Ulysses & Mona (2018)
Recently released on Blu-ray and DVD: Billy Bathgate, Ulysses & Mona, Il Divo, Timeless: Live in Japan and The Eagle.
Billy Bathgate
The gripping opening scene features a mobster (Bruce Willis) with feet in wet cement and ready to be executed. Billy Bathgate (1991) stars Dustin Hoffman as gravel-voiced, emotionally erratic kingpin Dutch Schultz, and Nicole Kidman as the WASP drawn to the underworld. The titular protagonist (played by Loren Dean) is a Bronx tenement kid for whom crime in Depression-era America is a way out of poverty. The great supporting cast includes Stanley Tucci and Steve Buscemi.
Ulysses & Mona
Mona (Manal Issa) is a young art student and Ulysses (Eric Cantona) an aging artist—once the toast of the scene but gone to seed and seclusion. Unfulfilled with her surroundings, Mona nudges her way into Ulysses’ life, triggering (along with his failing health) his odyssey of redemption. If the plot looks a bit pro forma on paper, the performances and lack of Hollywood resolution lifts the quirky French film by Sébastien Betbeder above expectations.
Il Divo, Timeless: Live in Japan (Eagle Rock)
They used to call it light classical. Il Divo, a quartet of operatically trained voices, apply themselves—like modern-day Mario Lanzas—to a repertoire of pop. For their 15th-anniversary concert (2018), the international ensemble (Spain, Switzerland, France, U.S.) chose Tokyo’s storied Budokan stadium. The well-crafted concert documentary reveals production lessons learned from such classy rock acts as Peter Gabriel and David Bowie—dry ice, mood lighting and giant video screens add vision to the sound.
The Eagle
In this 1925 romantic historical drama, Rudolph Valentino stars as a dashing cavalry officer in 18th-century Russia. In a variation on Robin Hood, he becomes the protector of the poor against a rapacious nobleman; in a variation on Zorro, he wears a mask and calls himself the Black Eagle. There are chases and a romantic entanglement (the Eagle falls in love with the nobleman’s daughter). Art director William Cameron Menzies provided the striking architectural settings.
