FILM FRENZY

Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone in Bugonia (Photo: Universal & Focus)

By Matt Brunson

(View From The Couch is a weekly column that reviews what’s new on Blu-ray, 4K, and DVD. Ratings are on a four-star scale.)

A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY (2025). Well, at least it’s preferable to One Big Beautiful Bill. Otherwise, it’s hard to get behind A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, an offbeat love story which starts out promisingly before losing its bearings. After visiting a car rental company whose only employees are two oddball characters (Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge), David (Colin Farrell) heads to a wedding, where he becomes acquainted with a fellow guest named Sarah (Margot Robbie). It’s revealed that Sarah has also acquired a vehicle from the same rental company, and both their cars take a cue from Knight Rider’s KITT in that they chat with their drivers. The 1994 Saturns ask their respective passengers if they would like to embark on an adventure — after replying in the affirmative, both David and Sarah find themselves taking their journey together, a fantastical trip in which each is magically allowed to revisit past locations and past incidents. It’s all very high-concept, and the early portion works because the focus is on David and Sarah and the interesting relationship they start to forge. But as the movie wears on, it wears down the audience with its unsteady mix of heavy melodrama and unconvincing epiphanies. Farrell and Robbie are both game, and director Kogonada (After Yang, also with Farrell) offers some pleasing visuals, but the movie never packs the emotional wallop this sort of story demands.

Blu-ray extras consist of a trio of making-of featurettes.

Movie: ★★

THE BRIDE CAME C.O.D. (1941). Despite being two of the biggest stars in the Warner Bros. stable, James Cagney and Bette Davis only made two pictures together. The first was 1934’s Jimmy the Gent, for which Cagney received solo star billing while the rising Davis settled for a below-the-title credit; the second was The Bride Came C.O.D., with both now on equal footing and sharing marquee billing. Such a titanic teaming should have resulted in a motion picture classic, but this romantic comedy is a mere trifle, an engaging but disposable bit of fluff that was mainly produced so both stars could take a break from their usual heavy dramas. Davis plays Joan Winfield, an heiress whose plan to elope with a band leader (perpetual second banana Jack Carson) gets shanghaied when her father (Eugene Pallette) pays charter pilot Steve Collins (Cagney) to kidnap her and deliver her to him instead of her potential groom. Davis didn’t particularly enjoy making this picture — no surprise, since the scene in which Joan falls onto a cactus plant wasn’t scripted but was instead an accident that required the actress to have approximately 50 painful quills removed from her behind!

Blu-ray extras include the 1941 Oscar-nominated live-action short Forty Boys and a Song; the 1941 Oscar-nominated cartoon Rhapsody in Rivets; the 1941 Porky Pig cartoon Porky’s Pooch; the 1942 cartoon The Bird Came C.O.D.; and a 1941 radio broadcast of The Bride Came C.O.D. starring Bob Hope and Hedy Lamarr.

Movie: ★★½

BUGONIA (2025). One of the most original movies of 2025 actually isn’t — instead, Bugonia is a remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet! Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (whose The Favourite and Poor Things topped my 10 Best lists for 2018 and 2023 respectively) and scripted by former The Onion editor Will Tracy, this spaced-out odyssey casts Lanthimos regular Emma Stone as Michelle Fuller, the hard-nosed CEO of a pharmaceutical company with a spotty history. Michelle finds herself kidnapped by a rube named Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), the sort who probably never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like — along with his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis, himself autistic and making his film debut), Teddy holds her captive in his basement, convinced that she is actually an alien whose race seeks to destroy or, at the very least, control Earth. Like fellow award contender One Battle After Another, Bugonia is very much a picture of and for our time, utilizing Lanthimos’ patented brand of dark humor to showcase a world in all its flailing, failing imperfections. Its opinions and observations aren’t exactly unexpected, and there’s clearly a method to its misanthropic madness, which makes the final twist easy to predict. But even after this gotcha that will only getcha if you aren’t paying attention, the movie ends strongly, delivering a coda that is partly bilious, partly bittersweet, and fully brilliant.

The only Blu-ray extra is a making-of featurette.

