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Spider-Man: Homecoming, directed by Jon Watts, is one of the better CGI superhero movies, featuring an engaging lead performance from Tom Holland (The Impossible), with nice support from Jacob Batalon, Zendaya, and other actors playing his high school classmates. Kudos to the filmmakers for leading the story in a different direction from the previous Spider-Man franchises, which were getting to be more than a little too repetitious. The problem is they haven’t replaced the original story-line with anything of substance. Major stars like Robert Downey Jr., Marisa Tomei, and Michael Keaton as a cardboard villain are given little to do, with the special effects taking up most of the film’s run time not dominated by Holland and his clever friends.

The film is a pleasant enough time-killer, but nothing extraordinary.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is available in several Blu-ray concoctions including 3-D, as well as standard DVD.

Jordan Harrison’s play Marjorie Prime was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. The film, written and directed by Michael Almereyda, resembles nothing so much as Spike Jonze’s Her in which technology can be both a wonderful and a troublesome thing.

The film takes place sometime in the future when people of means can own holograms that simulate the presence of loved ones who have died. In this case, Marjorie, a woman in her late 80s (Lois Smith), has chosen a hologram of her late husband (Jon Hamm) when he was in his 40s and she was much younger. After her death, her daughter (Geena Davis) will choose a hologram of Marjorie in her last year. The film’s title is the name of the hologram, not the character herself.

The film is mostly people and their holograms sitting around talking, but when the people in question are played by Smith, Hamm, Davis, and Tim Robbins (as Davis’ husband) at their best, you listen to every word. Soon-to-be-87-year-old Smith is especially good here, playing a retired classical violinist, evoking memories of her classical pianist in 1970’s Five Easy Pieces. Pictures of the younger Smith evoke memories of her the first time she broke your heart as the young girl trapped in the whorehouse in 1955’s East of Eden. Her still lovely time-worn face reminds you of the many times you’ve seen her since, in films such as Twister, on TV in shows such as True Blood and The Americans, and if you were lucky enough, as Ma Joad on Broadway in The Grapes of Wrath. A two-time Tony nominee and a recent Emmy nominee (for The Americans), an Oscar nomination for her performance here would be the icing on the cake of her long career.

Marjorie Prime is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Maudie is a heavily fictionalized biography of Maud Lewis, the famed Canadian folk artist who lived in Nova Scotia from 1903 to 1970. Beautifully played by Sally Hawkins as the woman who suffered from crippling rheumatoid arthritis all her life, the film from Irish director Aisling Walsh begins with Maud, now living with a gruff aunt, being told by her visiting brother that he has sold the family home left him at the death of their parents, and that she must continue to live with her aunt. She rebels and answers an ad to act as the housekeeper of a one-room shack with sleeping loft for a local fish peddler, played by Ethan Hawke. There she begins to paint, whereas in real life she had been taught to paint by her mother as a girl, and in fact, sold her beautifully hand-painted Christmas cards to make money. The year, undisclosed in the film, was 1938. She was 34 and he was 40. He is at first annoyed with her for being a terrible housekeeper, but when someone offers to pay for her drawings, and later her paintings, he sees that as an opportunity to make money, charging $5 and $6 per painting. In real life, her early paintings sold for 70 cents. It wasn’t until the late 1940s that they sold for $3 or $4 and only in the last three or four years of her life did they sell for more – $7 to $10.

Another discrepancy in the narrative is the claim that Richard Nixon ordered one of her paintings when he was Vice President. This is unlikely, as Maud did not become well-known until she was interviewed for television in 1964 and 1965. Nixon’s White House did order two of her paintings after her death.

What the film does get right is Maud’s painting of every inch of the interior of her house, which is meticulously reconstructed for the film. Hawkins’ portrayal of a woman in obvious constant pain, who never complains about her affliction, is a wonder. If she weren’t considered a strong contender for this year’s Oscar for the upcoming The Shape of Water, she might just as easily be in contention for her lovely work here.

Maudie is available on standard DVD and will soon be available on Blu-ray as well.

Sofia Coppola won the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her remake of Don Siegel’s 1971 film The Beguiled, setting up expectations that were impossible to attain.

Coppola has had a checkered career, first garnering attention with the negative, almost hostile reviews that greeted her performance in father Francis Ford Coppola’s 1990 film The Godfather Part III while she was still a teenager. Her debut as a director came with 1999’s well-regarded The Virgin Suicides, but it was 2003’s Lost in Translation that made the world sit up and take notice. She was nominated for a Best Director Oscar and won for Best Original Screenplay. Her next film, 2006’s Marie Antoinette, was highly anticipated, but other than its Oscar-winning costume design, was pretty much a disappointment. Her next two films, 2010’s Somewhere and 2013’s The Bling Ring, were major flops. The Beguiled has critics and audiences somewhat on the fence.

The 1971 version of The Beguiled starring Clint Eastwood, Geraldine Page, and Elizabeth Hartman was an unsettling film about a Union soldier who stirs up passions in a Confederate girls’ boarding school toward the end of the Civil War. Coppola’s remake starring Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, and Kirsten Dunst, is visually stunning with sumptuous costumes down among the majestic magnolias, but with some of the original’s most sensationalistic scenes missing, it is a dramatically weaker work, but not the disaster many have proclaimed it to be.

Both versions of the The Beguiled are available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon has been given a 4K digital restoration by Criterion that makes the sumptuous 1975 film look even more stunning than it has in previous home video releases. Ryan O’Neal and Marisa Berenson receive top billing, but the film’s Oscar-winning cinematography, art direction-set decoration, and costume design are the real stars.

The Criterion Edition release is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray debuts of The Old Dark House and Portrait of Jennie.

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