Winner of three Academy Awards, Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash is essentially a two-character study about a gifted young drummer and his sadistic music conservatory teacher. Both Miles Teller and Oscar winner J.K. Simmons are excellent in those roles. The film’s persistent and insistent jazz score is so omnipresent it’s almost a third character. Paul Reiser as Teller’s father, Melissa Benoist as his first girlfriend, and Austen Stowell and Nate Long as competitive fellow drummers have the most prominent supporting roles, but it’s the interaction between Teller and Simmons that grabs and then holds your interest throughout.

Simmons’ character is not unlike the sadistic college professor played by John Houseman in The Paper Chase and the equally sadistic drill instructor played by Louis Gossett, Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman, roles which won them Oscars as well.

Whiplash is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

An old-fashioned suspense film in the best sense, Hossein Amini’s The Two Faces of January, is a fairly faithful version of the 1964 novel by Patricia Highsmith, author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Viggo Mortensen stars as a middle-aged American con artist on his honeymoon in Athens who accidentally kills a private investigator and has to flee the country without a passport. He’s aided by much younger bride Kirsten Dunst and American-born Greek tour guide Oscar Isaac. The Hitchcockian drama is a fine showcase for both Mortensen and Isaac, less so for Dunst who makes a fine showing, but whose screen time is limited. Unlike most modern crime dramas with their ambivalent endings, this one ties up the loose ends nicely with good guy Isaac coming out on top.

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