Sicario (Lionsgate, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD), a violent, chaotic, adrenaline-fueled thriller set in the brutal violence of the drug war on the American border with Mexico, is a film that constantly seems to be spinning out of control. That’s not entirely by design, I fear, but it is purposeful. From the opening scene, where a missing persons rescue operation headed by FBI Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) sends the team into a Mexican drug cartel safehouse, a sinister mausoleum hidden behind the chalkboard the walls, and a booby trap that takes the life of one of her men, we are thrown into a world where the rules no longer apply.
We are suddenly tossed along with Macer, a driven but idealistic veteran of an FBI strike force, into what appears to be a black ops campaign driven by the CIA. She is requested by a cagey company man named Matt (Josh Brolin, who tosses off his evasions with an amiable grin that hides his endgame), ostensibly an “advisor from the DOD,” and like her we are racing to keep up with the events. Borders are crossed (both physical and moral), information is withheld, and she suspects something bigger (and likely illegal) under the official cover of the operation. The American team has apparently chosen to fight the Mexican cartels with their own tactics, acting on information and advice from a former cartel man with a score to settle with the Mexican mob. Benicio Del Toro plays the advisor, Alejandro, holding his cards close to his chest but never lying to Macer.
This is a world of sudden violence and brutal retaliation, yet apart from the opening scene, Macer is a frustratingly passive character in the midst of the action. She’s a proven warrior yet mostly serves as witness to the events, a point of view character and the moral high ground in a war where the rules of engagement are at best ambiguous.
Director Denis Villeneuve, a Québécois filmmaker who came stateside to direct Prisoners and Enemy in 2013, tends to ignore the holes and inconsistencies in the screenplay and focuses on the combustible atmosphere. This is a film built on a foundation soaked in nitroglycerine; every situation seems pitched on the verge of combustion. Early in the film, as they drive a recently captured suspect back over the border to the American side, the caravan gets blocked in the traffic crunch at the checkpoint. Every car around them carries a potential cartel soldier and Villeneuve brilliantly orchestrates the tension as all eyes rake the freeway for threats.
It’s that tension, enhanced by Villeneuve’s constant surveillance of every space these characters inhabit, as if viewing the world through their military vigilance, that keeps the film walking the knife’s edge and keeps the audience riveted to every scene. You never know when things will explode. You just know they will.
Blu-ray and DVD, with the desert-baked digital cinematography by Roger Deakins beautifully preserved in the HD transfer. There are four featurettes, all presented in HD, that add up to just over 50 minutes of supplementary material. “Stepping Into Darkness: The Visual Design of Sicario” focuses on crafting the film’s look and defining cinematography, “Blunt, Brolin and Benicio: Portraying the Characters of Sicario” features interviews with the three leads, “Battle Zone: The Origins of Sicario” researches the brutal history of drug violence along the border (it features graphic imagery so beware), and “A Pulse from the Desert: The Score of Sicario,” which runs about 6 minutes, profiles composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. The Blu-ray also features bonus DVD and Ultraviolet Digital HD copies of the film.
The Walk (Sony, Blu-ray, Blu-ray 3D, DVD, VOD), starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit, the French aerialist who strung a tightwire between the Twin Towers and walked between the newly-constructed buildings in 1974, is from Robert Zemeckis, a filmmaker who has pushed cinema technology to offer previously unseen sights and experiences. Here he uses digital effects to recreate not just the time and place but the sensation of walking hundreds of feet from the ground, balancing on an industrial cable in the swaying winds of a New York morning on August 7, 1974. This is not about tension or suspense or action cinema thrills, but a creative act imbued with a sense of awe and wonder.
