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.
Another week, another Netflix teen romantic comedy – but this time, plot twist, a very good one. Elsewhere on the streamers, we’ve got a fanciful bit of historical fiction and the breakthrough film for one of your faves. And on the disc front, we’ve got a big Blu-ray upgrade from Criterion, plus two ripe-for-rediscovery ‘60s dramas and two new volumes of Kino Lorber’s essential exploitation movie history.
Take a dive!
ON NETFLIX:
“The Half of It”: Alice Wu’s contemporary riff on “Cyrano de Bergerac” – or, more accurately, a more contemporary riff on “Roxanne” – is an absolute charmer, anchored by the charisma and chemistry of its key performers (Leah Lewis, Daniel Diemer, and Alexxis Lemire). But credit is also due to the ingenuity of this update; in addition to the expected technological advances (ghost-dating is much easier when you can text), Wu also cleverly plays with gender and fluidity, raising the stakes and creating that rarest of beasts, a true love triangle.
ON AMAZON PRIME:
“The Cat’s Meow”: Peter Bogdanovich, one of the last true raconteurs, finally has a podcast – and, as if on cue, Prime has added one of his most entertaining explorations of Hollywood history. Inspired by one of Tinsel Town’s great unsolved mysteries, the 1924 death of film producer Thomas Ince on William Randolph Hearst’s yacht, Bogdanovich and screenwriter Steven Peros weave a what-if narrative that includes not only Hearst (Edward Herrmann, in the role he was born to play) but his mistress Marion Davies (Kirsten Dunst, pitch-perfect), Charles Chaplin (a wonderful Eddie Izzard), and more. It’s all conjecture, of course, but done in high style and with a real affection for the period.
ON HULU:
“Slums of Beverly Hills”: Those who didn’t know the score on Natasha Lyonne until “Russian Doll” are in for a treat with Hulu’s recent addition of this, her breakthrough film, a 1998 coming-of-age comedy from writer/director Tamara Jenkins. Lyonne is marvelous as Vivian, a young woman whose sketchy dad (Alan Arkin, terrific) moves their family through a series of dumpy rental apartments on the edge of the Beverly Hills school district. Jenkins gets the mid-‘70s period details just right, but more than that, she remembers what it is to be a teenager, uncomfortable in your skin, your school, and the whole damn world.
ON THE CRITERION CHANNEL / BLU-RAY:
“Six Moral Tales”: Eric Rohmer’s ten-year cycle of two shorts (“The Bakery Girl of Monceau,” “Suzanne’s Career”) and four features (“The Collector,” “My Night at Maud’s,” “Claire’s Knee,” “Love in the Afternoon”) – new on Blu from the Criterion Collection – tracks the filmmaker’s considerable growth, as a stylist and a storyteller. The early films are firmly entrenched in the French New Wave, and though they’re as engaging as the best of those films, it’s exhilarating to watch those devices fall away as Rohmer finds his own voice. Yet certain touches are in place from the beginning: a candidly personal perspective, a clear sense of place, a complex world view, and a way of crafting stories that feel observed rather than manipulated. (Also streaming on The Criterion Channel.)
ON BLU-RAY:
“A Thousand Clowns”: Jason Robards reprised his leading role in Herb Gardner’s Broadway play for this 1965 film adaptation (new on Blu from KL Studio Classics), with director Fred Coe making extravagant use of New York City exteriors, as many a filmmaker would, to “open it up.” But the floodgates of NYC filmmaking were juuuuust creaking open, so there’s a genuine sense of energy and excitement to the location photography, and the hustle of the city it captures. But that’s a secondary attraction – the draw here are the performances, with Robards in typically fine form as the Peter Pan-ish protagonist, and Martin Balsam in an Oscar-winning turn as his practical (but buzzkill) brother. (Includes interview and trailer.)
“Me, Natalie”: When this 1969 Patty Duke vehicle is remembered at all, it’s remembered as the feature debut of Al Pacino, who pops up early and briefly as a fast-talking dance-floor Romeo who briefly contemplates picking up our heroine. He’s a jolt of electricity, and the movie (also new from KL) needs it. A fairly inane melodrama about the woes of the Ugly Girl, the filmmakers hilariously insist that Duke is some kind of hideous mutant because they’ve put big false teeth on her. But she does some fine acting, and the picture improves markedly in the second half, when she shakes off her surroundings and makes a new live for herself as a hip, chic Greenwich Village chick.
“Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of Exploitation, Vol. 4” / “Vol. 5”: Earlier this spring, Kino Lorber released the first three volumes of their “Forbidden Fruit” series, delivering what they promised: well preserved (for once) examples of the kind of drug-scare pictures, sex “education” movies, and nudist colony epics that worked the exploitation circuit, offering plenty of vicarious thrills before the third-act moralizing. “Marihuana” and “Narcotic,” featured on volume four, are very much in the vein of “Reefer Madness” from the earlier volumes, dramatizing (often in comically inaccurate detail) how a mere taste of illicit substances sends one down the path to sex, murder, and more. Volume five features two even wilder features: “Tomorrow’s Children,” a rather stilted medical drama arguing the case for and against eugenic sterilization, and “Child Bride,” which, I’m afraid, is indeed a backwoods story of a schoolteacher “preachin’ about marryin’ our yung’uns.” These films, to be clear, aren’t good in the traditional sense – but they offer a fascinating glimpse in to the kind of material into which filmmakers had to smuggle the goods for their curious, off-kilter, or just plain horny audiences. (Includes audio commentaries, trailers, short films, and film clips.)