Joey Magidson
Welcome back to my Home Movies! This week, we have a crowded slate of new releases, as well as 4K re-releases. Leading the way today, there’s Captain America: Brave New World and Mickey 17, though both pale in comparison to Black Bag. What else is on the slate, including a pair of Criterion Collection selections hitting shelves? Read on to find out…
Joey’s Top Pick
Black Bag
Steven Soderbergh‘s Black Bag is the sort of classy yet popcorn spy flick that we all too rarely get these days. It just goes down easily. Having Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender leading the way with some great movie star performances doesn’t hurt, either. Soderbergh and company are having a lot of fun, which undoubtedly rubs off on the audience. My review in the film here began and ended like so:
2025 is shaping up to be a really interesting year for Steven Soderbergh. He’s already released Presence back in January (though I saw it back in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, reviewing it here), which would have been enough for most filmmakers. However, Soderbergh is far from most filmmakers. So, he already has a second movie this year hitting in Black Bag, which couldn’t be more different. One is an experimental horror film, while the other is a star vehicle spy drama. The common thread? Both are very strong flicks.
Black Bag is a lot more fun than you might expect. As long as you go in expecting a playful take on this material, as opposed to a stone-faced one, you’ll be prepared for Soderbergh’s take. You may find it pleasantly forgettable, but when cinematic fast food is this delicious, you’re unlikely to mind in the slightest.
Also Available This Week
The Andromeda Strain (4K)
Better Man (4K)
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
Captain America: 4-Movie Collection (Blu-ray)
Captain America: Brave New World
Demolition Man (4K)
Dune: Prophecy 4K – The Complete First Season (TV)
The End
Kick-Ass (4K)
Landman: Season One (TV)
Mad Max 5-Film Collection (4K)
Masters of the Universe: Revelation / Revolution (TV)
May (Blu-ray)
Criterion Corner
Room 666 / Room 999
From The Criterion Collection: “At the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders asked such filmmaking luminaries as Michelangelo Antonioni, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean-Luc Godard, Yılmaz Güney, Werner Herzog, Susan Seidelman, and Steven Spielberg to ponder the question “Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?” Forty years later—adopting the same minimalist, fixed-camera format as Wenders—Lubna Playoust poses the same question to a group of contemporary auteurs, including David Cronenberg, Claire Denis, Asghar Farhadi, James Gray, Lynne Ramsay, and Wenders himself. Together, Wenders’ Room 666 and Playoust’s Room 999 capture the unfiltered perspectives of pathbreaking filmmakers on the state of the industry as well as the upheavals brought on by various new technologies and methods of distribution—in the process touching on large-scale issues of politics, culture, and the meaning (and continued relevance) of cinema in two distinct eras, nearly half a century apart.”
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The Wind Will Carry Us
From The Criterion Collection: “The mysteries of everyday life come into astonishing focus in one of Abbas Kiarostami’s greatest cinematic achievements. A slyly self-reflexive commentary on the director’s own artistic practice, The Wind Will Carry Us unfolds with unhurried majesty as it follows an undercover documentarian (Behzad Dorani) whose assignment to cover a small village’s funeral rites is continually frustrated by an elderly woman’s refusal to die. Along the way, though, he forges surprising, unsettling, and enlightening connections with those he meets. Suffused with Kiarostami’s love for people, poetry, and the arid beauty of rural Iran, this meditative masterpiece reflects upon the boundaries between intimacy and alienation, tradition and modernity, with the utmost grace.”
Stay tuned for more next week…
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