This Week’s Best Bet

In the revolutionary first decade of her filmmaking career, Chantal Akerman devoted herself to nothing less than the total resculpting of cinematic time and space. Journeying between Europe and New York City, Akerman forged a highly personal style that fuses avant-garde influences with deeply human expressions of alienation, desire, and displacement — themes that she would explore in a series of increasingly ambitious shorts, documentaries, and features, including the towering “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.” With immersive rhythms that render the most minute details momentous, these landmarks of 20th-century art continue to reveal new ways of experiencing cinema and framing reality. The three-disc Blu-ray set “Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978” includes nine of her films. SAUTE MA VILLE: (1968 — 13 minutes). Made when the director was just 18, Akerman’s debut film is a blistering first expression of what would become one of her major themes: women’s confinement in and rebellion against the domestic sphere. Akerman plays a young woman who, alone in her kitchen, enacts a savaging of traditional domestic rituals that leads to a literally explosive climax. L’ENFANT AIMÉ, OU JE JOUE À ÊTRE UNE FEMME MARIÉE: (1971 — 32 minutes). One of Akerman’s most rarely seen works is an intimate portrait of a young mother (played by Claire Wauthion) whose day-to-day routines are intercut with her stream-of-consciousness ruminations on her family, sex life, relationships, and body. Though Akerman (who also appears in the film) was later dismissive of her second directorial effort, its patient focus on the tension between domesticity and a woman’s inner life marks “L’enfant aimé” as an important link in the development of her artistry. “LA CHAMBRE:” (1972 — 11 minutes). Akerman’s dialogue with the 1960s avant-garde movement of structural cinema begins here, with the first film she made in New York City — a breakthrough in her experiments with the bending of cinematic time and space. As the camera completes a series of circular pans around a small apartment, the interior’s furniture, its clutter, and the filmmaker herself — staring back at us from bed — become the subjects of a moving still life. HOTEL MONTEREY: (1972 — 62 minutes). Under Akerman’s watchful eye, a cheap Manhattan hotel glows with mystery and unexpected beauty, its corridors, elevators, rooms, windows, and occasional occupants framed like Edward Hopper tableaux. Filmed over the course of 15 hours, from evening to dawn, with cinematographer and frequent collaborator Babette Mangolte’s carefully controlled camera gradually making its way from the lamplit lobby to the rooftop overlooking an awakening city, this radical, silent experiment in duration stands as one of Akerman’s most arresting formal achievements, collapsing time and charging the quotidian space it surveys with an eerie unreality. LE 15/8: (1973 — 43 minutes). Shot and directed by Akerman and Samy Szlingerbaum, this quietly revealing variation on the filmmaker’s recurring themes of dislocation and alienation unfolds on one day — August 15, 1973 — in a Paris apartment, where Finnish expat Chris Myllykoski opens up to the camera about her anxieties and uncertainties, her aspirations and ennui, and the sense of vulnerability she feels being a woman alone in an unfamiliar country. As Myllykoski’s voice-over narration shifts between the mundane and the searching, Akerman’s observant camera remains attuned to tiny gestures that tell a story of their own. JE TU IL ELLE: (1975 — 86 minutes). Akerman’s first narrative feature is a startlingly vulnerable exploration of alienation and the search for connection. In a performance at once daringly exposed and enigmatic, Akerman plays a young woman who, following a lengthy, self-imposed exile, ventures out into the world, where she has two very different experiences of intimacy: first with a truck driver who picks her up, and then with a female ex-lover. Culminating in an audacious, real-time carnal encounter that brought lesbian sexuality to the screen with a new frankness, “Je tu il elle” finds Akerman wielding her radical minimalism with a newfound emotional and psychological precision. JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES: (1975 — 201 minutes). A singular work in film history, Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick. In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or as one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, “Jeanne Dielman” is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades. NEWS FROM HOME: (1976 — 89 minutes). Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly composed shots of Manhattan circa 1976, the filmmaker reads letters sent by her mother years earlier. The juxtaposition between the intimacy of these domestic reports and the lonely, bleakly beautiful cityscapes results in a poignant reflection on personal and familial disconnection that doubles as a transfixing time capsule. LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA: (1978 — 127 minutes). Akerman’s narrative follow-up to her international breakthrough, “Jeanne Dielman,” is a penetrating portrait of a woman’s soul-deep malaise and a mesmerizing odyssey through a haunted Europe. While on a tour through Germany, Belgium, and France to promote her latest movie, Anna (Aurore Clément), an accomplished filmmaker, passes through a series of eerie, exquisitely shot brief encounters — with men and women, family and strangers — that gradually reveal her emotional and physical detachment from the world. Mirroring the itinerant Akerman’s own restless wanderings, this quasi self-portrait journeys through a succession of liminal spaces — hotel rooms, railway stations, train cars — toward an indelible encounter with the specter of history. Read more here. From The Criterion Collection.

