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.
Two of the best indie films of 2020 make their way onto disc and VOD this week, alongside a quietly affecting documentary, a frantic comedy/drama, a couple of sterling catalog releases, and a Criterion edition of the latest Scorsese and Dylan collaboration.
ON AMAZON PRIME:
“Give Me Liberty”: The entire first hour of Kirill Mikhanovsky’s dark comedy is pitched at an “Uncut Gems” level of nervous tension, as a luckless medical transport driver (Chris Galust) desperately to do his job and call a few audibles along the way, watching each one domino into another disaster. It’s a frankly stressful experience, so it’s a relief when Mikhanovsky slows down (a bit) to let us get to know its characters and their conflicts a bit better. The relentless pace and general ugliness will put a fair number of viewers off, but not this one; it’s a wild, unruly picture, taking its rhythms and cues from everyday life rather than a million other movies.
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / MUBI:
“Martin Eden”: “My force is fearsome,” Martin Eden writes, “as long as I have the power of my words.” It’s something of a matter of self-actualization – if he tells himself enough, perhaps it will come true – and the director Pietro Marcello seems to subscribe to the same philosophy in this audacious, ambitious, and frequently brilliant adaptation of Jack London’s novel. Marcello transposes the action from the Oakland of the original novel to his native Italy, adroitly plugging in to the class struggles and artistic impossibilities of the era; he also replicates and reanimates the look and feel of vintage Italian cinema, to stunning effect. Yet still, beyond the transpositions and flourishes, he retains the heart of London’s work, and the timeless, placeless feeling of struggling to advance one’s station – as well as the compromises that often entails. (Includes audio commentary, interview, Q&A, and trailer.) (Also streaming on MUBI.)
ON BLU-RAY / DVD / NETFLIX:
“Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese”: When Bob Dylan insists “I don’t remember a thing about Rolling Thunder!” early in this documentary account of his 1975-1976 tour, we should have believed him. The rambling, long-running roadshow was mounted in the spirit “a con man, carny medicine show of old” (per Allen Ginsberg, one of the friends and collaborators who came along for the ride), so in that spirit of snake oil and flim-flammery, director Martin Scorsese cheerfully intertwines fact and fiction, so that the film gets into the spirit of the tour, in which Dylan and company made their own folk myths and tall tales. Dazzlingly entertaining and wryly funny, with some of the best performance footage of Dylan’s career. (Includes additional performance footage, interviews, restoration demonstration, trailer, essay by Dana Spiotta, and writings by Sam Shepard, Ginsberg, and Anne Waldman.) (Also streaming on Netflix.)
ON DVD / VOD:
“The Climb”: There is a moment about 2/3 of the way through this tense comedy/drama in which one of the protagonists’ lives is in danger – and it seems genuinely plausible that they might kill him. That gives you some idea of the stakes co-star/co-writers Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin establish here; the entire film, a story of betrayal and recovery in a long-running friendship, is the kind of highwire act where you keep waiting for them to fall, and somehow, miraculously, they don’t. Unfolding as a series of tragicomic vignettes (directed by Covino with a stylishness that transcends the pitfalls of the typical, talky cringe comedy), it’s sometimes strange, sometimes sad, and frequently funny, albeit with the kind of laughter that always stings. (Includes audio commentary, original short film, and deleted and alternate scenes.)
“Born to Be”: Tania Cypriano crafts a sensitive, thoughtful, and valuable portrait of Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery – and specifically the work of Dr. Jess Ting, the center’s charismatic and innovative chief surgeon. Cypriano splits the running time between Ting and a handful of his patients, as they tell the stories of how they got to this point in their lives and where they hope to go, and the approach works. And the film is thankfully just as tuned in to the complexities of these procedures; these stories don’t end when they leave the hospital, and the endings that follow aren’t always as happy as you might hope. But they’re all treated as complicated, unique individuals, a courtesy extended by the film if not always by the world it documents. (Includes deleted scenes and trailer.)
ON BLU-RAY:
“Joint Security Area”: Before “Oldboy” or “Stoker” or “The Handmaiden,” Korean master Park Chan-wook helmed this military thriller that’s closer to “A Few Good Men” than the kind of intense action films on which he’d make his name. Lee Young-ae (later of his “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance”) stars as a neutral investigator of a murder on the South/North Korean border. Her job is to find out “not who, but why”; that “whydunit” mystery spirit extends to the construction of the narrative, which opens (enigmatically) with the event in question but then revisits it, “Rashomon”-style, with differing tilts and interpretations, complicating the backstory considerably. The requirements of the genre mean that we don’t see much of what was to come from this filmmaker – except for his already impressive ability to craft a motion picture with precision and intelligence, which is, to put it mildly, not nothin’. (Includes audio commentary, new interviews, archival interviews and introductions, music videos, isolated music and effects track, trailers, and essay by Kieran Fisher.)
“After the Thin Man”: Believe it or not, once upon a time, every single successful motion picture did not automatically warrant the franchise treatment, and it’s sort of adorable how this, the first sequel to the hit 1934 comedy/mystery, had to explain the concept to audiences (see the trailer below – “A Brand-New ‘Thin Man’ Adventure… That Starts Where The Other Left Off!”). But they were right to keep it going; the chemistry between stars William Powell and Myrna Loy remains clock-stopping, the mystery is sharp, the jokes land like good jabs, and the supporting cast is tip-top (particularly a young James Stewart, already exploring the complexities of his “aw shucks” persona). (Includes short film, cartoon, radio adaptations, and trailer.)