The Hawaiian Film Critics named Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho Best Film of 2021. The British thriller in which a contemporary 18-year-old fashion student is able to mysteriously enter the 1960s and return to the present each morning is a one-of-a-kind experience.
With its swirling camerawork, soundtrack filled with 60s pop classics, and superb acting by the entire cast, Wright’s first narrative film since 2017’s Baby Driver is far and away his best. The cast is headed by Thomasin McKenzie (Leave No Trace, JoJo Rabbit) as the young student and Anya Taylor-Joy (Emma.) as an up-and-coming entertainer in the swinging 60s.
Matt Smith (TV’s The Crown) as a man involved with both women in the 60s and Michael Ajao as a fellow student of McKenzie’s in the present, have the principal male roles. 1960s legends Diana Rigg (TV’s The Avengers), who died two weeks after completing her role, Terence Stamp (The Collector), and Rita Tushingham (A Taste of Honey) play characters in the present with links to the past. Tushingham is McKenzie’s grandmother, Stamp is a mysterious bar patron, and Rigg, to whom the film is dedicated, is McKenzie’s landlady.
Think Mulholland Drive with Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, and their landlady, Ann Miller, and you might think you know what’s going on, but you would be wrong, dead wrong. The film also evokes memories of Stamp’s The Collector and Tushingham’s A Taste of Honey, but these, too, involve misdirection as Wright is playing with us throughout.
Available on UHD 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD, extras include extensive making-of documentaries.
David Lowery’s The Green Knight is another film that has done well with year-end 2021 awards.
Based on the 14th century legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire, Lion) stars as Gawain, the nephew of King Arthur who accepts a Christmas challenge from the Green Knight to defeat him in battle, a battle that must be avenged the following Christmas in the same manner.
Lowery (2016’s Pete’s Dragon) is a director whose films audiences tend to like or dislike. This one is no exception. Some love the atmosphere drama of legend while others find it confusing. Arthur, for example, is never mentioned. He is referred to throughout as the King. It is left to your historical knowledge to identify him and the other knights of the roundtable by the setting. Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina) plays the dual roles of Gawain’s girlfriend and the Lady of the Manor he passes through on his fateful journey to meet again with the green knight. Joel Edgerton (Loving) plays the Lord of the Manor. Lesser-known actors play the pivotal roles of the King and the Green Knight. Sean Harris is the King and Ralph Ineson is the Green Knight.
There is no disputing, however, the look of the film, which is breathtaking from beginning to end.
Available on UHD 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD, extras include extensive making-of documentaries.
Warner Archive has released Blu-ray upgrades of 1943’s Edge of Darkness and 1947’s Song of the Thin Man.
Edge of Darkness, directed by Lewis Milestone, is a heart-pounding World War II thriller about the Norwegian resistance to the Nazis. Errol Flynn, Ann Sheridan, Walter Huston, Judith Anderson, and Ruth Gordon head the cast with Helmut Dantine as the principal villain.
The film was beset by many problems during its production. Flynn was indicted for rape, Sheridan’s husband George Brent separated from her after learning she had an affair with Flynn, and fog caused delays in the outdoor production, and Anderson and Gordon were prevented from leaving to return to New York for their commitment to a revival of Three Sisters with Katharine Cornell. Eventually the fog lifted, Flynn was acquitted, and the film was finished.
Song of the Thin Man, directed by Edward Buzzell, was the sixth and final film in MGM’s golden Thin Man series and the sixth to be released on Blu-ray.
William Powell and Myrna Loy were back as Nick and Nora Charles with ten-year-old Dean Stockwell as Nick Jr., Connie Gilchrist as their maid, and Asta the dog completing the family unit. The film’s supporting cast included four femmes fatale, Gloria Grahame, Jayne Meadows, Patricia Morison, and Marie Windsor among the suspects in a nightclub murder. The male suspects included Phillip Reed, Leon Ames, Ralph Morgan, and Don Taylor. Warner Anderson played a cop and William Bishop the murder victim.
The Film Detective has released a Blu-ray of John Sturges’ 1950 film The Capture, written by Niven Busch (The Postman Always Rings Twice) and starring Busch’s then-wife Teresa Wright and Lew Ayres. The action, which takes place in the late 1930s, centers on Ayres as a private detective for a railroad company who, as part of a posse, tracked down and captured a man suspected of a holdup. Wounded by Ayres, the man dies in police custody and Ayres becomes involved with his widow (Wright), eventually determining who set up and murdered her husband. A well-made film noir, it’s worth seeing for the performances of Ayres and Wright and the pre-Bad Day at Black Rock style of director Sturges.
Extras include a feature-length commentary by author/screenwriter C. Courtney Joyner and documentary shorts on Wright and Sturges.
Shout! Factory has released a Blu-ray upgrade of director Tom Holland’s notorious 1993 flop The Temp.
Beset by problematic studio changes at Paramount, the film was taken away from Holland and edited into a ludicrous mess which removes most of the film’s horror aspects and turns its coldblooded killer (Lara Flynn Boyle) into an “is she or isn’t she” enigma, which satisfied no one, least of all Holland and co-stars Timothy Hutton and Faye Dunaway.
What remains is a marginal camp classic, but Holland’s no-holds-barred on-screen interview is itself a classic.
This week’s new releases include Jane Campion’s The Piano in UHD 4K and Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright in its long overdue Blu-ray debut.
