars lose their credibility and would turn to less exciting kinds of films. He’s since recanted that pledge and suggested that he would be happy to reprise the character, Qui-Gon Jinn, in any new Obi-Wan spin-off film. The Commuter looks fine in Blu-ray and 4K UHD, even if the effects don’t demand too much of the format. There are a pair of making-of featurettes of the EPK variety.

A Taxi Driver: Blu-ray
At the risk of implying that I can’t tell the difference between two of Asia’s most popular actors, I approached Jang Hoon’s A Taxi Driver as if it were a comedy starring Jackie Chan. The broadly smiling face of the cabbie leaning out from the window of his light-green taxi, belongs to Song Kang-ho, but, at first glance, he sure looked like Chan. I should have recognized Song from Memories of Murder (2003), The Host (2006) and Snowpiercer (2013), among other South Korean hits. And A Taxi Driver does open with several scenes that would suggest it’s aiming for broad laughs. Based on an incident that occurred during the political upheaval that followed the assassination of President Park Chung-hee, on October 26, 1979, it describes the relationship that develops between a down-on-his-luck taxi driver, Kim Man-seob, and the German journalist who hires him on a secret mission. Part of the early comedy derives from their inability to communicate with each other and Kim’s desperate need for a larger-then-normal fare. It continues after the cab is blocked from approaching the city of Gwangju by soldiers. Kim finds a detour that would be better suited for a Jeep than a compact car, and it will need some repairs to get back Seoul. What the journalist, Peter (Thomas Kretschmann), neglected to tell Kim when he promised him 100,000 won, now becomes obvious, and it’s anything but funny.

Peter’s going there to cover confrontations between students and police over the power grab by Chun Doo-hwan, chief of the Defense Security Command. Even though Kim cautions Peter of the seriousness of the situation, he doesn’t want to lose the fare home, either. Together, they seek safe locations to film the riots and locate students to translate their conversations. They also interview students and residents who fear the truth of what will soon became known as the Gwangju Uprising might be buried by authorities, if the sole western reporter is prevented from collecting evidence. This is very serious stuff, indeed, and Song uses archival newsreel footage to convey the savagery of the soldiers and police against mostly defenseless protesters. When officials become aware of Peter’s assignment, they target him and Kim as much as the students. Finally, their escape from Gwangju, aided by a flotilla of little green cabs, adds a bit more humor. Somehow, Jang manages to maintain an uneasy balance between the film’s light and dark moments, including Peter’s ability to get the footage out of the country. Without the revelations and a return to a true democracy, South Korea might still be a dictatorship. Ironically, despite the movie’s commercial appeal, Chinese censors have banned A Taxi Driver, just in case viewers in Beijing see parallels between Gwangju and Tiananmen Square.

Humor Me: Blu-ray
Fans of “Flight of the Conchords” who simply can’t wait for the Kiwi duo’s upcoming hourlong comedy special on HBO to air – a concert tour was canceled last month after Bret McKenzie broke some bones in a fall – can fill half of the void with Humor Me. In it, the ever-hangdog Jemaine Clement somehow manages to lose, nearly simultaneously, his job as a playwright, his wife and son, and apartment. His Nate Kroll is trapped within a writer’s block so thick he would need a chisel and laser to cut through it. As a last resort, Nate begrudgingly moves in with his widowed father, Bob (Elliott Gould), in his New Jersey retirement community. Always quick with a joke, Bob uses humor to deal with all of life’s challenges, even if it requires him to fake the occasional heart attack. He arranges for his son to take a job with the property’s handyman, Ellis (Willie Carpenter), who needs Nate’s help like he needs a stone in his shoe. While at work, Nate stumbles on a group of senior citizens rehearsing a production of “The Mikado.” The ladies welcome the professional help, no matter how grudgingly it comes. One crisis leads to another, of course, pushing Nate and Bob’s relationship to breaking point. Naturally, fate intrudes at the last minute to ensure a happy ending. Humor Me benefits from the presence of such veteran entertainers as Gould, Annie Potts, Bebe Neuwirth and Ingrid Michaelson, a thirtysomething singer/songwriter who’s every bit as restless in the retirement community as Nate. Marking his directorial debut, Sam Hoffman (“Old Jews Telling Jokes”) has crafted an endearing father-son tale with the right mixture of laughs and melodrama to satisfy viewers in the same age bracket as the characters.

Elvis: The Beginning
Prince: The Only Ones Who Care
Heartworn Highways/Revisited
You’d think that after watching HBO’s four-hour documentary on the life and music of Elvis Presley, “The Searcher,” there wouldn’t be anything more to learn. You’d be wrong. Narrated by Jack Perkins, “Elvis: The Beginning” takes an up-close-and-personal approach to the first multistate tour taken by Elvis, Scotty Moore and Bill Black. It followed a 4,500-mile loop, starting in Memphis and stopping for more than 200 one-night stands. At 19, Elvis was the baby of the group, still requiring the written approval of his parents to perform. In addition to appearing on the “Louisiana Hayride,” the band played drugstore openings, church halls, honky-tonks, high-school gyms and benefits for wounded GIs. Along the way, Elvis paid visits to local deejays and record stores, all the while impressing locals with his impeccable manners and good-ol’-boy charm. The screaming fans would come later. We meet an old girlfriend, or two, and people who connected with the young entertainers in one way or another on their musical journey. “The Beginning” fills in the blanks with dramatizations and material taped at the source. A later interview with Moore is also included. Judging from how youthful Perkins looks, I imagine that the show was created for a television show, possibly “Biography,” in the early 2000s. Even so, it provides a solid 82 minutes of fun.

“Prince: The Only Ones Who Care” is a music-only celebration of one of the greatest rock stars of all time. It features more than 90 minutes of live performances, recorded from TV broadcasts throughout his career, and ranging from solo acoustic sets to full-band rave-ups, with dancers, backup singers and amazing costumes. He’s in great form. The performances appear to have been recorded on a VCR from such shows as “Saturday Night Live,” “The Arsenio Hall Show,” BET and “Today.” How the producers got the rights to the material is anyone’s guess, as it doesn’t look like public-domain or music-video clips. More recent live material is readily available on YouTube, including his spectacular sets at Coachella, Super Bowl and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Ceremony.

Last fall, when FilmRise re-released the original Heartworn Highways alongside Heartworn Highways Revisited, the only hitch came from knowing they’d be manufactured on demand, using DVD-R recordable media. If it wasn’t the optimum situation, it was quite a bit better than nothing. Now, the company has decided to send them out in standard delivery formats. For those unfamiliar with the documentaries, Heartworn Highways was made in 1976, before the “outlaw country” movement had grown to include such Austin- and Nashville-based singer-songwriters as Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, David Allan Coe, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell and John Hiatt. By the time it was released theatrically, in 1981, James Szalapski’s eye-opening film was regarded as an underground classic. Forty years later, “Revisited” lured Clark, Young and Coe to reprise their appearances, but, this time, in the company of such next-generation “outlaws” as John McCauley, Jonny Fritz, Josh Hedley, Justin Townes Earle, Shovels & Rope, Langhorne Slim, Robert Ellis, Andrew Combs, Shelly Colvin and Phil Hummer.

Doris Day: A Sentimental Journey
Some people will be surprised to learn that Doris Day, who hasn’t made a movie or starred in a television series since 1973, is still alive and presumably kicking in Carmel Valley, California, where she’s lived for nearly a half-century. In 1985, Day hosted “Doris Day’s Best Friends,” a show on the Christian Broadcast Network about celebrities and their pets, but it only lasted a season. She continues to spend most of her time caring for her pets and strays that find their way to her estate, as well as an advocate for animal-welfare groups around the world. At the time of her retirement, we learn in “Doris Day: A Sentimental Journey,” she was still one of the top box-office attractions in Hollywood. When her third husband, Martin Melcher, died on April 20, 1968, Day was shocked to learn that he and his business partner had squandered her earnings, leaving her deeply in debt. Moreover, he already committed her to various projects, including a CBS sitcom, about which she wasn’t keen. Clearly, it left a bitter taste in her mouth. For a woman who was frequently described as “America’s virgin” and a representative of all that’s chaste and holy in the pictures, Day led an uncommonly difficult life. Her career trajectory was altered as a teenager by a terrible accident, causing her to substitute singing for dancing. Her first marriage, to an abusive trombone player, took her off the road for a year, before she could dump him, return to Les Brown’s band and make her way to Hollywood. She doted on her son from that marriage, Terry, a record producter, who, some might recall, ran afoul of Charlie Manson. “Doris Day: A Sentimental Journey” was broadcast on PBS stations in 1991, with Roger Ebert serving as a narrator, and appearances by Kirstie Alley, Clint Eastwood, Rosemary Clooney Molly Haskell, Tony Randall, Kay Ballard, John Updike, Betty White and her biographer, A.E. Hotchner. The set also includes a surprisingly personal visit to Merv Griffin’s talk show, in 1975; an episode of “The Doris Day Show,” from 1968; and a collection of trailers, teasers and other publicity material from her heyday.

