This week’s new Blu-rays include conversations Britain’s leading women actresses and a suspenseful horror feature.
Tea with the Dames (IFC Films)
The four women have collected Oscars, Emmys and BAFTAs. Their worldwide reputation comes from performances in “Downton Abbey,” Gosford Park and Shakespeare in Love. And yet, given their remarks in the documentary Tea with the Dames, they’d rather be playing to live audiences. “All days are scary,” Eileen Atkins says of filmmaking. Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith agree. All that waiting and waiting, those retakes, all those people milling around on set.
In Tea with the Dames, director Roger Michell (Notting Hill) rolls the cameras as the foursome gather in Plowright’s country home. They have long histories together and apart and struggle to remember when they first met. It was the late 1950s, they were aspiring stage actresses. Much of the conversation in Tea with the Dames concerns their first love, theater, the stages where they learned the timing and mastery of dialogue they later brought to the screen.
Brahms: The Boy II (Universal)
The violent burglary of their London home left 8-year old Jude and his mom (Katie Holmes) traumatized. Jude will only communicate in writing and mom refuses to discuss what happened. Dad has a reasonable suggestion: “What if we went away? Someplace quiet?”
An enduring horror genre theme is that the past is hard to escape. After moving to a lovely Tudor cottage nestled in the woods, Jude unearths a creepy boy doll with a list of rules in its suit pocket. He becomes attached to the thing. Jude’s psychologist calls the doll, named Brahms, “a safe outlet to process his trauma,” yet disconcerting details accumulate. Mom is convinced that Brahms is more than an imaginary friend. Dad is slower to catch on.
Polished and suspenseful, The Boy II touches on the fragility of identity and the possibility of disembodied evil manifesting itself—it can be thwarted but there’ll always be a sequel.
