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First Reformed is the latest in writer-director Paul Schrader’s long list of thought-provoking films.

Schrader has said that no matter what he does, the first line of his obituary will be that he wrote Taxi Driver. Probably so, but he also wrote the screenplays for two of Martin Scorsese’s other most acclaimed films, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ. Like those three films, most of the films he has written and/or directed were about men who fall into desperation as their worlds fall apart. First Reformed is no different.

Like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, George C. Scott in Hardcore, Richard Gere in American Gigolo, Ken Ogata and the other actors who shared his character in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Willem Dafoe in Light Sleeper, and Nick Nolte in Affliction, Ethan Hawke is a complicated protagonist, a flawed but interesting man in Schrader’s best film in more than twenty years.

Hawke, who began acting in films as a teenager, has his best role ever as the upstate New York minister having a crisis of faith in the film, A four-time Oscar nominee, two for writing (Before Sunset, Before Midnight) and two for acting (Training Day, Boyhood), submerges his trademark affability to play the reticent man of God who says little besides what is expected of him.

Fearing he has cancer, yet postponing his visit to the doctor, the life seems to have gone out of Hawke’s character since the death of his 19-year-old son in the Iraq War and the breakup of his marriage to his church’s choir director and singer (Victoria Hill). A former military chaplain, now the minister of a struggling historical church, he is asked by one of his few parishioners (Amanda Seyfried) to counsel her husband (Philip Ettinger) who is against his pregnant wife bringing a child into a world in which climate change could render the earth uninhabitable in that child’s lifetime. He does, but at the same time, questions whether he and his church could and should do more to speak up about the dangers of climate change. He goes to see the minister of the megachurch (Cedric the Entertainer) with his concerns, but the megachurch minister is against saying or doing anything that would invoke the wrath of his biggest supporter, the owner of a toxic dump. He is more concerned with preparations for the 250th anniversary celebration of Hawke’s church after which he plans to send Hawke to a sanitorium, supposedly for his health.

The film plays out like a slow-motion film noir in which you don’t know what is going to happen next. When a major character dies, was it really a suicide or was he murdered? What will Hawke do with a crucial piece of evidence? How will it all end? Many viewers were put off by the film’s ending which seems to be going in one direction, then another, but ends in yet a third one. That’s because the film is not so much about darkness as it about salvation. It is a religious film, after all from the writer-director who was not allowed by his strict Calvanist parents to see films as a child. As a result, Schrader’s influences were not those of his contemporaries, but those of the European directors he discovered in college. He considers First Reformed to be a reworking of Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light with a little bit of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev thrown in for good measure.

First Reformed is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

To say that action adventure sequels are not my favorite type of film these days would be a bit of an understatement, but the utterly distasteful Deadpool 2 takes the cake for the most soulless desecration of the genre to date.

The original Deadpool had novelty going for it, but there is no novelty in the sequel, just one ugly, senseless scene after another. Some may find Ryan Reynolds’ smartass narrative quips as the title character amusing, but I find them as stupid as they are tasteless.

Reynolds, who seemed like he might be headed in the direction of a serious actor with 2015’s Woman in Gold, now seems to have regressed to making the kind of schlock that has defined most of his career. If he ever makes another serious film, I might take an interest in his work. Until then, however, I’ll give it a pass.

Deadpool 2 is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Producer-director William Castle was a huckster whose late 1950s and early 1960s films made money because of their publicity, which usually centered around a gimmick. With 1959’s The Tingler, newly upgraded on Blu-ray by Shout! Factory, the gimmick was vibrating seats in theatres exhibiting the film.

This one is given a touch of class by the casting of Vincent Price, who took seriously his role of the doctor who discovers the secret of the paralyzing “tingle,” and Judith Evelyn as the deaf and dumb proprietor of a silent movie theatre who falls victim to it. Evelyn (Rear Window), had been his co-star in the 1940s Broadway sensation Angel Street, in which she played what became the Ingrid Bergman role to Price’s Charles Boyer role when it transferred to the screen as Gaslight.

Castle did eventually produce a genuine masterpiece in 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, but thankfully he was kept from directing it in favor of Roman Polanski who allowed the producer a Hitchcock-like cameo as a man waiting to use a pay phone when Mia Farrow finished her call.

Ernst Lubitsch’s last great film, 1943’s Heaven Can Wait, has been given a Blu-ray upgrade by Criterion.

Adapted for the screen by Lubitsch’s frequent collaborator Samson Raphaelson from Leslie Bush-Frekete’s play Birthday, this is the film that restored Lubitsch’s reputation after the critical drubbing of 1942’s To Be or Not to Be, a classic now but considered in poor taste at the height of World War II.

Heaven Can Wait begins with the classic scene in which the devil (Laird Cregar) condemns Florence Bates to an afterlife in Hell and doesn’t let up from there. Don Ameche, Gene Tierney, Charles Coburn, Spring Byington, Marjorie Main, and Eugene Pallette lead the sparkling cast. Extras include an in-depth interview with Raphaelson from the early 1980s and home movies of Lubitsch playing his piano in the 1940s.

This week’s new releases include Book Club and Woman Walks Ahead.

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