4K/UHD Release of the Week 

Zazie Beetz makes a formidable protagonist as Asia, a young woman at a mysterious Manhattan high-rise who skillfully fights for her life while searching for her younger sister, a maid there—Asia soon finds that the building and its inhabitants are part of a sacrificial satanic cult.

 

 

If this sounds insane, then wait until you watch it, as director-cowriter Kirill Sokolov piles on geysers and geysers of gore along with tongue-in-cheek battles royale that start to wear out their welcome. But it’s bizarre enough to stay with, and Beetz has the making a great action hero—although would anyone really want a sequel? It all looks even more blood-spatted in UHD; extras include on-set featurettes and interviews.

 

 

 

Streaming Releases of the Week

What starts as an obvious but effective satire as a group of tech company employees get together for a retreat soon devolves into a pointlessly ultraviolent screed that makes no sense and relies on unimaginative torture as it lumbers to its blood-soaked finale.

 

 

Director-writer Aaron Fisher and cowriter Kerri Lee Romeo seem to think that rewatching the same torture scenes will magically create some sort of blackly comic masterpiece; instead, I often thought about bailing altogether. Alan Ruck as an insane former CEO and Odeya Rush as one employee’s innocent girlfriend who turns out to be more resourceful than anyone else are the sole reasons to watch, if you can stomach the eye gougings, self-impalings, etc.

 

 

The Get Out 

In Derrick Borte’s diverting action flick, Albanian nightclub owner Kapak is held up by Jeff, a desperate college professor, who is then joined by bank teller (!) Carrie to hold him up again—and that’s not even mentioning the corrupt cop and undercover fed who are hovering around.

 

 

Forget the plot: what makes this watchable is the entertaining cast, led by the hilarious Nina Dobrev as Carrie, Aaron Paul as Jeff, Russell Crowe as the heavily accented Kapak, the always underrated Teresa Palmer as Kapak’s girlfriend and Luke Evans as the fed. 

In-Theater Release of the Week

American poet Mary Oliver’s journey into literary history is chronicled in Sasha Waters’ absorbing and sympathetically documentary, which takes her more seriously than the literary establishment did once she became the most popular poet in the country.

 

 

Waters marshals the forces in the pro-Oliver (who died in 2019 at age 83) camp, including celebrity friends and admirers like John Waters, Oprah Winfrey, Helena Bonham Carter and even Stephen Colbert, the latter who is so taken with Oliver’s poetry that he cannot get through reciting it twice without getting emotional and stopping.  

 

 

 

Blu-ray Release of the Week 

When Egypt’s most famous actor George Fahmy is forced by the regime to star in a propaganda film, he finds himself in even more danger when he starts an affair with the gorgeous wife of the general who is producing the project in director-writer Tarik Saleh’s often amusingly jaundiced satire.

 

 

It’s a film that’s only hamstrung by its length—a good 20 minutes could have been shorn, especially when toward the end it starts to repeat itself. Still, it’s well-acted by a large cast led by Fares Fares as Fahmy and makes pointed observations about cinema and politics throughout. The film looks good on Blu; unfortunately, there are no extras.

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week

French composer Mel (Mélanie) Bonis (1858-1937) is one of those musical names that’s rarely heard, since her contemporaries were men (of course) like Fauré, Debussy, Chausson, and César Franck—but the latter was impressed with her enough to teach her privately. Bonis left behind a huge catalog of more than 300 works in every genre, and this excellent disc consists of nine of her many works for orchestra.

 

 

Leading off with the atmospheric Trois femmes de légende—brief musical portraits of Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s Ophelia, and Salome—the disc also includes several attractive suites and dances and ends, appropriately, with three lovely songs for female voices, including the final one for soprano, mezzo and women’s choir. Joseph Bastian leads the WDR Symphony Orchestra in sensitive readings of these unfairly obscure works.