Cruella (In Theaters and Streaming on Disney+, May 28)
London during the 1970s sets the scene for this Cruella origin story. When we meet Estella de Vil (Emma Stone), she’s a hotel housekeeper, helping herself to customers’ booze while dreaming of becoming a celebrated fashion designer. Along the way, she teams with crooked laundry-truck drivers Jasper and Horace (Joel Fry and Paul Walter Hauser), who acquaint her with fashion legend, Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson). Estella crashes von Hellman’s party, where several stoic Dalmatians serve as decorative guard dogs. Estella dog-naps the pooches and Cruella is born. It hardly fills out the two-hour-plus runtime, but Disney’s complimentary soundtrack (on sale now), needs room to bark. (Lisa Miller)
“CSI: NY: The Complete Series” (CBS DVD)
“CSI: Las Vegas” debuted in 2000 as new century police procedurals—detectives armed with DNA kits and other forensic aids—became popular mirrors of public perception. Some have said “CSI” raised public awareness of DNA in crime solving. However, real cops criticized the series as unrealistic and over dramatized. The controversy only insured that the ratings remained high and resulted in spin-offs set in other glamorous cities, including “CSI: NY” (2004-2013). The long-running Gotham offshoot is out now on DVD—all 197 episodes spread across 55 discs (plus nine hours of special features). (David Luhrssen)
Nina Wu (Film Movement DVD)
Wu Kei-Xi gives a superb performance as a struggling actress in Nina Wu. The latest by Taiwanese director Midi Z, Nina Wu is masterfully cinematic for color, composition, sound and silence. The opening scene aboard a subway train sets the film’s high bar for dynamic visuals and fostering the sense that the protagonist is lonely in the crowd, surrounded by masses of people but hearing little. Not unlike Mulholland Drive or Black Swan, Nina Wu becomes a vivid narrative of a performer whose psyche splinters under the pressure of impossible demands for perfection. (David Luhrssen)
A Quiet Place Part II (In Theaters May 28)
John Krasinski’s science-fiction suspenser imagines powerful aliens, who, although blind, locate prey using their uncanny hearing. In the sequel, widowed Evenlyn Abbott (Emily Blunt) is parenting a newborn infant along with her deaf teen daughter (Millicent Simmonds) and pubescent son (Noah Jupe). Having discovered the extraterrestrial’s weakness, the surviving Abbotts hope to use it to defeat the monsters. Their old family friend. Emmett (Cillian Murphy), agrees to help. The PG-13 film, directed by John Krasinski, documents the creatures’ arrival, giving rise to more spooky special FX footage and imaginative scares. (Lisa Miller)
“Weird Wisconsin: The Bill Rebane Collection” (Arrow Video Blu-ray)
The barriers to filmmaking were high before digital, but Bill Rebane struggled to surmount them anyway from the early 1960s through the late ‘80s. Born in Latvia, he became a refugee and lived in Germany and Chicago before settling in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, where he established a studio and employed locals in his sci-fi horror movies.
“Weird Wisconsin” collects six of his films on Blu-ray, plus an informative document by David Cairns, Who is Bill Rebane? Among the talking heads is Milwaukee filmmaker Mark Borchardt, who speaks eloquently of Rebane’s “self-motivation” and “stamina of intent” in an “indifferent, uncaring world.” One of Rebane’s flicks, The Giant Spider Invasion (1975), made reams of money—for the distributor. Rebane was sometimes forced to rewrite screenplays as actors dropped out, adding a dimension of incoherence. The settings are often recognizably “Up North” Wisconsin between the woods, the snow and the snowmobiles.
Like many cult directors, Rebane seldom (if ever) raised enough money to camouflage the artifice of his medium. His films are charmingly unconvincing in their insistence that an apocalypse is just around the corner. (David Luhrssen)