Shakespeare Wallah: Blu-ray
Among other attributes, Shakespeare Wallah represents the second collaboration of principals behind a long line of Merchant Ivory Productions. The first, The Householder (1963), combined the producing talents of Ismail Merchant, direction of James Ivory and writing of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, from whose novel it was adapted. “It is a strange marriage we have at Merchant Ivory,” Merchant once observed. “I am an Indian Muslim, Ruth is a German Jew and Jim is a Protestant American. Someone once described us as a three-headed god. Maybe they should have called us a three-headed monster.” Their 23 movies together, including Howard’s End, The Remains of the Day, A Room with a View and Heat and Dust and were far more heavenly than monstrous. Merchant and Jhabvala are no longer with us, but the production company has continued apace, with Call Me by Your Name, which was adapted by Ivory from the 2007 novel by André Aciman. His Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay made Ivory the oldest-ever winner in any competitive category. Released around the globe in the mid- to late-1960s, Shakespeare Wallah is based on the diaries of actor/manager Geoffrey Kendal, describing his family’s travelling Shakespeareana Company in post-colonial India. (Kendal became known there as Shakespearewallah, or Shakespeare-expert or Shakespeare-salesman.) In fact, the Kendals play loosely drawn versions of themselves in the movie … wonderfully.

Here, Tony Buckingham (Kendal) and his wife, Carla (Laura Liddell), oversee the troupe, which also includes their coming-of-age daughter, Lizzie (Felicity Kendal), as she falls in love with Indian playboy Sanju (Shashi Kapoor). Sanju’s affections are shared by Manjula (Madhur Jaffrey), a star in the increasing dominant Bollywood film empire. In real life, MIP-regular Kapoor married Felicity’s older sister, Jennifer Kendal. (They would make important contributions to the Indian film industry until her death, in 1984.) Until then, the Kendals made a reasonably decent living performing selections from the Bard’s canon — in traditional costume and in the king’s English – before prep-school and collegiate audiences, makeshift theaters in the boonies and for wealthy patrons of arts. Watching the duplicitous Sanju juggle his affection for the coquettish Lizzie and Bollywood diva, Manjula, frequently elevates the always delightful Shakespeare Walla to laugh-out-loud funny. The Cohen Film Collection release accords the black-and-white presentation a pristine 2K restoration, while adding lengthy conversations with Merchant, Ivory, Kapoor and Felicity Kendal, and with Ivory and Madhur Jaffrey, conducted by Mallika Rao from the Village Voice.

The Color of Pomegranates: Criterion Collection: Blu-ray
Watching Criterion Collection’s new, fully restored edition Sergei Parajanov’s 1968 masterwork, The Color of Pomegranates, made me wonder if anyone alive today will see the day when dreams can be recorded and played back on a video monitor, with the ability to rewind and pause images for psychiatric appraisal. It seems impossible today, but, in the 1960s, who could imagine owning a movie as amazing as The Color of Pomegranates and being able to watch it at home – let alone, a phone — whenever one wanted, without the scratches, splice marks and artifacts that attended 16mm film? “Pomegranates” plays out in a series of tableaux that blend the tactile with the abstract, reviving the splendors and hardships of Armenian culture through the story of the 18^th Century poet-troubador, priest and martyr Sayat-Nova. Parajanov introduced the film as a poetic fantasy, an artistic form he knew would run counter to government-approved socialist realism. It employs iconographic compositions, rather than traditional narrative — some lasting no more than a few seconds – to chart Sayat-Nova’s intellectual, artistic and spiritual growth.

Soviet censors, unwilling to spend the time it would have taken to fully evaluate Parajanov’s vision, decided to ban the film, re-edit it and send the director to a prison camp. They even changed the title from “Sayat-Nova” to The Color of Pomegranates. This edition has been cobbled together from long ignored and hidden prints and restored to capture the brilliant color and audio scheme. Because everything about “Pomegranates” is noteworthy, viewers should make time for the supplemental package, which includes Mikhail Vartanov’s long-suppressed “Paradjanov: The Color of Armenian Land” (1969) and Martiros Vartanov’s “The Last Film” (2014); a new commentary, featuring critic Tony Rayns; a video essay on the film’s symbols and references, featuring scholar James Steffen; documentaries “Sergei Parajanov: The Rebel” (2003) and “The Life of Sayat-Nova” (1977); and an essay by film scholar Ian Christie.

Aloha, Bobby and Rose: Blu-ray
Made at a time when road pictures and buddy films defined what it meant to be a young person in a post-Vietnam and post-hippie America, Floyd Mutrux’s Aloha, Bobby and Rose successfully merged elements of Breathless, American Graffiti and Bonnie and Clyde into a drive-in tragedy. As the advertising blurb asserts, “Bobby has a ’68 Camaro. Rose has a five-year-old kid. On their first date, they become lovers and fugitives.” Paul Le Mat plays Bobby, an L.A. grease monkey who’s only a shade removed from hot-rodder John Milner, in American Graffiti. He talks one of his garage’s customers, Rose (Dianne Hull) – a single mother, who doesn’t get out much, anymore – into a night on the town in his totally cherry Camaro. After stopping at a liquor store for some liquid courage, Bobby thinks it might be fun to pretend to rob the cashier with the screwdriver he carries in his pockets. The store’s owner can’t see the screwdriver, however, and he mistakenly shoots and kills the cashier. Immediately sensing that their happy days are over, they gather a few things and head for Mexico.

In between, they run into the kinds of characters they might never have met back home in L.A., but who represent elements of Old West lawlessness. Anyone who’s seen Jean-Luc Godard or Jim McBride’s version of Breathless will know what to except when Bobby and Rose go on the lam. No reason to spoil the ending for anyone else, however. Although mainstream critics weren’t kind to “AB&R” on its release, in 1975, it turned a nifty profit for Columbia Pictures, based on a $600,000 budget. Today, it looks as if it might have been made for Roger Corman, instead of a major studio, and can be enjoyed accordingly. It features strategically spotted songs by Elton John, Bob Dylan, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Jr. Walker and the All-Stars, and The Temptations, and early appearances by Robert Carradine, Tim McIntire and Edward James Olmos. The Blu-ray adds fresh interviews with Multrux, LeMat and Carradine.

Enigma Rosso Blu-ray
I don’t know enough about Agatha Christie’s mysteries to draw parallels between Alberto Negrin’s giallo whodunit, Enigma Rosso (a.k.a., “Rings of Fear”), and characters featured in “A Caribbean Mystery” and “Nemesis.” Any linkage between Miss Marple and a movie as salacious as Enigma Rosso and Massimo Dallamano’s What Have You Done to Solange?, which it resembles, should be considered advisedly, though. I think it would be much easier to make a giallo out of a British cozy than for a writer of popular British mysteries to write a screenplay for Dario Argento or Mario Bava … which, of course, is neither here nor there. Here, when the brutally violated body of a young woman is found wrapped in plastic, Inspector Gianni Di Salvo (Fabio Testi) is drawn to dark deeds at an exclusive girls’ school, where the beautiful members of a group called the Inseparables are being targeted with sinister letters and attempts on their lives. Following a clue in the dead girl’s diary, he soon discovers a web of sordid sex and homicide. The culprit should come as a surprise to most viewers. The film also stars Christine Kaufmann, Ivan Desny, Jack Taylor and Helga Liné. The Blu-ray adds commentary with historian Nathaniel Thompson.

Sleeping Dogs: Special Edition: Blu-ray
Made in 1977, before New Zealand could boast of anything resembling a film industry, Sleeping Dogs became the first Kiwi export to make a splash in North American theaters. It marked director Roger Donaldson’s transition from television to films and Sam Neill’s introduction to the world at large as a future star. Sleeping Dogs is a paranoid political thriller based on “Smith’s Dream,” by C. K. Stead. The novel was inspired by the author’s involvement in the anti-Vietnam War protest movement in the early 1970s. According to Stead, “It brought the war home to New Zealanders by putting a Vietnam-type situation in a local setting.” In the movie, a dictatorial prime minister uses the pretext of a severe oil crisis to crack down on homegrown dissidents. The head of the secret police orchestrates a shooting of military personnel called in to quell a protest. The uproar allows him to impose martial law and use force against his opponents, who hardly represent a great threat to the nation’s democracy. For some reason, the authorities have pinned some of the blame, at least, on Neill’s character, Smith, an apolitical loner homesteading on a deserted island owned by the Maori. He’s arrested for a crime he had no idea had even taken place. It will take viewers a while to figure out that Smith has been set up by both sides. After his escape, police chase him from one end of the topographically diverse island to the other. An unexpected treat arrives in the person of Warren Oates, the great American character actor, who plays a U.S. Army veteran enlisted to play the obnoxiously macho adviser to a special anti-insurgency unit. The Arrow Films package adds commentary with Donaldson, Neill and Ian Mune; the featurettes “The Making of Sleeping Dogs (1977)” and “The Making of Sleeping Dogs (2004)”; and a nicely appointed insert booklet, which contains writing by Neil Mitchell and a reproduction of the film’s original press book.

Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years, Vol. 2: Blu-ray
The complete title for this, the third collection of films by Seijun Suzuki released by Arrow in less than a year, is “Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years, Vol. 2 — Border Crossings: The Crime and Action Movies (1957-1961).” It arrives two months after the similarly precise, “Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years, Vol. 1 — Seijun Rising: The Youth Movies (1958-1965)” and, by another six months, “Seijun Suzuki’s The Taisho Trilogy (1980-1991).” It represents a remarkable cross-section of pictures from one of Japan’s most important directors of genre flicks and studio-financed B-movies. They complement the titles released by Criterion Collection from the same period. Unlike the more action-oriented crime thrillers in “The Early Years” collections, “The Taisho Trilogy” entries are more reflective and overtly arty. Available for home-viewing for the very first time outside of Japan, “Volume 2” is less interested with the Yakuza and teen gangs shown in “Volume 1,” than with crimes related to vice – drugs, prostitution, gambling smuggling — and international intrigue. At the time, Japan is being buffeted by waves of great social change and they’re reflected in the genre pictures, just as American movies captured the tumult and contradictions of the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition and Great Depression.

The Sleeping Beast Within (1960) is a gripping crime thriller in which a newspaper reporter’s search for his girlfriend’s missing father leads him into the heart of the criminal underworld of Yokohama’s Chinatown. Its companion piece, Smashing the 0-Line (1960), follows the descent of two competing reporters into a scabrous demimonde of drug and human trafficking. In Eight Hours of Terror (1957), a bus making its precarious way across a winding mountain road picks up some unwelcome passengers. In Tokyo Knights (1961), a college student takes over the family business in the field of organized crime. The Man With a Shotgun (1961) marks Suzuki s first entry into the territory of the “borderless” Japanese Western, which combines traditional cowboy tropes with those of modern Yakuza films. It’s easily one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen. The “Limited Edition” (1,500 copies) adds audio commentary by critic and author Jasper Sharp; the always entertaining and informative Tony Rayns on the background to the “Crime and Action Movies”; a stills gallery; reversible sleeves, featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Graham Humphreys; and a 60-page illustrated collector’s book, with new writing by Sharp.

I Am Somebody: Three films by Madeline Anderson
Among the many distinct images to emerge from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950-60s are those of heavily armed and helmeted police and soldiers, many of the leading dogs, riding on horses and pointing fire hoses at unarmed African-Americans protesting for rights, wages and benefits that today are largely taken for granted. The troops aren’t there because they enjoy busting heads, although some of the racist cops clearly do. They were there to enforce laws instituted by the white establishment to prevent blacks, Hispanics and poor whites from attaining an equal station in life as their own. I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago, watching the PBS documentary “Delores,” in which police automatically were enlisted in the service of corporate farmers and agribusiness interests interested in maintaining a status quo of substandard wages, intolerable working conditions and segregation. The strikers and activists didn’t carry weapons and their demands have since proven workable and legitimate. The documentary triptych “I Am Somebody: Three Films by Madeline Anderson” is another documentary that combines horror with triumph. To get to the uplifting moments, viewers must endure lasting images of man’s inhumanity to man. And, in various forms, it’s still happening today. Too many people are making too little money – or living in hellish conditions – and too many obstacles stand in the way of reform, including armed police and soldiers sent to “Make America Great Again.”

The Icarus package is comprised of Anderson’s I Am Somebody (1970), which chronicled a strike by 400 black women, employed a Charleston hospital, who desired union recognition and a wage increase. They were met by National Guard troops, with bayoneted rifles and police. The strike and economic boycott were supported by Andrew Young, Charles Abernathy and Martin Luther King’s widow, Coretta Scott King. Integration Report 1 (1960) examines the struggle for black equality in Alabama, Brooklyn and Washington, D.C., incorporating footage by Albert Maysles and Ricky Leacock, protest songs by Maya Angelou, and a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. A Tribute to Malcolm X includes an interview with Malcolm X’s widow Dr. Betty Shabazz, shortly after his 1965 assassination. The extras include a “Smithsonian Oral History Interview” (2017), between Rhea L. Combs and Madeline Anderson, and “Celebrate Moe!” (2002), a film about Moe Foner for the Service Employees International Union. After completing “I Am Somebody,” Anderson found it difficult to find financing for topical documentaries. She returned to television to work for the Children’s Television Workshop, where she was an in-house producer/director for “Sesame Street” and “The Electric Company.”

Honor Up: Blu-ray
Ostensibly a treatise on the challenges of maintaining a strict code of honor and loyalty among thieves, Honor Up is so full of gratuitous violence and ’90s-gangsta clichés that it feels as if it’s been locked in a vault for the last 25 years. It’s been compared to Paris Barclay’s 1996 spoof, “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood,” but completely absent the laughs, satire and irony in the Wayans brothers’ script. Honor Up follows the exploits of a Harlem street hustler, OG — played by hip-hop entrepreneur Damon Dash – a strict adherent to the code and someone who remains loyal to the man who brought him into the game. He expects the same from his crew. Of course, the worst crime a gang member can commit is snitching on a comrade in arms to cover his ass. It marks that person as a rat and puts a target on his back.

Apparently, though, snitching can be as contagious as any other communicable disease, because, once it starts, it causes the foundation of the gang to crumble. Sensing their weaknesses, a dogged police detective, played by Nicholas Turturro, borrows into the gang’s infrastructure like a termite. When the OG smells a rat in his midst, the punishment is dramatized in slow motion, backed by operatic music. Co-writer/director Dash surrounds OG with characters played by rappers Cam’ron, Smoke DZA and Murda Mook, and a girl gang with Stacey Dash and Eishia Brightwell. If Honor Up was going to find any traction theatrically, which it didn’t, it would have been on the back of executive producer and merchandise maestro Kanye West. The only publicity the movie received, however, derived from a visit paid by Kanye and a post-partum Kim to a top-secret screening. The Blu-ray adds commentary with Dash and producer/actress Raquel M. Horn.

Oscar
Killjoy 2: Deliverance From Evil
Like anything else that feels exhilarating before it gets too expensive to afford, making films can be addictive. At least, that’s what happens in Fernandel Almonor’s microbudget comedy about a guy, suspiciously named Oscar Micheaux III, who gets in trouble after spending his fiancé’s nest egg on his film. More precisely, the money was borrowed from his future father-in-law, who, if he knew the truth, would have allowed the loan shark, Little Idi (Tony Tambi), to cut off Oscar’s fingers. Before he can get back behind the camera, however, Oscar (David Haley) is required to work off the loan at his father-in-law’s Front Page Jamaican Grille, and to attend a 12-step program. The laughs in Oscar derive from some extremely broad insider gags – the program’s moderator is named Alan Smithee (Arthur Roberts) – and some agreeably Third World slapschtick. Some of the testimony offered at the Filmmakers Anonymous meeting certainly will ring true in the low-rent districts of greater Hollywood. Comparison to I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (1988) and Hollywood Shuffle (1987) may be a stretch, but only in execution, not in spirit. The cast also benefits from enthusiastic performances by Michelle Grant, Alvaro Orlando and Mykel Shannon Jenkins.

Despite reviews for Killjoy that redefined the term, scathing, the folks at Charles Band’s Full Moon Features decided to try their luck with urban horror, again, two years later, with Killjoy 2: Deliverance From Evil (2002). The series would go on to include five titles, over 16 years, not all of them interested in pursuing an African-American tradition. As before, the antagonist is a killer clown who can be summoned through voodoo incantations to rid the world of miscreants of color. This time, a group of juvenile delinquents – none of whom look a day younger than 30 – are required to serve their time working in a shelter in a dense forest, a place as foreign to them as Manhattan would be to a Hopi snake dancer. After one of them is shot by a local, the survivors seek refuge in the home of a voodoo sorceress, where they mistakenly summon the legendary clown-faced demon, Killjoy – yes, he has an unkempt Afro wig — who begins hunting them down one by one. Apart from some funny fish-out-of-water gags, Killjoy 2: Deliverance From Evil is largely devoid of laughs or thrills. The only actors whose careers survived their encounter with Killjoy are scream queen Debbie Rochon, Nicole Pulliam (“Fashion House”), Choice Skinner (“Black Lightning”) and Trent Haaga, who’s made a career out of playing the killer clown.

