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 biweekly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.
Charlie Kaufman is back to rearrange your brain, Kelly Reichardt is back to reconfigure your toxic masculinity, Universal is back to sell you those Hitchcock movies all over again (and they will), and Criterion is back to see you those Jules Dassin movies all over again (ditto).
READ MORE: The Essentials: The Surreal Films Of Charlie Kaufman
All that, and more, is at your fingertips this week, so let’s get cracking:
ON NETFLIX:
“I’m Thinking of Ending Things”: “Someone has to be a pig infested with maggots, right? Might as well be you.” That is, somehow, one of the closing grace notes of Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of Ian Reid’s novel, in which that most established of rituals, the trip to meet the parents, goes awry in ways both expected and inexplicable. The big family dinner is a horror movie – emotional horror, as fraught and unsettling as a slasher film – but Kaufman is up to much more than domestic discomfort, using brutalist framing and cutting to keep the viewer just off-balance enough for the occasional sucker punch. It’s beautiful, bizarre, upsetting, and inexplicable; in other words, Netflix got just what they should’ve expected from a Charlie Kaufman film.
ON HBO MAX:
“Class Action Park”: After a while, the detailed descriptions of the dubiously designed and shoddily built rides of Action Park, a New Jersey water and motor park of the ‘70s and ‘80s, begin to feel like a comically one-upping act of hyperbole – the “Aristocrats” of theme parks. But directors Chris Charles Scott and Seth Porges tell their tale with the required complexity. They giggle at the shoddiness of the enterprise (and its patrons – there are more mullets per minute than any motion picture in recent memory), and energetically embrace and recreate the fuzzy analog aesthetic of the period. But they also properly place their story in the cultural, political, and sociological context of the decade, as well as the timeless idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy; stern warnings and horrified reporting only made the danger of this dirtbag destination seem more alluring.
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / VOD:
“First Cow”: Kelly Reichardt again plunges us into a period-dress story of American frontier history, anchored in spontaneity and timeless concerns. The title creature, the first such animal in the area, is a point of pride for a rich landowner (Toby Jones); its milk becomes a stand-in for the simple pleasures and other extravagancies that seem just barely out of everyone else’s reach. Deliberate and methodical yet warm and funny, “First Cow” is a deeply humanist piece of work – note the insight and demystification this female director brings to her story of primitive, grizzled men, glowering and growling at each other, then scrapping messily at the drop of a hat. She sees things they don’t, and after sitting with her for a while, so do we.
ON 4K:
“The Alfred Hitchcock Classics Collection”: Some labels throw the word “classic” around pretty loosely, but kudos to Universal for truth in advertising: this new box set features 4K Blu-rays for “Rear Window,” “Vertigo,” “Psycho,” and “The Birds,” indisputably four of the highlights of Hitchcock’s mind-boggling career. The discs look gorgeous and the transfers are impeccable, but the real draw, of course, are the movies – a master working at the peak of his powers, with limitless resources, creating films that both explore his (and many of our) psychological preoccupations while simultaneously entertaining mass audiences. Few filmmakers have done it since; even fewer have done it this well. (Includes audio commentaries, new and archival interviews, featurettes, trailers, storyboards, screen tests, deleted scenes, and the original, extended cut of “Psycho.”)
“The Goonies”: No name in cinema was as golden in the summer of 1985 as Steven Spielberg’s, and the strength of his brand was on full display here; the director was Richard Donner and the writer was Chris Columbus, but both are clearly drawing on the spirit of executive producer Spielberg’s kid-centric suburban storytelling with this adventure of buried treasure, hard-boiled criminals, and evil developers. It hasn’t all aged well – those kids sure do yell a lot – but Donner marshals the chaos with style, and the ensemble cast (including Sean Astin, Martha Plimpton, Corey Feldman, and Josh Brolin, all babies) shines. (Includes audio commentary, featurette, outtakes, music video, and trailer.)
“Beetlejuice”: Tim Burton’s sophomore feature may be the purest (or at least, most watchable) distillation of his sensibilities and aesthetic – a broad, goofy, goth haunted house comedy, sending up both small-town life and insufferable New York artists. When it hit theaters in 1988, the buzz was mostly centered on Michael Keaton (though he has less screen time than you probably remember); in 2020, its primary delights are the birth of the Winona Ryder persona and Catherine O’Hara developing the prototype for Moira Rose. It is, as ever, kind of a mess. But it’s fun to watch Burton crank it up and let it go. (Includes theatrical trailer and three episodes of the “Beetlejuice” animated series.)
ON BLU-RAY:
“The Naked City”: If you have a favorite police procedural – anything from “Dragnet” to “The French Connection” to “Law & Order” – you can probably trace it back to Jules Dassin’s 1948 crime drama (getting the Blu-ray upgrade, along with Dassin’s “Brute Force,” from Criterion). Filmmakers and showrunners are still engaging in the conventions it forged: documentary-style location shooting (all but unheard of in that backlot-centered era), “ripped from the headlines” premise (it was based on the real-life murder of a model), and the central pairing of a wise older detective (the great Barry Fitzgerald) and a naïve rookie (Don Taylor). Yet the familiarity of these elements doesn’t make it a slog; Dassin’s filmmaking is so vibrant, you catch a whiff of the excitement he gets from creating this new form. (Includes audio commentary, archival interviews, featurettes, and an essay by Luc Sante.)
“Brute Force”: Dassin first teamed with “Naked City” producer Mark Hellinger for this furiously hardboiled and ruthlessly malevolent prison drama, starring Burt Lancaster (all the way rough and tumble) as a prisoner trying to organize a dangerous escape. Richard Brooks’ screenplay indulges in the expected colorful characters and jailhouse jargon, but is equally fascinated with the petty politics that drive this place, and those who run it. Sweaty, sneering, and intense, with the kind of nihilistic worldview (and accordant conclusion) that still packs a wallop. (Includes audio commentary, archival interviews, featurette, trailer, and an essay by Michael Atkinson.)