Afterimage
Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda’s final film, Afterimage (2016), is the work of a master with a strong POV and full command of the tools of cinema. Afterimage dramatizes the end years of Poland’s great modernist painter, Wladyslaw Strzeminski (through nuanced, thoughtful performances by Boguslaw Linda). The focus is on the painter’s struggle to maintain creative autonomy in the face of Poland’s post-World War II Communist regime, which sought to mobilize art in the service of ideology.
Indiscretion
Veronica (Mira Sorvino) is the perfect politician’s wife—on the surface. But the hairline cracks in her marriage are widening. He’d rather take a call from staff than have sex with her (and the media broadcasts rumors of his infidelity). Veronica’s head turns when she meets a hipster artist (Christopher Backus), flirtation leads to sex and the twist: He’s the one with the fatal attraction in a melodrama whose protagonists are bound to end badly.
Hangover Square
“I don’t know where I’ve been or what I’ve done,” says George Harvey Bone (Laird Cregar), a composer in Jack the Ripper-era London. Bone’s blackouts are trigged by jarring sounds and lead to murder. Cregar’s lurching discomfort suits his role as hapless madman. George Sanders plays a bit part as a sympathetic alienist. The cinematography is tightly composed, claustrophobic. Bernard Herrmann composed the jarring knife’s edge score for this overlooked 1945 film out on Blu-ray.
“Mussolini: The Untold Story”
Mussolini makes the trains run on time in this 1985 TV mini series after Il Duce (George C. Scott) pays a surprise visit to the Roman station and physically ejects a tardy engineer from the locomotive. Scott’s Duce is Caesarian in ambition, a good family man but brutal to anyone standing in his way. Scott was too old for the role but had Mussolini’s gestures down including a scowl worthy of Trump at his most petulant.