47 Below
When it comes to exploring and challenging the elements, the worst thing that can happen – short of death – is creating the impression that anyone proficient at Pilates or completing a 10K run is also capable of climbing the world’s tallest mountain or sailing around the world solo. Just because something has been made to look easy on TV doesn’t mean it is. Enticing photos of the human traffic jam leading to the summit of Mount Everest probably were as much to blame for the great disasters in 1996 and 2014 as changing weather conditions. In 47 Below, we join Australian doctor Geoff Wilson in his attempt to complete a coast-to-pole crossing of Antarctica, to honor a friend’s fight with breast cancer. In doing so, he transformed one of his equipment carriers into a “boob sled,” painted pink and designed to resemble a pair of, yes, breasts. Where Robert Scott, Douglas Mawson and Roald Amundsen were able to make the trek with the assistance of dog teams and other explorers, Wilson decided to do it alone, accompanied by a selfie camera and a kite that he attached to his body and the sled, allowing him to travel as fast as the wind took him … when it was blowing in the right direction, anyway. To survive, he had to battle ferocious blizzards, with winds exceeding 100 kilometers per hour, frostbite, deadly crevasses, loss of food and key equipment, and Antarctica’s terrifying isolation. Dogs would have provided some warmth and companionship, at least. If nothing else, the expedition raised $250,000 for breast-cancer research.

Hell’s Kitty
Rave Party Massacre
It isn’t often that stories that begin as YouTube webisodes are interesting enough to warrant a larger home on screens intended for feature films. After five minutes, or so, the seams begin to show, and the narratives run out of steam. Hell’s Kitty is an exception, if only for people who believe a pet can be possessed by the devil and make dating a hellish experience for its owner. Such is the case with aspiring screenwriter Nick Tana, whose obsession with his cat blinds him to the fact that friends, lovers and acquaintances are dying in its company. When relatives of the victims come to him asking questions, Nick scrambles to defend his pet. Typically, Hell’s Kitty would be a one-gag-per-episode experience, if it weren’t for some nifty editing. In the 98-minute feature cobbled together from the segments, it succeeds through the large number of cameos by familiar actors and lots of jokes only a dog lover would fully grasp. By the time Nick is convinced to have a kitty exorcism, most viewers will be sold on the picture, I think. Among the actors who pop up more than once are Nina Hartley, Michael Berryman, Adrienne Barbeau, Bill Oberst Jr., Doug Jones, Creep Creepersin and Lynn Lowry. It’s difficult to imagine they could be paid much, if anything for their contributions. Perhaps, they were compensated in cat nip.

The scariest thing about Rave Party Massacre (a.k.a., “Dead Thirsty”) is having to endure President George H. W. Bush’s proclamation of a New World Order before the United Nations on September 11,1990. Two years later, such talk would be greeted with derision and outright revolt, but it almost sounded reasonable before the first war with Iraq. In any case, it’s annoying.  On the eve of an abandoned hospital’s demolition, a large group of party-hardy yuppies gathers in its empty surgical theaters and waiting rooms to dance to EDM delivered at a pulsating 150-beats-per-minute. It’s 1992 and the president is about to be swept out of office by Bill Clinton. When Rachel (Sara Bess), Branson (Jared Sullivan) and other ravers are ushered into the illegal party, they are handed a hallucinogenic drug that inspires nightmarish visions and leaves them open to torture by malevolent forces. The party, itself, consumes only about 20 minutes of time, while the rest is chewed up in chases through empty hallways and listening to Rachel scream on a morgue platter. As for a massacre, well, it’s pretty much limited to a small handful of unfortunate revelers. The ending brings a decently conceived and reasonable plot twist, but it’s a bit late in the game for logic. The bonus package adds a director’s commentary, behind-the-scenes footage, set- design sketches and on-set interviews with cast & crew.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Season 11: Blu-ray
I’ll leave it to the fanatics, who financed the 11^th season of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” through a successful Kickstarter campaign, to decide if the effort was worth it. I suspect that they would reply in the affirmative, but not without some debate over the relative merits of the individual components. This time around, hapless Jonah Heston (Jonah Ray) is trapped on the dark side of the moon and forced to watch cheesy movies by the evil, profit-obsessed mad scientist Kinga Forrester (Felicia Day) and her fawning henchman Max (Patton Oswalt). Jonah shares his thoughts on Satellite of Love’s movie menu with his wisecracking robot pals, Tom Servo (Baron Vaughn), Crow (Hampton Yount) and Gypsy (Rebecca Hanson). Also on board are guest stars Mark Hamill, Neil Patrick Harris, Joel McHale and Jerry Seinfeld. There’s no debate as to quality – or lack thereof – of the playlist of classically crummy B-movies, however: Starcrash, At the Earth’s Core, Reptilicus, Cry Wilderness, The Beast of Hollow Mountain, Avalanche, The Land Time Forgot, The Loves of Hercules, Yongary, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom I/II, Carnival Magic and The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t. Featurettes include “Special Features and Technical Specs” and “We Brought Back MST3K Documentary.”

Mohawk: Blu-ray
I’d like to promote a gritty action adventure picture so small it didn’t even register a blip at Box Office Mojo. If Mohawk had been produced and released in the same general vicinity as Little Big Man, Soldier Blue, Black Robe or The Last of the Mohicans, writer-director Ted Geoghegan (We Are Still Here) might have found a niche among fine revisionist Westerns. As it is, he can be proud of almost universal raves in Metacritic.com and kudos for showing a different side to Uncle Sam’s decades-long campaign to eradicate native Americans from their homes. Make no mistake: Mohawk is a genre film from start to finish. No one holds the high ground for very long. Now that the true horrors of American genocide are no longer hidden under layers of dust in museums and university archives, Geoghegan isn’t required to build a case for the revenge-minded Indians – the ones not killed in the smallpox epidemic if 1635, anyway – before they’re driven to war. Here, they are still being punished for backing the losing teams in the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 and refusing to buy into the American dream of dairy farms and white picket fences, stretching from sea to shining sea.

After a frontier outpost is overrun by Mohawks unwilling to relocate to Canada, it becomes incumbent on the survivors to capture them and either lead them to justice at a nearby fort or kill them on the spot. The disparity in fire power is represented by a British arms dealer’s efforts to trade hatchets for furs, while the Americans carry muskets, pistols and swords. The Mohawks’ greatest ally is their sibling relationship with the forest, but the advantage is shrinking with every new Yankee victory. After the fair-minded American officer is killed, his spot is taken over by a venom-spouting racist who never met an Indian he didn’t already hate. He makes the unilateral decision to torture and hang a young warrior, who shares a lover with the Brit. Made up (or tattooed) to resemble a ghost, Oak is played with gusto by Kaniehtiio Horn (“Hemlock Grove”), a 5-foot-8 Canadian Mohawk who’s pregnant and in love with both the captive and British arms trader. Carnage begets carnage, until there’s no one left to draw last blood. The costumes and makeup seem reasonably accurate throughout Mohawk and the action is staged, in part, at Syracuse’s Skä•noñh Great Law of Peace Center. While I wouldn’t care to hazard a guess as to the movie’s historical accuracy, Mohawk looks great and Geoghegan nimbly injects a supernatural angle that enhances, but never gets in the way of the cold-blooded action.

Insidious: The Last Key: Blu-ray
If any working actress could survive being cast as the title character in Helen Keller vs. Nightwolves (2015), it would be Lin Shaye. The genre-bending horror, which should never be confused with The Miracle Worker, “explores the true story that the government didn’t want you to know, about how Helen Keller really lost her eyesight and hearing.” The only way it could have succeeded at the box office was on a double-bill with “Grandma Moses’ Death Pact With the Art Mafia.”  Even then, however, only an actress with Shaye’s horror cred could avoid being burned at the stake by politically correct critics. In Adam Robitel and Leigh Whannell’s Insidious: The Last Key, Shaye once again reprises her role as parapsychologist Dr. Elise Rainier, who returns to her family home with her ghostbusting team of Specs (Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson) to face the unrelenting demons that have plagued her – and subsequent home owners — since childhood. For the record: “The Last Key” is the second prequel in the franchise, which continues to make money for the Universal and Sony co-release. It takes her to her childhood abode, where Elise first made contact with the “Further” and Key Face, as well as ghosts she left behind when she escaped her possession. All these years later, she’s still drawn to the Further by a lonesome whistle in the basement. Elise is confronted there by a series of doors, some of which lead nowhere.

