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Film and the Arts
May '25 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 22 May 2025 01:28
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Film Series of the Week
Kira Muratova—Scenographies of Chaos
(Film at Lincoln Center, NYC)
One of Ukraine’s greatest directors, Kira Muratova toiled for much of her career under the oppressive Soviet system, and several of her films, pre-Glasnost, were banned or suppressed for years, even decades. This near-exhaustive survey of 16 of her features, made between 1964 and 2012 (she died in 2018 at age 83), shows Muratova as an uncompromising artist whose work artfully dissects quotidian lives with a pinpoint scalpel.
Her early classics Brief Encounters (1967) and The Long Farewell (1971) are messy in the best way, mirroring her female protagonists’ unstable personal and public lives. The Asthenic Syndrome, Muratova’s 1989 international breakthrough, is a profoundly cutting critique of the USSR’s last days told through her dazzling formalist technique. Some Muratova films will be released by Criterion, but to see them on the big screen, visit the Walter Reade Theater by May 25.
(Film Movement Plus)
Vicente Aranda—the best post-Bunuel Spanish director after Carlos Saura—made artfully erotic explorations of female sexuality for several decades (he died in 2015 at age 88). Film Movement Plus has resurrected a quartet of his films, a grab bag of his work that showcases his singular mix of seriousness, sleaziness and potent political commentary. The Girl in the Yellow Panties (1980) introduces a former Francoist writer who’s beguiled by his sexy young niece (played by Aranda’s muse, the great Victoria Abril, in one of her first—and most memorable—roles).
Abril returns majestically in Lovers (1991), an absorbing true-life adultery drama a la The Postman Always Rings Twice, as a widowed landlord who seduces her young tenant as he tries to navigate pre-married life with his virginal fiancée (Maribel Verdu, another superb Spanish actress in one of her earliest starring roles). The other two Aranda films, 1994’s The Turkish Passion and 1998’s The Naked Eye, are like late-night Cinemax softcore flicks distinguished by Aranda’s precise direction and the performances of his leading ladies Ana Belén (Turkish Passion) and Laura Morante (Naked Eye).
In-Theater Releases of the Week
The Kiss
(Juno Films/World Wide Motion Pictures Corporation)
Director Bille August, who made masterly character studies like Pelle the Conqueror and The Best Intentions early in his career, made a late-career classic with A Fortunate Man in 2018, while his latest, an adaptation of German/Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s only novel, is a well-mounted bittersweet romance between an army officer and a crippled but beautiful and headstrong woman.
It’s beautifully shot, compellingly acted and keeps one engaged from start to finish, but August allows a certain sentimentality to creep in that’s not present in Zweig’s more tough-minded novel, and the result is less than the sum of its considerable parts.
(Strand Releasing)
Norwegian writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud’s triptych about forms of nontraditional intimacy—titled Love, Sex, and Dreams—comprises standalone works that can be seen in any order; the first being shown here, Love, introduces two colleagues at an Oslo hospital: Marianne, a single straight doctor, and Tor, a single gay nurse, who have conversations about pursuing sexual gratification without love or personal attachments.
Although a fascinating philosophical exercise, Haugerud’s film never achieves any emotional or dramatic resonance since it feels that the director is randomly moving his pieces on a chessboard, with little that’s organic or truly felt in the relationships or character motivation. It will be interesting to see if the other two films can avoid this self-inflicted impediment.
4K/UHD Releases of the Week
Dune Prophecy
(Warner Bros)
The Dune franchise, starting with Frank Herbert’s books, seems the most self-important and humorless of all sci-fi/fantasy worlds, and this prequel—which takes place more than 10,000 years (!) before the events of the original Dune—is another example.
It focuses on the women of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, who foretell the birth of hero Paul Atreides, but—at least in this six-episode telling—the dourness and violence of the protagonists (embodied without much distinction by eminent performers like Emily Watson and Olivia Williams) are dramatized with po-faced inscrutability. The UHD image looks excellent; extras are the featurette Building Worlds and five Behind the Veil featurettes.
(Warner Bros)
Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up to his ham-fisted but Oscar-winning Parasite is a sci-fi story set in 2054 during a space expedition where our eponymous hero is an “expendable,” taking on dangerous jobs and being cloned every time he dies. It’s a strangely inert, even risible black comedy that purloins Edward Ashton’s underlying novel (pointedly titled Mickey 7) to little effect but stultifying repetition. Bong’s direction—despite accomplished cinematography, editing, sets and costumes—is plodding and his actors follow suit, particularly a sleepy Robert Pattinson as Mickey and hammy Mark Ruffalo and Toni Colette as the colony’s leaders. The film looks quite impressive in UHD; extras comprise several on-set featurettes.
CD Release of the Week
Weinberg—Complete Music for Cello and Orchestra
(Naxos)
Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-96) died before his musical renaissance began with his emotionally shattering Holocaust opera The Passenger, several productions of which were soon followed by the dozens of recordings of his varied orchestral and chamber music. His symphonies and string quartets took precedence in several of these releases, his modest but still significant output of orchestral music for cello gets a hearing on this satisfying disc.
