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Bohemian Rhapsody isn’t a terribly profound film, but it’s a highly enjoyable one for what it is – a typical Hollywood tribute to a great artist with an emphasis on the joy he or she brought to the world. As such, it works. It is, after all, already the highest grossing biographical musical of all time with an infectious star performance.

Rami Malek’s remarkable performance as Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of Queen, may well be the best of its kind since James Cagney inhabited master showman George M. Cohan’s totally different style of singing, dancing, and strutting in 1942’s Yankee Dandy Dandy. The best moments of that film, aside from its musical numbers, were the moments of family togetherness with Joan Leslie as his wife, Walter Huston and Rosemary DeCamp as his parents, and real-life sister Jeanne Cagney as his sister. The same is true of Bohemian Rhapsody, although the emphasis here is on Mercury’s professional family consisting of Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, and Joe Mazzello as his bandmates, Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon, as well as his biological family and various lovers from Lucy Boynton as Mary Austin to Allen Leech as Paul Prenter to Aaron McCusker as Jim Hutton. The real-life bonding between the actors playing the members of the band is palpable. It’s no wonder the film was nominated for an ensemble award by the Screen Actors Guild, and certainly no wonder that Malek has been winning awards for best actor over more established competitors.

The highlight of the Blu-ray and DVD releases of the film is the complete reenactment of the 1985 Live Aid concert that was not seen in theatres.

One of Malek’s fellow best actor Oscar nominees, Willem Dafoe, has one of his best roles as Vincent van Gogh in his final days in Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate. The director, who was nominated for an Oscar for 2007’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is following in the footsteps of Vincente Minnelli and Robert Altman, whose respective 1956 and 1990 films, Lust for Life and Vincent &Theo, previously explored the Dutch painter’s life, as well as the masterful 2017 animated film Loving Vincent, which explored the events surrounding his death.

Schnabel’s film is a bit of a chore to sit through from a narrative perspective but is uncanny in its detailing of the loneliness of the artist. Dafoe, who was 62 during filming, was 25 years older than van Gogh was at his death at 37, but his portrayal of the tortured artist is nonetheless letter perfect.

At Eternity’s Gate is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Timothรฉe Chalamet was nominated for every major award in the Best Supporting Actor category for Felix van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy except the Oscar. Released theatrically in the U.S. by Amazon, the film has not yet been released on Blu-ray or standard DVD in the U.S. but has been released in Canada in both English and French and that version was (is?) available for purchase through Amazon U.S. as well as Amazon Canada.

Beautiful Boy is a bit tedious to sit through as it takes us through Chalamet’s various drug addictions, hospitalizations, and relapses before he finally breaks the habit after a near-fatal heroin overdose following many years of abuse.

Despite its bleak story line, the film is beautiful to look at thanks to its location filming throughout California where the actual story took place. It’s also extremely well-acted by the principal cast which also includes Steve Carell as Chalamet’s father, Amy Ryan as his mother ,and Maura Tierney as Carell’s second wife, Chalamet’s wonderfully caring stepmother.

A film with no redeeming value I can find, Jason Reitman’s The Front Runner, is a major disappointment about Gary Hart’s 1988 run for the U.S. Presidency.

The first 36 minutes of the film are mostly boring meetings between Hart (Hugh Jackman) and his campaign Manager (J.K. Simmons) and staff and attempts by the media to get him to answer a question. There is no indication of why anyone would want to vote for the Democratic U.S. Senator from Colorado other than he has nice hair. Then at the 37-minute-mark, one of the reporters who is trailing him gets a call from an anonymous woman advising him that Hart has a new girlfriend, a campaign worker in Florida, who is flying to Washington, D.C. to spend the weekend with him. At first the call is dismissed because Hart isn’t scheduled to be in D.C. that weekend, but when he abruptly changes his plans to be there, the hunt is on.

The incident is historically important because before this, presidential candidates’ affairs were kept out of the news, but they have become so commonplace since that the only possible reason to care would be if Hart were depicted as a bright, shining star who might have made a great President if the press hadn’t brought him down. The trouble is that not only are we not given a look into Hart’s qualifications, what we see is an arrogant jerk who deserves to be brought down, so what is the point?

Vera Fargima co-stars as Hart’s doormat of a wife and Alfred Molina does his best to make people forget that he looks nothing like his character, Ben Bradlee, previously portrayed by Jason Robards in All the President’s Men and Tom Hanks in The Post.

The Front Runner is available on Bly-ray and standard DVD.

New Blu-ray upgrades include 1993’s Shadowlands and 1966’s The Group.

Richard Attenborough’s Shadowlands earned Oscar nominations for William Nicholson’s screenplay based on his play and Debra Winger for her portrayal of Joy Grehsam, the late-in-life wife of writer C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia) who died of cancer four years into their marriage.

Winger’s performance is one of her best, as is Anthony Hopkins’ as Lewis. He earned an Oscar nomination of his own that year for The Remains of the Day. Joe Mazzello, 26 years before Bohemian Rhapsody, played Winger’s son the same year he played Attenborough’s grandson in Jurassic Park. He has an amusing scene in which he looks in Lewis’ old wardrobe for the entrance to Narnia and finds it isn’t there. His climactic scene with Hopkins is a genuine heartbreaker.

Sidney Lumet’s film of Mary McCarthy’s The Group is best remembered for showcasing the talents of such 1960s up-and-comers as Candice Bergen, Joan Hackett, Elizabeth Hartman, Shirley Knight, Joanna Pettet, Jessica Walter, and Kathleen Widdows as graduates of a Vassar-like college with James Broderick, Larry Hagman, Hal Holbrook, and Richard Mulligan among the men in their lives. It remains surprisingly fresh and a cut above numerous other such films made since.

This week’s new releases include A Star Is Born and the Criterion Edition of Death in Venice.

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