Once again, Elise is vanquished by Key Face, but, somehow, lives to tell about it. While not particularly scary, relying mostly on jump scares, “The Last Key” exudes creepy atmosphere throughout. If you’ve seen the previous three chapters, you’ll know what to expect in “The Last Key” and won’t be disappointed. If that doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement, it’s only because I don’t have any brain cells already invested in the story. Shaye’s growing legion of admirers – where’s her star on the Walk of Fame, by the way? – benefit the most from her presence here. That, and some of the special makeup effects are pretty good. The first time I interviewed Shaye was after she scored a trifecta in the Farrelly Brothers’ gross-out trilogy, Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary as a disgusting old hag. And, while I wasn’t expecting a human gargoyle, per se, Shaye couldn’t have been more different in person. Despite more than 200 acting credits on IMDB.com, she’s been one of Hollywood more underappreciated actresses, supporting and otherwise, for 25 years. It doesn’t look as if she’s spend much time telling stories to the hosts of American talk shows, either. Shaye deserves her moment in the sun, however. The Blu-ray adds a quick refresher course on previous Insidious installments, several deleted scenes, an alternate ending and several making-of featurettes, including one devoted to the character, Elise.

Proud Mary: Blu-ray
I’ll admit to being among the small minority of Americans who’ve yet to see Black Panther. I have, however, enjoyed Marvel Knights: Black Panther, a motion comic from Shout! Factory that was presented as an eight-episode mini-series, in 2012. The character was a franchise waiting to happen. If Screen Gems had been able to read the tea leaves a bit more clearly, it might have held off releasing its throwback actioner Proud Mary until it saw how the African-American community reacted to a movie that features a black comic-book superhero. There were plenty of superheroes back in the era of blaxploitation flicks, but their domains were limited in scope and scale. Their chief superpower was limited to being smarter than the goombahs and corrupt cops who exploited the ghetto community, while their “superfly” costumes protected them from being considered square in an ocean of cool cats and swinging kittens. The approach worked in Harlem and the remote African kingdom of Wakanda.

Proud Mary may not be in the same league as Black Panther – as a commercial vehicle or fully realized story – but it features an excellent performance by Taraji P. Henson (“Empire”) and atmosphere to spare. Loosely based on John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands’ Gloria (1980), Proud Mary stars Henson as a ruthless assassin for a mob operation fronted by Danny Glover, with connections to a bunch of twitchy Eastern Europeans. When Mary shoots a sociopathic if protected mobster, to save a slick street urchin (Jahi Di’Allo Winston), she puts herself in mortal danger. Neither is it anything that would have been expected of her. They have good chemistry together, and it almost saves the rest of the picture from undernourished clichés. That, and a lot of madcap violence involving automatic weapons and hand-to-hand combat. The studio decided, instead, not to screen Proud Mary for critics and they reciprocated by trashing it. The Blu-ray adds featurettes, “Mary’s World,” “The Beginning of the End” and “If Looks Could Kill.”

Are We Not Cats
In John Waters’ largely ignored sex comedy, A Dirty Shame (2005), one of the points he makes is that a bizarre fetish need not stand in the way of love or romance. In a world in which it only takes two to tango, a partner in perversion shouldn’t be that difficult to find … if they know where to look. I don’t recall that any of Waters’ characters engaged in trichotillomania and trichophagia — the compulsive pulling-out of one’s own hair and eating it – but they wouldn’t be the strangest of compulsive activities that occasionally lead to romance in the movie. Xander Robin’s possibly autobiographical Are We Not Cats harkens to a time when New York’s punk, New Wave and dispossessed underground was represented on film by such films as Ulli Lommel’s Blank Generation, Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens and Desperately Seeking Susan, and Jim Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation. Things haven’t changed all that much for the young people who comprise New York’s hipster proletariat, as represented here by Eli (Michael Patrick Nicholson). Eli’s a friendly enough chap, but he lacks the drive and passion for life necessary to make a living in the Big Apple. Here, however, Eli’s having a particularly rough week. Not only has he been dumped by his girlfriend and fired from his garbage-route job, but he’s also been thrown out of his immigrant parents’ apartment. They received an offered they couldn’t refuse and decided to pull up stakes for Arizona. His mother invites him to visit, but he wouldn’t last a week in the desert sun.

Instead, Eli ends up sleeping in the back of the track passed along to him by his father, and now allows him to make a few bucks performing errands for the kinds of people whose work is always done off the books. On a delivery run upstate, Eli befriends a shady rock entrepreneur, Kyle (Michael Godere), and his kooky, blond-wigged girlfriend, Anya (Chelsea Lopez). When Kyle observes the chemistry growing between Eli and Anya, he warns him not to take everything about her at face value. After a very weird night together, it’s clear what Kyle meant about Anya’s hidden personality traits. In a shocking conceit that some viewers will find difficult to digest, Eli’s trichotillomania complements Anya’s trichophagia, but only to the point where tragedy overcomes the generally dark comic tone. Did I mention that Are We Not Cats isn’t for everyone? Its idiosyncrasies should appeal, however, to those who can identify the fine lines that separate comedy, horror and romance in the underground cinema. Nicholson and Lopez deserve a lot of credit for being able to keep their characters working within the line and not straying into caricatures.

The Fencer
If there’s a subgenre in which American filmmakers excel, it’s the sports melodrama. Hoosiers, Miracle, Brian’s Song, Rocky, Seabiscuit, Million Dollar Baby, Remember the Titans and Rudy topped one best-of list I found on the Internet, but there are hundreds, maybe thousands more titles that fit the generic mold. Several good movies have been made in which ping-pong, bowling, water polo and volleyball factor into drama, comedy or romance. Ridley Scott broke his directorial cherry in 1977 with The Duellists, in which a small feud between two Napoleonic officers escalates into a decades-long series of duels. Since then, however, it’s entirely possible that the only filmmakers who’ve taken fencing as seriously as Scott have been Klaus Härö and Anna Heinämaa. They’re the creative team behind The Fencer, the Finnish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 2016 Academy Awards. Newly released into DVD by Music Box Films, it does for swordplay what Stand and Deliver did for math, McFarland, USA did for cross-country running and The Great Debate did for, yup, debate. In addition to playing the David-vs.-Goliath card, The Fencer describes how a group of kids from an enslaved Baltic state took on better-equipped teams from around the U.S.S.R., giving their outcast coach an opportunity to stand up to Joseph Stalin’s goons … for a while, anyway. Härö, working from a script by fellow-Finn Heinämaa, has crafted a story that fits alongside the aforementioned titles as an inspirational drama, unabashed crowd-pleaser and hankie-optional tear-jerker. And, while it’s informed throughout by Cold War politics and repression, The Fencer doesn’t require a refresher course in European history to be enjoyed by American teens and adults, even if they couldn’t find Estonia on a map.

A prologue explains how, after 20 years of independence, Estonia was taken over, first, by communist forces; then, Nazi Germany; and, once again, by the Red Army. Each time, Estonian men were conscripted into the armies of their traditional enemies and put on the front lines in suicidal offensives. Those who survived the war found themselves in an emotional and philosophical limbo, caught between the Soviet Union and a resistance movement doomed to failure. The title character here, Endel Nelis, was conscripted into the German army in 1943 and, possibly, forced into the hastily assembled Estonian Waffen-SS division. (Others escaped to Finland, where they volunteered to join the Finns in their battles with the Soviets.) After escaping from Stalin’s secret police, Endel changed his identity to find work at home in a small country school. Although he was a competitive fencer before the war, Endel is reluctant to tip his hand as to his true identity. One of the chores he’s assigned is arranging athletic activities for the students. No sooner is he able to get the kids excited about a skiing expedition than the equipment is commandeered by Soviet forces occupying the town. It only adds to the emotional burden they’ve been carrying around like a backpack full of rocks.

When one girl catches Endel practicing fencing moves in the gym, she pleads with him to teach her the basics of the time-honored sport. He reluctantly agrees, unaware of how desperate her classmates would be to join the fun. To compensate for a lack of equipment, they make swords out of reeds they find in a marsh and share protective padding. Envious of Endel’s popularity, the school’s toady principal does everything he can to sabotage the fencing club. By then, however, a handful of the kids has been invited to the competition in Leningrad, where it would be difficult for Endel to avoid arrest, possible execution or a labor camp in Siberia. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the coach risks his freedom by sticking with his team. The principal makes sure Soviet officials are aware of his identity and decision to go to Leningrad. Even so, Endel is allowed the time to complete his coaching duties, before being hauled away by the police. The spotlight then turns back to the kids, who, in fact, are quite formidable. Härö also finds room for an us-against-the-world romance and a parents’ revolt against the hardline principal. Then, too, watching the faces of the students as they evolve into individuals with dreams and goals of their own, while coming together as teammates, is nothing less than thrilling. Oh, yeah, The Fencer is based on real people and actual events. The DVD adds several deleted scenes and a lengthy interview with Härö.