It takes the film a while to get to that point, however. Gordon-Levitt plays Petit with a cute French accent just short of Monty Python parody (which, to be fair, is pretty accurate to the man as heard in the documentary Man on Wire, a 2008 film well worth the watch and available on Netflix) and narrates from the high up on the torch of the Statue of Liberty with NYC circa 1974 (another digital effect) in the background. He’s all overbearing whimsy as we watch him learn his craft—juggling, unicycling, and tightrope walking—in Paris, at times under the mentorship of Ben Kingsley (downright restrained here, especially compared to Gordon-Levitt), and put together his “accomplices” after he sees pictures of the Twin Towers under construction and hatches his master plan. Jumping to New York, the infiltration of the towers becomes a caper film in its own right, masterminded by a shaggy band of amateurs driven largely by Petit’s passion.
Zemeckis is in his element here and the film starts to pick up energy, and as the outcome is no doubt—it’s history, after all—Zemeckis eases us from the thrill of the caper mechanics into something more spiritual as he carries us into the clouds as Petit finally makes his walk early on the morning of August 7, 1974, as New Yorkers were shuffling off to work. The astonishment of the crowds stopping on the sidewalks to gawk is treated as a moment of true wonder. The moment is breathtaking, even if it’s not quite so astounding on the small screen as it is in the IMAX 3D presentation,. But then not many people actually caught the film in theaters so home video is where this film is destined to live.
Blu-ray and DVD, with the featurette “Pillars of Support,” about the supporting cast. The Blu-ray editions also include the featurettes “The Amazing Walk” (a production piece on creting the effects for the climactic scene) and “First Steps: Learning to Walk the Wire” (on Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s apprenticeship learning the art of wire walking) and seven deleted scenes, plus bonus Ultraviolet Digital HD copies of the film, and the Blu-ray 3D includes a standard Blu-ray as well.
Experimenter (Magnolia, Blu-ray, DVD) opens with the infamous experiment that made Yale psychology professor Stanley Milgram’s reputation. Subjects are told to ask questions of a person in a booth (heard but unseen) and give them increasingly bigger electrical shocks every time they answer incorrectly. It’s an experiment in teaching methods, they are told, but in fact they are the ones being measured as they continue administering what they believe are life-threatening electrical jolts to strangers on nothing more than the command of a scientist. They are, in essence, simply following orders.
This is all dispassionately explained by Milgram, played here by Peter Sarsgaard, as he sits behind a one-way mirror to observe his subjects (played by John Leguizamo, Anthony Edwards, Anton Yelchin, Taryn Manning, and others) and addresses the camera directly. A son of German Jewish immigrants who came to America as the Nazis were rising to power, Milgram wondered how an entire nation could have capitulated to such inhuman commands. He found out. Two thirds of the subjects comply, a finding that shocked the country, made Milgram’s reputation, and dogged him for his entire career. The anger over the experiments are ostensibly over the potential emotional damage suffered by the subjects but the debate keeps turning back to the actual results.
Michael Almereyda writes and directs in a way that acknowledges itself, a commentary of sorts on the mechanics of cinema and storytelling itself. Almereyda wants us to be aware that this is a fiction even as he explores the ideas with great intelligence and the life of Milgram with curiosity, Sarsgaard’s Milgram is not a particularly warm, people person, but neither is he cold or arrogant. He’s genuinely curious and that curiosity drives him to more experiments in social psychology; did you know that the idea of “six degrees of separation” is from another of Milgram’s studies? You may not know Milgram’s name (I didn’t before seeing the movie) but his observations have become a part of our social culture. It’s probably the most intellectually engaged and engaging film of 2015, for both its subject matter and its presentation, and features the most overlooked ensemble of the year. It’s simply fascinating.
Blu-ray and DVD, with the featurettes “The Making of Experimenter” and “Designing Experimenter” and the interview featurette “Understanding Stanley Milgram: An Interview with Joel Milgram.
Also new in the first week of the new year (with reviews to follow): Fantomas (Kino Classics, Blu-ray), the high-def premiere of the great (and wonderfully surreal) French crime serial by Louis Feuillade, and The Complete Lady Snowblood (Criterion, Blu-ray, DVD) featuring both Lady Snowblood films directed by Toshiya Fujita and starring Meiko Kaji.
