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Punch-Drunk Love, Mia Madre & The Best of Cinerama | Fast Scans: Top Foreign & Indie Picks, January 2017

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The Best of Cinerama. 143+ min. 1963. Blu-ray/DVD ISBN 9781893967984.Cinerama’s Russian Adventure. 127+ min. 1966. Blu-ray/DVD ISBN 9781893967991.
ea. vol: color. Flicker Alley. $59.99.

russiaPre-IMAX immersive cinema takes vicarious travelers on dizzying roller-coaster and jet rides, with colorful visits to St. Moritz, the Orient, the South Sea Islands, and other lovely locales, in Best’s highlights culled from prior Cinerama features. Likewise, Russian Adventure combines footage from previous Soviet travelogs visiting Siberia, Moscow, and Leningrad, among other spectacular places, as well as boasting dazzling point-of-view shots from horse-drawn sleighs and rafts plummeting down raging rivers. Carefully restored and shown in simulated curved-screen format to approximate their original exhibition, both of these cinematic curios admirably represent half-century-old ­showmanship.

Carrington. color. 123+ min. Olive Films. 1995. DVD UPC 887090129619. $24.95; Blu-ray UPC 887090129718. $29.95. Rated: R.

carringtonReal-life Victorian-era painter Dora Carrington (Emma Thompson) and author Lytton Strachey (Jonathan Pryce) enjoyed an unusually passionate relationship, though primarily a platonic one owing to the latter’s homosexuality. In his directorial debut, screenwriter Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons; Atonement) offers a racier variety of a Merchant/Ivory period piece in which romantic roundelays occur amid a milieu of cultured nonconformists in a lush countryside. Michael Nyman’s (The Piano) score provides a plaintive urgency to the atypical love story.

Man Facing Southeast. color. 108+ min. In Spanish w/English subtitles. Kino Lorber. 1986. DVD UPC 738329205058. $29.95; Blu-ray UPC 738329205065. $34.95. Rated: R.

man-facingAn Argentine mental-hospital psychiatrist (Lorenzo Quinteros) treats a “drop-in” client (Hugo Soto) as delusionary for claiming to be from another planet. But that doesn’t explain the otherwise preternaturally rational patient’s hypnotic effect on fellow wardmates, telekinetic acts of kindness, and other otherworldly behavior—including enabling his divorced doc’s newfound love life. Writer-director Eliseo Subiela’s fascinating parable deals in blunt religious overtones while managing to maintain an aura of mystery about the true nature of this “man who fell to Earth.”

Mia Madre. color. 107+ min. In Italian & French w/English subtitles. Music Box Films. 2015. DVD UPC 751778950768. $29.95; Blu-ray UPC 751778950805. $34.95. Rated: R.

Professional and personal challenges beset a filmmaker (Margherita Buy) dealing with a self-centered leading man (John Turturro) who cannot remember his lines, while she also copes with a sick mother (Giulia Lazzarini), an increasingly distant daughter, and an ex-boyfriend. Director Nanni Moretti (The Son’s Room; We Have a Pope) playfully offsets serious family predicaments with comic relief from on-set absurdities as well as performing the role of the filmmaker’s sympathetic brother. Balancing work with home life gets a reflective treatment that is not too weighty.

Punch-Drunk Love. 2 discs. color. 95+ min. Criterion Collection. 2002. DVD ISBN 9781681432274. $29.95; 1-disc Blu-ray ISBN 9781681432267. $39.95. Rated: R.

punch-drunk-loveLonely, obsessive, and tantrum-prone novelty-supply salesman Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) indulges in phone sex in a moment of weakness, which leads to extortion by the seedy business owner (Philip Seymour Hoffman), while the anguished Egan pursues a sweetly ingenuous woman (Emily Watson) who inexplicably finds him charming. Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights; Magnolia) gets an unexpectedly mature performance from the usually sophomoric Sandler in this really offbeat but endearing rom-com overdue for reconsideration by initially unreceptive audiences. [See Trailers, LJ 10/1/16.]


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