The Man From Earth: Holocene: Blu-ray
Normally, it would be easy to dismiss The Man From Earth: Holocene as a novelty sequel to a work of speculative fiction that enjoyed a modicum of success, after it was widely shared through geek-to-geek networks and found an afterlife on stage. Director Richard Schenkman claims that “Holocene” wouldn’t have come about if it weren’t for a groundswell of support from fans loyal to the source material, The Man from Earth, and, in turn, respect for midcentury fantasist, Jerome Bixby. And, therein, lies the tale that makes “Holocene” a compelling entertainment. Among other things, Bixby is credited with writing “Requiem for Methuselah,” which aired twice during the third and final season of “Star Trek.” The teleplay’s roots extend back even further than that, however. Some “Star Trek” scholars believe that it was based on ideas advanced in Forbidden Planet (1956), which, in turn, was inspired by Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” Bixby’s final screenplay, for The Man from Earth, was conceived in the early 1960s and completed on his deathbed in April 1998. In 2007, it was turned into an independent film project executive produced by his son, Emerson Bixby, directed by Schenkman and starring David Lee Smith, William Katt, Richard Riehle, Tony Todd, Annika Peterson, Alexis Thorpe, Ellen Crawford and John Billingsley. It’s possible, as well, that Bixby cribbed the core conceit from his screenplay for It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), which – wait for it – is said to have inspired Dan O’Bannon’s screenplay for Alien (1979). What’s this mystically powerful idea? Selective immortality.

The Man from Earth’s plot focuses on John Oldman (Smith), a university professor, who claims to be a Cro-Magnon who’s secretly survived for more than 14,000 years. As his colleagues press him to explain his sudden departure from the university, Oldman reluctantly reveals that he relocates every 10 years to keep others from realizing that he does not age. Oldman asks his academic friends to challenge his claim, prompting a lively debate on subjects ranging from pure science to science-fiction and religion. Like a multi-millennial Leonard Zelig, Oldman always appeared to be at the right place at the right time, alongside the right people. He was a Sumerian for 2000 years and a Babylonian, who traveled east to become a disciple of Gautama Buddha. He brought these teachings to ancient Palestine, at the time of Jesus. He also dropped the names of Christopher Columbus and Vincent Van Gogh into the conversation. Atypically, for sci-fi, everything in the movie transpires within the walls of a rural home and the special-effects budget couldn’t have been more than a few bucks. It explains the easy transfer to the stage. The Man From Earth: Holocene picks up a decade later, after Oldman resurfaces at a different college, as comparative-religion professor John Young. While he’s well-regarded and something of a campus heartthrob, Young maintains a healthy distance between himself and his students. Thanks to the Internet, a group of his admirers trace his disparate roots to a widely discredited book written by one of the professors (Katt) who attended the going-away party and took Oldman’s story as something other than hokum. Knowing how such an amazing story, if proven true, could disturb easily freaked-out people, Oldman/Young tries mightily to keep his secrets just that … secret. One of the students, a Christian fundamentalist, takes exception to his professor’s account of history, and it leads to a Judas-like betrayal. Once again, “Holocene” relies more on words than action. Here, though, the tension isn’t heightened by a claustrophobic setting.

Bixby hadn’t envisioned a sequel, so “Holocene” takes liberties with the original concept. Indeed, Schenkman foresees the possibility of a TV series, not unlike “Kung Fu” or “Quantum Leap.” As it is, though, the sequel only found an audience through a festival screening and guerrilla distribution network, based on self-pirating the film via the Internet. According to Schenkman and producer Eric D. Wilkinson, they’ve received nearly $45,000 in donations via their site, manfromearth.com, from fans and supporters around the world, including China. Besides Smith and Katt, “Holocene” features credible performances by Vanessa Williams, Michael Dorn, Sterling Knight, Akemi Look, Brittany Curran, and Carlos Knight. The Blu-ray adds commentary with Schenkman and Wilkinson; a 40-minute behind-the-scenes featurette, with cast and crew; a piece on the original score; a Q&A with Schenkman at the Dances With Films World Premiere; deleted/extended scenes; a ”Primal Kickboxing” instructional video; photo gallery; and original posters.

Along With the Gods: The Two Worlds: Blu-ray
Although the smash Korean action/fantasy Along With the Gods: The Two Worlds is officially based on Joo Ho-min’s popular webtoon (a.k.a., manhwa), it shouldn’t be difficult for western viewers to identify traces of Defending Your Life (1991), Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and Heaven Can Wait (1943). The guiding conceit, however, is provided by an ancient Buddhist belief that when a person of substance reaches the afterlife, they are judged 7 times over the course of 49 days, and “only the souls who pass trials relating to deceit, indolence, injustice, betrayal, violence, murder and filial impiety can be reincarnated.” Maybe, maybe not. If anyone deserved to bypass the seven trials, you’d think it would be the heroic firefighter Kim Ja-hong (Cha Tae-hyun), who saved the life of a little girl by using his body to break her fall from a high floor in a skyscraper inferno. After some natural confusion on his part – Kim can hear people lauding his heroic sacrifice – he’s guided to the afterlife by three guardians, who, themselves, aren’t very clear on the seven-trials concept. Even though Kim led an exemplary life, his reincarnation can be affected negatively by unforeseen repercussions from positive acts. In other words, celestial prosecutors can use the butterfly effect against the defendant … times seven. At 140 minutes, there’s plenty of time for a dazzling display of CGI-driven flashbacks and guilt trips, fantasy landscapes, demons and angels, gods and goddesses. If the appeal still is to fans of Pacific Rim cinema, I can see how kids here might be attracted to it for the same reasons they’re drawn to The Wizard of Oz. The background featurettes aren’t up to snuff, however.

Braven: Blu-ray
If the poster art for Braven is intended to remind browsers of Logan/Wolverine, of X-Men fame, it just could work. Jason Momoa stares out from the photograph, with a snow-covered mountain and dense forest in the background, a bow in his left hand, a quiver on his back and a fresh scar on the side of his face. Although his hair looks frozen in place, the sleeves of his T-shirt only extend to middle of the Polynesian tattoo on his forearm. On the cover of the DVD/Blu-ray box, the same photo of Momoa is used, with a handgun in his right hand, the bow and quiver erased, and, instead of a mountainous background, the forest is quite a bit denser. A cabin has been set on fire, apparently, by marauders on snow-mobiles. The differences aren’t terribly misleading or inaccurate, however. The Hawaiian-born, Iowa-raised Momoa may have struck the same sort of pose in marketing material for “Baywatch: Hawaii,” “Stargate: Atlantis,” Conan the Barbarian, “Game of Thrones,” “The Red Road,” “Frontier” and the “Justice League,” where he plays Aquaman. At a buff-and-tumble 6-foot-4, the camera didn’t have to add muscles where they don’t exist. If there’s any deception intended here, it’s to make the modestly budgeted Canadian indie look several million dollars more expensive than it probably was. But, Northwoods logger Joe Braven is only half the story here. The other half is provided by the spectacular scenery along Newfoundland’s coastline, all of which is extremely well utilized by stuntman-turned-director Lin Oeding, cinematographer Brian Andrew Mendoza and a trio of stunt coordinators.

When a truck transporting logs and heroin slides off the road during a severe snowstorm, the driver and his assistant find a temporary hiding place for the drugs in a nearby cabin. Inconveniently, for the traffickers, Joe and his father (Stephen Lang) have picked the same weekend to take advantage of the cabin’s isolation to chart the crusty old man’s future in anticipation of Alzheimer’s. Unbeknownst to them, as well, Joe’s daughter, Charlotte (Sasha Rossof), has stowed away in their SUV. When the bad guys can’t wait any longer, they decide to storm the cabin and eliminate the owners. If they had held off for a couple more hours, they could have walked into the shed unobstructed and carried away the stash. What fun would that be, though?  The shootout, which, yes, includes pinpoint-accurate archery and wolf traps, is extremely well choreographed and executed. At a brisk 94 minutes, hardly a moment is wasted for idle chitchat, time-consuming romance or needless exposition. Even when Joe’s bow-hunter wife, Stephanie (Jill Wagner) is introduced to the mix, the action never wavers or seems absurd. The story’s economic use of violence might remind some viewers of similar work by Sam Peckinpah and Don Siegel. It’s not as much of a stretch as you might think. The package adds the featurette, “The Braven’s Views.”

