New DVD offerings: 'Still Alice,' two by Costa-Gavras, and more
She garnered worldwide acclaim - and an Oscar nomination - in 1997 for her role as a porn star in Boogie Nights.
She garnered worldwide acclaim - and an Oscar nomination - in 1997 for her role as a porn star in Boogie Nights.
But Julianne Moore's breakout role came three years earlier, as Yelena in Louis Malle and Andre Gregory's Chekhov riff, Vanya on 42nd Street. On screen in virtually every scene, Moore radiated an aura both intelligent and sensual.
A year later, she confirmed her ascendancy as a great actor in Todd Haynes' dystopian New Age satire Safe.
The Boston University alumnus, who has made more than 60 films, finally won her first Oscar last year for Still Alice, a powerful drama about language, memory, and identity that was released Tuesday by Sony.
Adapted by the writing and directing team of Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland from the best-selling novel by neuroscientist Lisa Genova, the film features Moore as Alice Howland, a linguistics professor at Columbia University who finds out she has early-onset Alzheimer's disease.
The disease wreaks havoc with what Alice considers to be the very root of her identity: Her power to remember, use, deploy, understand, explain, and teach language.
Alec Baldwin stars as Alice's husband while Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth, and Hunter Parrish play her children. The film shows how the disease affects the whole family, not least because it has a genetic component and can be passed on.
(www.sonypictures.com/movies/discanddigital/; $30.99 DVD; $34.99 Blu-ray; rated PG-13)
Two by Costa-Gavras
Greek-born French filmmaker and public intellectual Konstantinos Gavras, or Costa-Gavras as he is known, won the Oscar for best foreign-language film in 1969 for Z, a powerful thriller based on the real-life assassination of a pro-democracy Greek politician.
It was followed by a series of equally intelligent political dramas, including Missing, Hanna K., and Betrayed, that used biting satire and blistering action to expose the hypocrisy and injustice at the heart of extreme political ideologies.
The Criterion Collection has released restored editions of two of Costa-Gavras' earlier films previously unavailable in America.
State of Siege (1972) targets both sides in a conflict between a CIA-backed right-wing regime in an unnamed South American country and the guerrillas who rise up against it. Yves Montand stars as an American official kidnapped by an urban guerrilla group desperate to publicize the CIA's complicity in their government's many violations of human rights.
The Confession (1970) is a thoroughly Kafkaesque fable about the vicious repression in Soviet bloc nations. Montand plays a heretofore trusted Czechoslovakian Communist Party official who is arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and interrogated endlessly. The thing is, his captors never tell him what crime he has committed, or what information they want him to reveal. They simply go about destroying the man. Both films are due May 26. (www.criterion.com; $29.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-ray each. Not rated)
Other titles of interest
Boardwalk Empire Complete Series. Due Tuesday, this 20-disc set includes all five seasons of HBO's period drama about gangsters, guns, and dames in pre-WWII Atlantic City. (www.store.hbo.com; $199.99 DVD; $239.99 Blu-ray; not rated)
Cymbeline. Due Tuesday, Michael Almereyda updates the Shakespeare romance, setting it in the world of outlaw bikers. (www.lionsgate.com; $19.98 DVD; $19.99 Blu-ray; rated R)
Welcome to Sweden: Season 1. Also due Tuesday, this delightful romantic comedy stars Greg Pohler as an American accountant who chucks it all away to move in with his gal (Josephine Bornebusch) in rural Sweden. (http://entertainmentone.com/films; $39.98; not rated)