Joey Magidson
Welcome back to my Home Movies! This week, we don’t have a lot of new releases to sift through, so Bring Her Back kind of takes top honors by default. Today also features a bunch of 4K re-releases, as well as a pair of Criterion Collection debuts. So, it’s hardly an empty slate, even if it is a bit of a thin one. Read on for more…
Joey’s Top Pick
Bring Her Back
Sally Hawkins is the reason to see Bring Her Back, which is why I’m willing to make it my top pick, despite not being high on the film itself. Hawkins elevates the movie with a committed performance that showcases some very complicated emotions. I got a lot out of her, even if the flick didn’t give me much else to work with. This here is what I said about Hawkins in my review, in part:
Bring Her Back has one redeeming feature in its committed performance from Sally Hawkins. In the tradition of Toni Collette in Hereditary (a lesser version, to be sure), Hawkins gets to really showcase herself, all while creeping the audience out. She’s good and should have had even more to do, though the film lets her down in that regard, despite the promise of the premise.
Sally Hawkins is the highlight here, giving what’s actually a slightly restrained performance, given what could have been. She does more for the film than the writing or direction does to make you care about Laura, despite the worsening things you see. Hawkins relishes being a villain, to be sure, and even if this one is a forgettable one to me, her work is pretty good.
Also Available This Week
The Boys: Season 4 (TV)
Coneheads (4K)
Drag Me to Hell (4K SteelBook)
Gung Ho (Blu-ray)
Happy Gilmore (4K)
Harvey (4K)
Tales from the Void: Season One (TV)
Xanadu (4K)
Criterion Corner
A Confucian Confusion / Mahjong: Two Films by Edward Yang
From The Criterion Collection: “In this pair of sharp, sprawling satires, one of Taiwan’s most celebrated filmmakers, Edward Yang, captures the anything-can-happen mood of Taipei at the end of the twentieth century. Made in between his epic dramas A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi, A Confucian Confusion and Mahjong find Yang applying a lighter but no less masterly touch to his explorations of human relationships in an increasingly globalized, hypercapitalistic world. These intricately constructed ensemble comedies—one set in a cutthroat corporate milieu, the other in a shady criminal underworld—reveal the absurdity and cynicism at the heart of modern urban life.”
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Shoeshine
From The Criterion Collection: “An international breakthrough for neorealism, Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award–winning film is an indelible fable of innocence lost amid the hardscrabble reality of 1940s Italy. On the streets of Rome, two boys—best friends Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) and Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi)—set out to raise the money to buy a horse by shining shoes. When they are inadvertently caught up in a robbery and sent to a brutal juvenile detention center, their loyalty to each other is severely tested. A devastating portrait of economic struggle made all the more haunting by its child’s-eye perspective, Shoeshine stands as one of the defining achievements of postwar Italian filmmaking.”
Stay tuned for more next week…
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