Gone Are the Days: Blu-ray
Despite the fact that he’s pushing 78, Lance Henriksen has more work on his plate than actors half or two-thirds his age. As one of the most recognizable, genre-defying hard-guys in the movies and television, the New York native has played more wildly different sorts of working-class heroes – and villains – than one can instantly identify. He’s excelled as astronauts (Alien) and vampires (Near Dark) and provided voices in several animated features. Typically, though, character actors don’t wait for their phones to ring on the days that awards nominations are announced. Even so, Henriksen’s portrayal of psychic FBI profiler Frank Black, in “Millennium,” garnered three consecutive Golden Globe nominations for Best Performance by a Lead Actor in a Drama Series. In Mark Landre Gould and Gregory M. Tucker’s atmospheric oater, Gone Are the Days, he plays a notorious outlaw, Taylon Flynn, who’s heading rather quickly toward his last roundup. Despite his bad health, Taylon saddles up for one last shot at redemption, by relieving one last bank of its money. Once inside the mining town, he discovers the daughter he abandoned decades earlier, working in a seedy brothel. Naturally, the brothel owner doesn’t want to lose one of his prized assets, so he enlists the local sheriff (Tom Berenger) to his cause. Gone Are the Days may not break any new ground, but it serves as reminder as to the genre’s continued vitality and ability to entertain.  Also on hand are Danny Trejo, Steve Railsback and Jamie McShane. The package adds a making-of featurette and cast/crew interviews.

My Friend Dahmer: Blu-ray
With a title like My Friend Dahmer, you’d think that Marc Meyers’ disconcerting drama would have a snowball’s chance in hell of being watchable. Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes were so heinous and thoroughly covered by the media that it would have been difficult to find an angle worth revisiting. What would be the point, anyway? My Friend Dahmer is based on the graphic novel by Derf Backderf, who attended the same high school as the future serial killer and considered himself to be one of his few friends. And, by “friends,” I mean fellow students who adopted the terribly shy and awkward teenager as their personal plaything. The band nerds who comprise the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club here have no trouble convincing Dahmer (Ross Lynch) to do oddball things that would draw attention to himself and cause other students to shun him. While the hazing easily qualifies as bullying, Dahmer seems to welcome the companionship it provided him. The other boys might have been surprised to learn that Dahmer already fits the profile of a future sociopath. He collects bones and dissects roadkill, has dysfunctional parents (Anne Heche, Dallas Roberts) and lives in a world of his own creation. He fixates on a neighborhood jogger (Vincent Kartheiser), who appears like clockwork on the road outside his home. For all his weirdness, however, he’s a good student and not without ambition. Meyers lays out all of Dahmer’s pluses and minuses in as neutral a way as possible, using Backderf’s subsequently published sketchbook as a roadmap to the psychological profile. My Friend Dahmer climaxes at the point where Dahmer – angry after his mother pulls up stakes without alerting him – decides to take his first human life. Blessedly, we’re spared any depiction of the crime. My Friend Dahmer is the culmination of a comic- book project that began in 1994, shortly after Dahmer was murdered in prison, and has since grown to include the self-published 24-page “My Friend Dahmer” (2002) and a 224-page version, released in 2012. The Blu-ray adds an interview with actor Ross Lynch and behind-the-scenes slideshow.

Jasper Jones
This coming-of-age tale about life in a claustrophobic Western Australian town, circa 1969, is based on an award-winning novel by Fremantle writer Craig Silvey. It could just as easily been set in the American South, during the same period, without missing a beat. Because Jasper Jones addresses small-town crime, racism and intolerance in similar ways, several Down Under critics have compared it favorably to Stand by Me and To Kill a Mockingbird. In it, Charlie Bucktin (Levi Miller), a bookish 14-year-old, finds himself caught in the middle of an investigation into the disappearance and probable murder of a teenage girl, Laura Wishheart, who was dating mixed-race 16-year-old Jasper Jones (Aaron McGrath). Even absent a body, all fingers in town are pointing in Jasper’s direction. We suspect that he didn’t commit the crime, if only because the evidence against him is too conveniently laid out. (If he were guilty, why would Jasper coax Charlie out of bed on that fateful night to help him deal with her lifeless body.) To protect Jasper, Charlie goes along with the scheme, first, and ask questions later. Complicating things for Charlie on a personal basis is his burgeoning relationship with the victim’s whip-smart sister, Eliza (Angourie Rice). The boys suspect that the killer is a reclusive swamp rat, Mad Jack Lionel (Hugo Weaving), who’s harboring secrets that may or may not have anything to do with the crime. It’s to Rachel Perkins’ credit that there’s sufficient room left in the narrative for compelling parallel storylines, involving prejudice faced by a Vietnamese immigrant family, and a reckless affair between Charlie’s mom (Toni Collette) and a local cop. Not everything is tied together with a neat little bow, but it’s easy to see how Jasper Jones became a big hit in Australia. Bonus features include interviews with director Perkins and stars Collette, Weaving, Rice and Miller; a short film “Death of a Unicorn,” narrated by Tilda Swinton; and director’s statement.

Mabel, Mabel, Tiger Trainer
At its heart, Leslie Zemeckis’ exhaustively researched documentary, Mabel, Mabel, Tiger Trainer, is the story of a Kentucky girl who ran away from home, joined the circus and, for the next 57 years, was one of its greatest stars. After being raised in poverty, and stints as a nurse and hoochie-coochie dancer, Mabel Stark became the first woman to train tigers, doing things with big cats in the center ring that few other performers dared. She headlined shows with Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey, survived multiple maulings and tempestuous marriages, and starred in Hollywood movies (Doctor Doolittle, Tarzan). At one time, Stark managed up to 20 tigers at a time, forming intimate bonds with each one, rather than using the whip. In 1968, her life ended tragically just outside of the Jungleland amusement park, in Thousand Oaks, California. The circus setting adds a lot of color to what might have been just another first-woman-to-do-such-and-such story. Her marriages, alone, could have inspired through-lines in a dozen soap operas. Mabel, Mabel, Tiger Trainer does a nice job encapsulating American entertainment history as the circus moved from big tops to big-city arenas, with no room for midway rides or freak shows. By the time Stark left the circus for good, there were only a few traveling units. The archival material is enhanced by fresh interviews with historians and circus folk. The DVD adds several bonus features. And, yes, a theatrical feature is currently in the planning stages.

The City of the Dead: Limited Edition: Blu-ray
Deep Red: Limited Edition: Blu-ray
Full Moon High: Blu-ray
Sometimes, there’s nothing more comforting than a nearly 60-year-old exploitation flick that refuses to succumb to the clichés that cling to its surface like barnacles to a whale. On its surface, the only thing worth savoring in The City of the Dead (a.k.a., “Horror Hotel”) would be an early performance by Christopher Lee, who, in 1960, was well on his way to becoming a horror icon. Produced in England but set in the colonies, the British actors were required to speak with American accents throughout. The City of the Dead takes places in the fictional Massachusetts town of Whitewood, where a witch named Elizabeth Selwyn is about to be burned at the stake. Before that can happen, though, she confesses to being Satan’s host on Earth and curses the town’s inhabitants for generations to come. Flash forward a few hundred years and a comely student of Lee’s Professor Alan Driscoll has been encouraged to visit Whitewood for a paper she’s doing. Nan’s visit corresponds with Candlemas Eve, when local wiccans sacrifice a young girl to sate Satan’s appetite for virgins. Even in 1960, Venetia Stevenson probably wouldn’t be mistaken for a virgin, but she’ll do in a pinch. Two weeks later, Nan’s brother follows her path to Whitewood, which, by now, is surprisingly lively for a ghost town. If that scenario feels more appropriate for a horror anthology, it’s probably because the script was originally written by George Baxt as a pilot for a TV series – possibly “Thriller” — starring Boris Karloff. And, yet, thanks to the British cast and a fresh 2K polish, City of the Dead in none the worse for the wear and Lee, as usual, is a delight. The Arrow package adds the slightly shorter American version, “Horror Hotel,” which was released in 1963; a 45-minute interview with Lee, from the DVD release; a 17-minute behind-the-scenes featurette; interviews with directorJohn Llewellyn Moxey and Stevenson; commentaries by Lee, Moxey and actor/historian Jonathan Rigby; and an insert booklet with essays and production photos. For some reason, City of the Dead has resonated through the years with such bands as Iron Maiden, UFX, Kid Diamond, Rob Zombie and In This Moment, all of whom have borrowed snippets for songs and videos.

Arrow Video extends it Wonderful World of Giallo series – my words – another month with Dario Argento’s way-over-the-top fright fest, Deep Red (a.k.a., “Profondo rosso,” “The Hatchet Murders”), starring a totally cool David Hemmings, beguiling Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia and Macha Meril. It arrived four years after Argento’s “Animal Trilogy” changed the way the world looked at Italian genre filmmaking. As such, it represented a refinement of the genre, which previously had to overcome tight budgets and skeptical critics, and a stepping stone to Argento’s more supernaturally themed material. One night, musician Marcus Daly (Hemmings) witnesses the brutal ax murder of a woman in her apartment. Racing to the scene, Marcus just manages to avoid the perpetrator. Now moonlighting as an amateur sleuth, Marcus becomes ensnared in a bizarre web of murder, mystery and the macabre, where nothing is what it seems. The action is backed by a throbbing score from the progressive Italian rock band, Goblin, and a color scheme from a Technicolor wet dream. The two-disc Limited Edition is enhanced by the inclusion of the original version and shorter export edit of the film; six postcard-sized lobby-card reproductions; a reversible fold-out poster, featuring two original artworks, and reversible sleeve, with newly commissioned work by Gilles Vranckx; a booklet, with new writing on the film by Mikel J. Koven, author of “La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film,” and an archival essay by Alan Jones, illustrated with original archive stills; audio commentary by filmmaker and Argento expert, Thomas Rostock; an introduction, by Claudio Simonetti of Goblin; and several archival featurettes.