The Concertino for Cello and String Orchestra is an enticing run-through for his weighty Cello Concerto, which is one of Weinberg’s most eloquent large-scale pieces; rounding out this recording is the enchanting Fantasia. Cello soloist Nikolay Shugaev performs impressively, backed by the solid Tyumen Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Yuri Medianik.
Broadway Play Review—“The Picture of Dorian Gray” with Sarah Snook
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 15 May 2025 02:56
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Based on the novel by Oscar Wilde
Adapted and directed by Kip Williams
Performances through June 29, 2025
Music Box Theatre, 239 West 45th Street, New York, NY
doriangrayplay.com
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| Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray (photo: Marc Brenner) |
Sarah Snook gives an impressive tour de force of a performance in Kip Williams’ busy and basically anti-Wilde adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Williams has 26 characters in his script and Snook plays them all, many through technological tricks that allow her to play off herself in several roles, as screens show her pre-filmed portrayals of peripheral characters in the familiar story of a young man who wishes for his own portrait to age while he remains young—which happens to his initial enjoyment but later madness.
Using onstage cameras and onscreen video has been on our stages for awhile now, with varying degrees of success or irritation by the likes of Ivan van Hove. Williams joins the fray with his willing and able accomplice—for nearly two hours, Snook jumps in and out of various clothes, shoes, facial hair, wigs, accents. Williams’ staging would seem to be the perfect way to visualize Wilde’s themes of the meaning of art and beauty as well as the perils of vanity and narcissism.
Indeed, it’s initially great fun to watch Snook morph into the selfish young Dorian, the principled painter Basil Hallward and the pleasure-seeking Lord Henry, among many others. It’s also entertaining to watch the behind-the-scenes quick changes occur right onstage with the agile assistance of a half-dozen crew members who brandish cameras as well as paraphernalia Snook uses onstage like a cigarette or drink.
But that fun soon wears out its welcome and the show becomes trying, even enervating at times, as Williams favors cleverness and technology over the elegance and terrifying clarity of Wilde’s story. As bodies start piling up while Dorian indulges in every manner of hedonism and his portrait grows progressively more hideous to mirror his lifestyle, there’s very little of Wilde’s thematic cohesiveness that culminates in a perfectly pitched ironic ending. Instead, we watch Snook alternately overact and underplay several characters as crew members run around the stage with their cameras.
The opening shows Snook quickly becoming several characters in front of our eyes—and the cameras—but that’s merely a tease as the rest of the play pairs the onstage performer with her onscreen image, reaching its apex (or nadir) when several onscreen Snooks attend a dinner party alongside the stage performer. Williams and his talented crew have turned a classic piece of 19th-century Gothic horror into a buzzy 21st-century event, where everything that still makes Wilde’s story hauntingly relevant has been replaced by the superficial pleasures that are Dorian’s downfall.
May '25 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 08 May 2025 03:22
- Written by Kevin Filipski
4K/UHD Release of the Week
Dirty Harry
(Warner Bros)
When Clint Eastwood introduced his maverick San Francisco detective Harry Callahan to audiences in 1971, the “shoot first and never ask questions” approach was thought problematic and even fascist—and, indeed, the four sequels were even worse.
Still, the first film, efficiently directed by Don Siegel on photogenic Bay Area locations and filled with Harry’s witticisms while taking down bad guys (“’Do I feel lucky?’—Well, do you, punk?”) remains a diverting genre picture. The UHD transfer is first-rate; extras are Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel’s commentary along with vintage and new featurettes.
Bonjour Tristesse
(Greenwich Entertainment)
Durga Chew-Bose’s debut feature is a sun-dappled but dark story about teenage Cécile, her widowed father Raymond, his younger girlfriend Elsa and his longtime friend Anne, the latter appearing at their French villa during a summer sojourn to upset the precarious balance among them.
Based on Françoise Sagan’s famous novel—previously made into a film in 1958 by Otto Preminger starring Jean Seberg, David Niven and Deborah Kerr—Chew-Bose’s adaptation is fastidious and well-acted (particularly by Lily McInerny as Cécile and Naïlia Harzoune as Elsa) but overly studied and curiously inert, never reaching the emotional depth it strives for.
The Surfer
(Roadside Attractions)
Even by the standards of outlandish Nicolas Cage vehicles, this latest one, directed by Lorcan Finnegan and written by Thomas Martin—and set in Australia, where Cage plays a dutiful father hoping to introduce his teenage son to the wonders of surfing where he grew up, only to find himself in nightmarish encounters with locals that leave him homeless, carless and fighting for his sanity—is so ridiculous it plays like a parody of Cage flicks.
Still, despite its imbecile and ham-fisted depiction of toxic masculinity, the viewer shouldn’t bail because Cage invests himself so heavily in this risible role that it’s like stopping to watch a car wreck on the side of the road.
