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One of 2016’s most anticipated films, Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans, disappointed most critics who found it too long, too slow, too sentimental, and so on. Balderdash! It’s a nice old-fashioned post-World War I romance that plays out nicely at 133 minutes. Disney should have given the film a limited release where it might have built into the hit it deserved to be, instead of throwing it to the wolves in a wide release.

Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines) also wrote the screenplay based on a novel by M.L. Stedman. Beautifully filmed in New Zealand, the story takes place in Australia on a remote island off the western coast where the Pacific and Indian oceans meet. Michael Fassbender is a four-year British veteran of the war who takes a temporary job as lighthouse keeper that morphs into a permanent one. On one of his infrequent trips to the mainland, he strikes up a friendship with Alicia Vikander, a young woman whose two brothers were killed in the war. They marry and Vikander becomes pregnant twice, miscarrying both times. She is at her most despondent when they discover a raft washed up on shore with a dead man and a still breathing infant. She persuades him to not report the discovery, but to pretend the infant girl is their own. Against his better judgment, he goes along, but when he meets the child’s still grieving mother (Rachel Weisz) four years later, he can no longer keep still. All three leads and the young girl, winningly payed by Florence Clery, are put through an emotional wringer for the remainder of the film.

Vikander has the toughest role, both physically and emotionally, but somehow you sympathize more with Fassbender and Weisz whose suffering is better controlled. Fassbender’s performance is a 180-degree turn from his cold, but equally brilliant, Oscar-nominated portrayal of Steve Jobs last year. Weisz gives her best performance since 2012’s The Deep Blue Sea for which she won numerous awards.

The Light Between Oceans is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Throughout most of his career, Alfred Hitchcock was not taken seriously as a great director. He was considered more of an entertainer than an auteur until French filmmaker Francois Truffaut (Jules and Jim, Day for Night) released his landmark 1966 book, Cinema According to Hitchcock, later revised and reissued as Hitchcock/Truffaut. The book was based on an exhaustive fifty hours of interviews with the master of suspense, during which Truffaut spoke in French and Hitchcock in English with former Radio Free France broadcaster Helen Scott acting as interpreter.

The 2015 film version of Hitchcock/Truffaut is a documentary featuring archival excerpts of the original interviews along with additional on-camera assessments of Hitchcock’s films from some of today’s leading filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, Peter Bogdanovich, and Paul Schrader. The Blu-ray and standard DVD feature deleted scenes from the film including one that, to me, tops everything that was in the actual film. It’s Fincher’s take on Notorious, which is both hilarious and profound. Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains are probably still rolling in their graves from laughter.

If Hitchcock’s films were the sublime, the modern versions of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes are the ridiculous. The British manifestation, Sherlock, started out well enough in 2010, but this year’s long-delayed Sherlock: Series 4 is an abomination. It’s three hard to follow, bizarre adventures involving Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch), Dr. Watson (Martin Freeman), Inspector Lestrade (Rupert Graves), Mycroft Holmes (Mark Gatiss), and the deceased Moriarty (Andrew Scott) who is still popping up like a bad penny. It’s more than time for these excellent actors to move on to something else.

Sherlock: Series 4 is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Newly released Blu-ray upgrades include Carrington from Olive Films; Wait Until Dark from Warner Archive, and Two for the Road and The Barefoot Contessa from Twilight Time.

1995’s Carrington was one of only three films directed by the Oscar-winning writer Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, Atonement). Based on the book by Michael Holroyd, the film follows British artist Dora Carrington (1893-1932) from her first meeting with fellow Brit, eccentric writer Lytton Strachey (1880-1931), to her suicide two months after his death.

Emma Thompson, the same year as Sense and Sensibility, plays Carrington opposite Jonathan Pryce in a BAFTA-nominated performance as Stratchey. Carrington is attracted to Stratchey who is openly gay, and the two move in together in a relationship that, while not sexual, isn’t conventionally platonic either. Carrington takes on a series of lovers including Rufus Sewell, Steven Waddington, Samuel West, and Jeremy Northam, even marrying Waddington with Strachey’s approval and having him move in to their shared home. Waddington eventually takes on a mistress and with the approval of both Carrington and Stratchey moves her into their home, as well. Sewell, Waddington, West, and Northam’s performances are on a par with the two award-winning stars.

Despite all the sexual shenanigans, the most shocking thing about the film is Stratchey’s complaining about being old at 35 and Carrington’s having the same complaint when she reaches that age. Strachey seems positively ancient when he dies of undiagnosed stomach cancer at 51.

For decades, audiences have been arguing about which of Audrey Hepburn’s last two performances, before her self-imposed early retirement at age 37, was the better. Was it her resourceful though terrified blind lady in Terence Young’s 1967 film Wait Until Dark or her modern British wife opposite Albert Finney in Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road released a few months earlier in the same year?

Critics routinely rate Two for the Road as the better film, and many believe that her performance in that was the stronger, but her fellow actors generally credit the skill with which she conveyed her blindness in Wait Until Dark as the superior job. Watching them back-to-back, I find myself agreeing with the actors who nominated her for an Oscar for the latter.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1954 film The Barefoot Contessa is an odd duck of a movie about a recently deceased actress (Ava Gardner) and the men in her life, including her director (Humphrey Bogart) and her sweaty press agent (Edmund O’Brien). Gardner, looking more exquisite than she ever was or would be, is a vision as the title character, but her acting is not on the same level as her Oscar-nominated performance in the previous year’s Mogambo. Film historians put the blame on Mankiewicz (All About Eve), who was pre-occupied with the recent death of his brother Herman (Citizen Kane) and the deteriorating mental health of his wife Rose Stradner (The Keys of the Kingdom). He was allegedly blind to co-star Humphrey Bogart being mean to her because she was openly living with a Spanish matador during filming while Bogart’s friend, Frank Sinatra, to whom she was still married, was trying to get back together with her. O’Brien, staying above the fray, won an Oscar. If nothing else, the film does look terrific.

This week’s new releases include Bells Are Ringing and The Lair of the White Worm.

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