Also new and notable:
The Visit (Universal, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD), the new horror film from M. Night Shyamalan, returns to a small canvas for a thriller about two young children visiting their estranged grandparents for the first time and discovering something very wrong about them. With a featurette, deleted scenes, and an alternate ending among the supplements. The Blu-ray features bonus DVD and Ultraviolet Digital HD copies of the film.
Sleeping with Other People (Paramount, DVD) is “a romantic comedy with commitment issues” starring Alison Brie and Jason Sudeikis. DVD only with a bonus Ultraviolet Digital HD copy of the film.
The horror comedy Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (Paramount, Blu-ray, DVD) teams up teenage Boy Scouts with a kickass cocktail waitress to fight the living dead. The Blu-ray includes four featurettes and deleted scenes, plus bonus DVD and Ultraviolet Digital HD copies of the film.
The Green Inferno: The Director’s Cut (Universal, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD), Eli Roth’s tribute to the gory Italian cannibal horrors of the 1970s and 1980s, comes to disc in what it being called a “Director’s Cut” but is the same R-rated version that played in theaters. Features commentary with the filmmakers and actors and a bonus Ultraviolet Digital HD copy of the film.
Over Your Dead Body (Scream Factory, Blu-ray) is a horror film from Japanese filmmaker Miike Takashi, who reworks the 19th century tale into a backstage drama at a modern theater company reviving the old kabuki ghost story. In Japanese with English subtitles and alternate English dub soundtrack.
Digital / VOD / Streaming exclusives:
Coming to VOD (cable and digital) weeks before disc: the Civil War western The Keeping Room with Brit Marling and Hailee Steinfeld, the documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, and the Jem and the Holograms, based on the 1980s cartoon and toys.
Available for digital purchase in advance of disc:
Stonewall (Lionsgate, Digital HD)
Straight Outta Compton: Unrated Director’s Cut (Universal, Digital HD)
Irrational Man (Sony, Digital HD)
Show Me a Hero (HBO, Digital HD)
Classics and Cult:
Two for the Seesaw (Kino Lorber Studio Classics, Blu-ray)
The Captive City (Kino Lorber Studio Classics, Blu-ray)
The Hotel New Hampshire (Kino Lorber Studio Classics, Blu-ray)
Valentino (Kino Lorber Studio Classics, Blu-ray)
Spellbinder (Kino Lorber Studio Classics, Blu-ray)
The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (Kino Lorber Studio Classics, Blu-ray, DVD)
Yongary, Monster From the Deep (Kino Lorber Studio Classics, Blu-ray, DVD)
The House Where Evil Dwells / Ghost Warrior (Shout! Factory, Blu-ray)
TV on disc:
True Detective: The Complete Second Season (HBO, Blu-ray, DVD)
Flesh and Bone: Season One (Anchor Bay, Blu-ray, DVD)
Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime (2015) (Acorn, DVD)
The Last Kingdom (BBC, DVD)
Luther 4 (BBC, DVD)
Father Brown: Season Three, Part One (BBC, DVD)
Broad City: Season 2 (Paramount, DVD)
More new releases:
Infinitely Polar Bear (Sony, Blu-ray, DVD, Digital HD, VOD)
Captive (Paramount, DVD, Digital HD, VOD)
Shanghai (Anchor Bay, DVD, Digital HD)
Love (Alchemy, Blu-ray, DVD)
Hell and Back (Freestyle, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD)
The Barefoot Artist (Film Movement, DVD)
The Gambler (Film Movement, DVD)
Cruel (Film Movement, DVD)
The Maneater (Film Movement, DVD)
Deathgasm (Dark Sky, Blu-ray, DVD, Digital Download)
Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser (Sony, Blu-ray, DVD, Digital HD, VOD)
Stock Option (Alchemy, DVD)
A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story (Cinedigm, DVD)
Full of Grace (Cinedigm, DVD)
Prince (Kino Classics, Blu-ray)
Calendar of upcoming releases on Blu-ray, DVD, Digital, and VOD