The Gullspång Miracle
(Film Movement)
Maria Frederiksson’s portrait of Norwegian sisters and a family full of secrets has so many twists and turns that you might be forgiven for thinking it’s all a put-on, a mockumentary—but the emotional rollercoaster the three women go on after discovering they might be related after not knowing about each other for decades would be laughable if it was written as fiction.
Frederiksson at times seems to be stumped about whether she too has been taken for a ride but by continuing to film—and presenting solid if circumstantial evidence of a unsolved crime—she has made a mesmerizing, frustrating, compelling, blackly humorous documentary.
Blu-ray Release of the Week
The Human Pyramid/The Punishment
(Icarus Films)
Jean Rouch (1917-2004), the French anthropologist and director, was among the first practitioners of cinéma verité and explored relationships among people of different ethnicities and societies, as witness this fascinating—and in many ways still relevant—double feature.
1961’s The Human Pyramid follows a group of students in an Ivory Coast high school who are asked by Rouch to enact an interracial drama; the shocking ending is recorded by Rouch’s probing camera. The following year’s The Punishment follows a young French girl, sent home from school, who must deal with unwanted and systematic misogyny. Both films have quite good hi-def transfers.
Janáček—Jenůfa
(LSO Live)
The first wave of Czech composer Leoš Janáček’s great operas were centered on a trio of tragic heroines: together with Káťa Kabanová and The Makropulos Case, which followed it, Jenůfa is a grimly involving music drama, as this 2024 recording by the London Symphony Orchestra at Barbican Hall triumphantly demonstrates.
Swedish soprano Agneta Eichenholz plays the demanding title role with sensitivity and intelligence, Swedish mezzo Katarina Karnéus is equally powerful as Kostelnička, her stepmother, and LSO Conductor Emeritus Simon Rattle leads the orchestra and chorus in a gripping account of Janáček’s intense score.
Wagner— Der fliegende Holländer
(Decca)
Richard Wagner’s first mature opera, Der fliegende Holländer is also one of his most musically and dramatically accessible works, and the straightforward story of how love can be redemptive works beautifully with some of Wagner’s loveliest music.
Although there is some bumpiness in the musical passages, Edward Gardner ably leads the orchestra and chorus of the Norwegian National Opera, and the central roles of the Dutchman and Senta are wonderfully sung, respectively, by Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley and the great Norwegian soprano, Lise Davidsen.
Soprano Nina Stemme Performs at Carnegie Hall
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 07 May 2025 17:38
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Photo by Stephanie Berger
At the wonderful Stern Auditorium, on the night of Friday, May 2nd, I had the exceptional pleasure to attend a terrific recital—presented by Carnegie Hall—featuring the magnificent, Swedish soprano Nina Stemme—her astonishing performance in the title role of Richard Strauss’s glorious Ariadne auf Naxos at the Metropolitan Opera in 2010 is possibly the greatest theatrical experience that I have ever had—expertly accompanied by pianist Roland Pöntinen.
The event started strongly with a marvelous rendition of Edward Elgar’s wonderful Sea Pictures, Op. 37, which consists of five parts beginning with “Sea Slumber Song,” which is set to a beautiful poem by Roden Noel. The striking lyric for the next song, “In Haven,” was written by the composer’s wife, Caroline Alice Elgar. The third song, “Sabbath Morning at Sea,” has the one text in the set written by a canonical poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The following song, “Where Corals Lie,” is also based on an excellent poem by a distinguished author, Richard Garnett. The final song, “The Swimmer,” is of less literary interest but is nonetheless an equally compelling achievement in the genre.
Stemme then brilliantly performed four extraordinary songs by Kurt Weill, the first two set to texts by Bertolt Brecht, beginning with “Surabaya Johnny”—which was famously interpreted by Marlene Dietrich—from the musical Happy End—which was adapted from the same Damon Runyon story as Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls—and succeeded by “Nannas Lied.” The second two were French songs, starting with “Je ne t’aime pas,” which preceded “Youkali”—which, according to the program note by Janet E. Bedell, had its source as “an instrumental interlude for Jacques Deval’s French play Marie Galante” and was rediscovered by Teresa Stratas for her 1981 album, The Unknown Kurt Weill.
The second half of the evening, devoted to music by Richard Wagner, was as memorable if not more so, opening with the exquisite Wesendonck Lieder: “Stehe still!”, “Der Engel,” “Im Treibhaus,” “Schmerzen,” and most indelibly of all, the magisterial “Träume,” which for me inevitably recalls Luchino Visconti’s immortal film, Ludwig. The concert concluded with the stunning Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, in the arrangement by Franz Liszt. Enthusiastic applause for this incomparable artist elicited two fabulous encores: first, the superb "Var det en dröm?," Op. 37, No. 4, by Jean Sibelius, a setting of a text in Swedish by the 19th-century Finnish poet and dramatist, Josef Julius Wecksell; and, finally, Weill’s enchanting “My Ship”—with lyrics by Ira Gershwin—from the celebrated musical Lady in the Dark, written by Moss Hart.
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