■ Satellite
Stephanie Szostak plays with the slightly shy charm of a Millennial Audrey Hepburn in a fetching performance as Ro, a young woman navigating life’s turns and pursuing her dreams. Karl Geary plays Kevin, a bored ad executive who tosses caution (and career) to the wind when they fall in love. Problems ensue; life is a matter of learning. With Satellite, writer-director Jeff Winner has fashioned a relative rarity, a smart and sexy indie romance comedy.
■ The Conformist
Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) was both stylish and stylized. With the Modernist architecture of Fascist Italy as visual motif, The Conformist treats the Mussolini era with sardonic humor and seriousness. It’s also an essay on the thoughtlessness of crowds, the adherence to the world as is that sustains systems of power. Gliding with agility between times and places, The Conformist depicts Fascism as performance art, a theater of the absurd underwritten with deadly force.
■ Genesis, Three Sides Live
Peter Gabriel was on the rise in the ’80s, as was the band he left behind, Genesis. Out for the first time on Blu-ray, Three Sides Live captures highlights from Genesis’ 1981 tour interspersed with short interview snippets. Gabriel and the Phil Collins-led Genesis took divergent paths; Three Sides Live displays the latter’s tendency to turn keyboard-driven progressive rock into pop in a hits package that includes such songs as “Abacab” and “Misunderstanding.”