For a while there, genre parodies were almost as prevalent as the movies they spoofed. The best of them — Shaun of the Dead, Scary Movie and What We Do in the Shadows, among them – could stand on their own merits as entertainments for buffs and casual fans. Most best-of lists I’ve seen omit Lawrence Cohen’s Full Moon High, which, even upon its release in 1981, gave off cheap and outdated vibes. By using the 24-year-old I Was a Teenage Werewolf as its inspiration, Cohen appeared to be betting against the odds that kids newly enthralled by slasher and splatter flicks would find something amusing in tropes that no longer carried much weight. Knowing that the high-school experience, with its bizarre subcultures and codes, hasn’t changed all that much in the last 200 years, or so, Cohen simply lowered his sights to include viewers for whom whom Mel Brooks might as well have been Moliere. One indication that he wasn’t dumbing down the humor to reach the lowest common denominator, however, was his decision to cast Brooks regular Kenneth Mars (Young Frankenstein, The Producers) as the handsy Coach Cleveland. In such a target-rich environment, Cohen didn’t have to look too far more inspiration than that. Adam Arkin plays Tony, a star athlete whose horndog father (Ed McMahon) insists he accompany him on a business trip to Romania. Locked out of their room, while daddy’s romancing a pair of Transylvanian hookers, Tony is ambushed by a werewolf and inherits the full-moon curse. Skip ahead 20 years and Tony is every bit as fresh-faced, athletic and handsome as he was when he split town to avoid revealing his sickness to his friends. He pretends to be his own son, but there’s no way to fool an old girlfriend. Full Moon High may not be able to bear more scrutiny than that, however.

Up in Smoke: 40th Anniversary Edition: Blu-ray
Cheech and Chong’s debut motion picture has been released, re-released and repackaged enough times for veteran stoners to have memorized lines and set up gags of their own as trip-wires for fellow potheads. For lots of Old Hippies, Up in Smoke is one of those movies that delivers new laughs no matter how many times they’ve seen it. It’s anyone’s guess, however, how well Lou Adler’s lucrative collaboration with Cheech & Chong will hold up at a time when pot is legal in a growing number of states, THC content can be adjusted to fit a smoker’s moods and no-smoke-toking threatens to put the Zig-Zag man into a retirement home. Paramount’s “Up in Smoke: 40th Anniversary Edition” carries over several featurettes from previous editions and anniversaries. It adds newly recorded interviews with the boys, reflecting on four decades of marijuana-enhanced memories. A special “Deluxe Edition” is also addition. If Adler’s name doesn’t ring a bell, he’s the geezer with courtside seats next to Jack Nicholson at every Lakers home game.

Condorito: The Movie
Tad, The Lost Explorer and the Secret of King Midas
Pinocchio
I don’t know if the popular Chilean comic-strip character, Condorito, shares any avian DNA with the Disney’s Jose Carioca, but their respective ages and geographical proximity to each other suggest that they might. The anthropomorphic Condorito was created by René Rios Boettiger (a.k.a., Pepo) in 1949, seven years after Uncle Walt’s “dapper Brazilian parrot” was introduced throughout the Americas in Saludos Amigos (1942). While Carioca appears to be enjoying semi-retirement at various Disney parks around the world, Condorito is still going strong throughout Latin America. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy Condorito: The Movie as much as I did. In the opening prologue, we learn that he’s a descendant of a “featherless condor” who saved humanity from an alien attack during pre-Columbian times, by stealing a powerful amulet that was used to enslave humans. The character leads a decidedly less heroic life, today, in the fictional village of Pelotillehue, where he’s something of a slacker. The aliens return in Condorito: The Movie to retrieve the amulet. When the aliens call Condorito to demand the talisman in exchange for anything he desires, he assumes it’s spam from wireless company. As a lark, he agrees to turn over the gem if they agree to take away his girlfriend’s overbearing mother, Tremebunda, which, of course, is just what happens. In one fell swoop, Condorito manages to alienate his girlfriend, Yayita, and promise to deliver an amulet he can’t find. And, even if he does locate it, the amulet would give the aliens the power to conquer the universe, so why bother? Condorito and his condor nephew, Cone, team up to find the amulet and rescue Treme without allowing the aliens to take over the universe. What’s a poor bird and his nephew to do? I was impressed by the first-class animation and sense of humor which occasionally shifts from kiddy-friendly to ribald.

From Spain, Tad, The Lost Explorer and the Secret of King Midas merges the dubious archeological skills of construction worker Tad Jones with the genuine ability of Sara Lavrof, as a renowned scientist and explorer. Imagine Indiana Jones and Lara Croft coming at their respective jobs from completely different skill levels. Two years after their last mission, Tad travels to Las Vegas to attend Sara’s presentation of her latest discovery: the papyrus that points to the existence and whereabouts of the Necklace of Midas. Their reunion will be clouded by an evil millionaire, who kidnaps Sara to find the necklace and gain infinite wealth. Along with his friends, the parrot (Belzoni) and his dog (Jeff), Tad will have to use his wit and limited stamina to rescue Sara, who could be anywhere. The animation isn’t bad. The story, however, sometimes gets bogged down attempting to balance elements designed to keep kids and adults interested.

Enzo d’Alo’s brilliantly colored take on Carlo Collodi’s classic novel, “Pinocchio,” finally arrives in the U.S., five years after it was nominated for top awards at the Annecy Cristal and European Film Awards ceremony. Reimagined for a new generation and bursting with songs, laughter and thrills, this witty adaptation includes new, rarely explored chapters of the story. Carved by the lonely woodcutter, Geppetto, who’s longing for a real son, playful Pinocchio is eager to do good and become human. Sadly, he keeps getting distracted from his quest. Constantly captured by con men, creatures and constables, he finds solace in the courtesy of the helpful souls who recognize the wooden puppet’s kind heart. Children already familiar with the Disney version might enjoy seeing how the rest of the world views the same lovable character.

TV-to-DVD
PBS: Masterpiece: The Child in Time: UK Edition
Adapted from Ian McEwan’s Whitbread Award-winning novel, “The Child In Time” (1987), the 90-minute installment of “Masterpiece” provides a splendid opportunity to watch two of our finest actors work together under extremely difficult emotional circumstances. Benedict Cumberbatch and Kelly Macdonald play Stephen and Julie Lewis, a highly accomplished British couple with few, if any dark clouds on their horizons. The sunshine disappears in an instant, when, while shopping, Stephen momentarily takes his eyes off their 4-year-old daughter, Kate, who’s sat down on the floor next to the checkout line to read a book. The very next thing he knows, Kate is gone for good. Julie is quick to accuse her husband of negligence, berating him mercilessly. Two years later, Kate is still missing, and her parents are completely estranged. They will both admit to catching sight of a little blond girl in a yellow coat, running behind a fence or vanishing in a crowd. It’s heartbreaking to watch, but, sadly, nothing completely out of the ordinary in our culture. Director Julian Farino (“Ballers”) and adapter Stephen Butchard (“The Last Kingdom”) throw the couple a lifeline, but it comes so late in the game that’s there’s no guarantee they’ll recognize it when it comes. I haven’t read the book, but it’s easy to see how other things that happen in the Lewis’ lives serve to undermine their stability even further. They include inexplicable changes in the personalities of close friends, coincidental apparitions and fractures in the time-space continuum. A potential girlfriend for Stephen is introduced, then ignored, and a potential sighting causes him to invade the classroom of an innocent little girl, who shares facial features with Kate. The mental breakdown of a longtime friend is well handled, but difficult to understand. Confused viewers may find their only recourse is to find a copy of the book and read it cover-to-cover, which isn’t the worst solution in the world.

As time runs out on a busy week of viewing DVDs, I’m only able to mention the titles of other fine shows newly available to those of us with broken VCRs. Also from PBS, they are “The New York Cantors”; “Understanding the Opioid Epidemic”; “The Last Rhino”; the “Secrets of the Dead” presentation, “Scanning the Pyramids”; from “NOVA,” “Black Hole Apocalypse” and “The Impossible Flight”; PBS Kids’s “WordWorld: Let’s Eat” and “Wild Kratts: Madagascar Madness”; and the Smithsonian Channel’s “Victorian Rebel: Marianne North.”