A Good Woman is Hard to Find (2019)
Crime dramas from past and present plus memories of the troubled 20th century are among recent home video releases.
A Good Woman is Hard to Find (Film Movement)
The film opens: Sarah’s face and neck are splattered with blood. She’s frozen in shock before heading to the shower. It’s a flash-forward. When the narrative begins, Sarah is a single mom with little self-confidence living in public housing. But when vicious drug dealers intrude into her insecure life, she does unimaginable things in this 2019 Northern Irish psychological drama. A Good Woman is Hard to Find is dark and gruesome, not for the fainthearted.
The Last Supper (Kino Lorber)
The Last Supper is set on Jan. 30, 1933—the day Hitler was appointed Chancellor. The German film is a sequence of conversations, mostly over dinner in the apartment of an affluent, assimilated extended Jewish family. All shades of opinion are neatly represented: observant Jews, a Communist, family members planning to immigrate to Palestine and America, even one young misfit willing to overlook the Nazis’ anti-Semitism and embrace the idea of making Germany great again.
Promise at Dawn (Kino Lorber)
Charlotte Gainsbourg is the obsessive mother of Promise at Dawn and plays her role with tenderness and mania. French director Eric Barbier’s 2017 adaptation of Romain Gary’s novel, is the story of a penniless immigrant mom’s determination to transform her son into a well-rounded gentleman and a major cultural figure in France. Nothing less than best-selling novels and the Legion of Honor will do! The story spans 1920s Poland through World War II and beyond.
Hollywood Story / New Orleans Uncensored (Mill Creek Entertainment)
Which came first, Sunset Boulevard (1950) or Hollywood Story (1950). Fans of the Billy Wilder classic will recognize aspects of Hollywood Story’s wary backwards glance at the silent movie age. The nourish crime scenes—involving a cold case investigation of the 1929 murder of a star director—are oddly juxtaposed with Jim Backus’ mellifluous voiceovers. Hollywood Story is out on Blu-ray along with another crime drama by director William Castle, New Orleans Uncensored (1955).
