The Return and The Banishment
Teenage Andrei and his younger brother Ivan are startled when they find their father at home—a man who had been absent for nearly their entire lives. In The Return, the 2003 debut by Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev, the fishing trip proposed by their long-lost dad proves less than idyllic. He may be a criminal with ulterior motives for the expedition; he slaps the boys around as if drilling them for manhood. Does he love them?
The Return is a psychologically complex film with acute observations into adolescence and an enigmatic adult who intruded into the children’s lives. The film takes place against the vastness of the countryside and the emptiness of towns filled with abandoned factories. Also out on Blu-ray is Zvyagintsev’s second film, The Banishment (2007). Although drawn from a story by Armenian American author William Saroyan, it includes a similarly mysterious father figure and a sense of immensity.
Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left
The director of A Nightmare on Elm Street got started in 1972 with The Last House on the Left. Although categorized as horror for its Richard Nixon-era shock value, nowadays it’s easier to watch The Last House as a comedy of the generation gap and of middle-class mores colliding with big city pathologies. The new three-disc Blu-ray set is furnished with many extras, including a gaggle of documentaries, interviews, outtakes and commentaries, plus a 60-page booklet.
A Ciambra
Family life as inseparable from criminal life: it threatens to become a cliché in a film set in Sicily but in its gritty realism, A Ciambra eludes such truisms. It’s a close-up, inside dramatization of squabbling life in the island’s closely packed slums, where half-unpaved lanes are strewn with garbage and the native Sicilians find their level with Romani and recently arrived African immigrants. Directed by Jonas Carpignano, A Ciambra is executive-produced by Martin Scorsese.
