Every Tuesday, discriminating viewers are confronted with a flurry of choices: new releases on disc and on-demand, vintage and original movies on any number of streaming platforms, catalog titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This weekly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.
This week, we’ve got two late-2019 releases that didn’t get their due in the year-end mudslide, plus a sharp bio-documentary, one of the previous decade’s best action flicks, and an undervalued late-period entry from one cinema’s true masters.
READ MORE: Steven Soderbergh Signs Exclusive Deal With HBO/HBO Max
Let’s take a look!
ON NETFLIX:
“Haywire”: When Steven Soderbergh’s iteration of “Moneyball” fell apart, he found himself desperate to move his energies into another project. One night, he found himself watching an MMA match on television, and wondering if Gina Carano might be a movie star. So he built this breathtakingly entertaining 2012 action/spy flick around the acting novice, and one of its many pleasures is watching the ace filmmaker deconstruct the modern action movie, stripping the bloated theatrics of the genre down to their basics: running, jumping, shooting, and most of all, fighting. He refuses to over-edit or slather the action in music; we’re watching an athlete in these scenes, and Soderbergh, like the viewer, can’t help but regard her with awe.
ON PBS.ORG:
“Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool”: “I’ve always been the way I am,” Miles Davis says. “Been like this all my life. If anyone wants to be about creating, they have to be about change.” Those words are from his autobiography, voiced here by Carl Lumbly, and having Miles himself narrate this bio-doc, giving it his particular, puncturing growl, is a masterstroke; it makes us take the movie, and the artist, on his own terms. “Birth of the Cool” is at its best at its most freewheeling – director Stanley Nelson will occasionally pause the biography to just talk about his music, his style, his sound – but even at its most rote, this is a fascinating and informative study of this one-of-a-kind artist, and how he made (and remade) his art.
ON 4K / BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
“Queen & Slim”: “Well, if it ain’t the black Bonnie and Clyde,” quips Uncle Earl (Bokeem Woodbine), with a line that was picked up by no small number of critics and reporters about Melina Matsoukas’s lovers-on-the-run movie. But here’s the twist: the crime that incites the action happens on, quite literally, their first date (and not much of one), so it’s less a story of lovers on the run than barely-acquaintances on the run. That tension gives the picture its freshness and life; these two spend much of the first half on each other’s nerves, so the eventual romance feels more earned, and like less of a given. Matsoukas mounts the set pieces with real skill (the remarkable opening sequence beautifully conveys a palpable sense of quiet, bubbling panic), and while its runs a bit long and makes some sketchy choices in the home stretch, Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith are top-notch in the title roles, and the closing scene is absolutely heart-wrenching. (Includes audio commentary and featurettes.)
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
“Dark Waters”: Todd Haynes’ latest came and went without much fanfare late last year, which is a line I never thought I’d write – but it’s understandable, as this Mark Ruffalo vehicle was made, in marketing, to look like just another corporate whistleblower tale, the quintessential independent director making an “Erin Brockovich”–style stab at middlebrow success. But there’s a much richer, bleaker film inside the traditional packaging, a horrifying story of malfeasance and disregard that couldn’t land on a happy ending if Haynes wanted one (and he doesn’t). Strong performances across the board, but Ruffalo is particularly striking, fiercely rising to the opportunity to merge his political interests with his day job. (Includes featurettes.)
ON BLU-RAY
“Kansas City”: Robert Altman roared back to life in the early 1990s with the furious one-two punch of “The Player” and “Short Cuts,” but much of his later work was strangely undervalued – it was as if, now that he had been “rehabilitated,” he was then swiftly taken for granted. Exhibit A is this moody, punchy, Depression-era jazz-and-gangsters flick from 1996 (new on Blu from Arrow Video), which gives us such unmatched pleasures as Harry Belafonte playing a smooth-talking mob boss, Jennifer Jason Leigh as a hoodlum’s moll, Steve Buscemi as a squirrely thief, and a peerless jazz ensemble absolutely crushing it in scene after scene, providing a snazzy running underscore for one of Altman’s most underrated pictures. (Includes audio commentary, featurettes, interviews, and trailers.)