Buzzin’ the ‘B’s:

Based on the riveting best seller, Stephen King’s “Thinner” (1996) “Thinner” stars Robert John Burke (and Joe Mantegna in a story of supernatural terror as one man faces a countdown to the ultimate excruciating payback. A 109-year-old Romani man (Michael Constantine), hell-bent on revenge for the death of his daughter, exacts a shocking curse that compels its victim to gorge himself in an effort to avoid shrinking away to nothingness. With time running out from this bizarre and relentless torture, the accursed man must find a way to reverse his predicament, though death is quickly becoming his only option. In a Collector’s Edition Blu-ray debut from Shout! Factory … “Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths – Part One” (2023) is based on DC’s iconic comic book limited series “Crisis on Infinite Earths”; this new animated feature joins together DC Super Heroes from across the multiverse in the first of three parts that marks the beginning of the end to the Tomorrowverse story arc. Death is coming. Worse than death: oblivion. Not just for our Earth, but for everyone, everywhere, in every universe! Against this ultimate destruction, the mysterious Monitor has gathered the greatest team of Super Heroes ever assembled. But what can the combined might of Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern and hundreds of Super Heroes from multiple Earths even do to save all of reality from an unstoppable antimatter Armageddon?! On DVD, Blu-ray, from Warner. Read more here … After a dispute over a winning lottery ticket turns into a deadly hostage situation, the witnesses must decide exactly how far they’ll go — and how much blood they’re willing to spill — for a cut of the $156 million in “Your Lucky Day” (2023), starring Angus Cloud, Jessica Garza, Elliot Knight and Sterling Beaumon. On Blu-ray from Well Go USA.

Foreign Films:

In “Curse of the Dog God” (1977 — Japan), starring Shin’ya Ohwada, Emiko Yamauchi, Masami Hasegawa, Jun Izumi, Noboru Mitani, Shinya Ono and Kayoko Shiraishi, a trio of young scientists from the city head out into the countryside to investigate a source of uranium at the base of a sacred mountain. On their way, they carelessly destroy a roadside shrine and run over and kill a dog belonging to a local boy. The boy puts a curse on them and tries to disrupt the wedding when a local girl, Reiko, marries one of the trio. Back in the city, the newlyweds are subjected to a string of increasingly disturbing and inexplicable happenings and Reiko slowly goes insane, convinced that her husband has been cursed and that she has been possessed by the spirit of the Dog God. An attempt to exorcise her ends in tragedy when she dies during the ceremony. One of the trio of scientists throws himself off a skyscraper and a second member of the group is fatally attacked by a pack of feral dogs. But these terrible events are only the start of the Curse of the Dog God. Brand new 2K transfer from film negative digitally restored. On Blu-ray from Mondo Macabro … “The Inferno” (1979 — Japan), starring Mieko Harada, Kyôko Kishida, Ryûzô Hayashi, Kunie Tanaka, Seizô Fukumoto, Jun Hamamura and Kazuko Inano, begins with Miho and Ryuzo, two adulterous lovers, being hunted down by Miho’s husband. Ryuzo is killed while the pregnant Miho is bludgeoned and left for dead. As she dies, she gives birth to her daughter, Aki, who is thus considered to have been born in hell. Twenty years later, Aki, who is the very image of her mother, has become a daredevil racing car driver. She feels that strange forces are trying to kill her. To solve the mystery of her past she returns to the remote village where her mother died and to the dysfunctional family that refused to take care of Aki when she was a baby. Aki’s arrival triggers a series of disastrous events as she tries to take revenge for the murder of her mother. Brand new 2K transfer from film negative, digitally restored. On Blu-ray from Mondo Macabro.

From TV to Disc:

“Special Ops: Lioness – Season 1” (2022) is a three-disc set with eight episodes of the espionage thriller starring Zoe Saldaña, Laysa De Oliveira, Michael Kelly, Morgan Freeman and Nicole Kidman. Inspired by an actual US Military program, the series follows the life of Joe (Saldaña) while she attempts to balance her personal and professional life as the tip of the CIA’s spear in the war on terror. The Lioness Program, overseen by Kaitlyn Meade (Kidman) and Donald Westfield (Kelly), enlists an aggressive Marine Raider named Cruz (De Oliveira) to operate undercover alongside Joe among the power brokers of State terrorism in the CIA’s efforts to thwart the next 9/11. On DVD, Blu-ray, from Paramount.

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All DVDs and Blu-rays are screened on a reference system consisting of an Oppo BDP-83 Blu-ray Disc Player w/SACD & DVD-Audio, a Rotel RSX-972 Surround Sound Receiver, and Phase Technology 1.1 (front), 33.1 (center), and 50 (rear) speakers, and Power 10 subwoofer.