Movie: ★★★

DORIS DAY 4-FILM COLLECTION (1948-1962). It may not be as celebrated a film debut as those by, say, Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins, Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, and even Alan Rickman in Die Hard, but Doris Day certainly grabbed everyone’s attention when she made her motion picture debut in 1948 (see below). She was already a successful singer before tackling the silver screen, with over a dozen hit singles (including three #1 finishers on the Billboard Hot 100), and she similarly enjoyed great success in movies, remaining a top box office draw for 20 years. After retiring from cinema in 1968, she became a television fixture thanks to The Doris Day Show (1968-1973) and numerous specials, and she stayed busy as an activist (animal rights, AIDS awareness) before passing away in 2019 at the age of 97. The latest four-pack from the Warner Archive Collection offers flicks from all three decades of her movie career, although the results are mixed.

Day made her film debut with a peppy performance in the effervescent musical comedy Romance on the High Seas (1948). This one finds married couple Elvira and Michael Kent (Janis Page and Don DeFore) only a few years hitched and already not trusting each other when it comes to dallying with members of the opposite sex. To stay in town to catch her husband cheating, Elvira pretends to go away on a cruise, instead sending struggling singer Georgia Garrett (Day) in her place. Convinced that his wife has embarked on a journey with a lover, Michael sends private investigator Peter Virgil (Jack Carson) on the same voyage. Peter of course believes Georgia to be Elvira, and the shenanigans become even more complicated when Georgia’s lovelorn friend (Oscar Levant) comes on board in order to woo her. Doris sings four songs, although the best musical number finds Broadway star Avon Long (Porgy and Bess) performing “The Tourist Trade.” This earned a pair of Oscar nominations for Best Scoring of a Musical and Best Original Song (“It’s Magic,” which became a huge hit for Day).

Lullaby of Broadway (1951) borrows its title — and also its closing number — from “Lullaby of Broadway,” the Oscar-winning song first employed in 1935’s Gold Diggers of 1935. The plot, however, seems to be borrowed from elsewhere — specifically Frank Capra’s 1933 Lady for a Day, itself inspired by a Damon Runyon story. Day plays Melinda Howard, a singer who returns to New York from a spell in London to visit her mother Jessica (Gladys George). Melinda believes Mom to be a Broadway star — she’s actually an alcoholic struggling to make a living entertaining at a dive bar, and it’s up to Jessica’s friends (Billy De Wolfe and Anne Triloa), a pair of vaudevillians reduced to working as butler and maid for a big-hearted millionaire (the cuddly S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall), to hide the truth from Melinda. The dramatics tend to fall flat, and Gene Nelson makes for a snoozy romantic lead, but the old standards (including Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things” and George Gershwin’s “Somebody Loves Me”) are pleasing, De Wolfe and Sakall split up scene-stealing duties, and there’s a vibrant musical number involving doors.

One of the strongest of the myriad musical biopics released by Hollywood during the 1940s and ‘50s, Love Me or Leave Me (1955) focuses on the professional triumphs and personal travails of Ruth Etting, likely the first singer to earn the title of “America’s Sweetheart of Song.” Centering exclusively on the relationship between Etting (Day) and gangster Martin “The Gimp” Snyder (James Cagney), this begins with him first noticing her while she’s toiling as a taxi dancer. Etting accepts the infatuated mobster’s help in steering her toward stardom but balks at his amorous advances; nevertheless, they eventually marry, but his possessiveness and all-around antisocial behavior make her life unbearable. Cagney’s terrific, of course, but Day matches him with one of her best performances, dramatic or otherwise. Nominated for six Academy Awards, including a Best Actor bid for Cagney (his third and final) and Best Original Song for “I’ll Never Stop Loving You,” this earned Daniel Fuchs the Oscar for Best Motion Picture Story. Day was overlooked, but the soundtrack release did turn out to be the top-selling album of her career.

I first saw Billy Rose’s Jumbo (1962) as a wee lad and have always had fond memories of the scene in which Jimmy Durante, as circus owner Pop Wonder, tries to sneak Jumbo, the titular pachyderm, out of the area, only to be confronted by those in pursuit. “Where are you going with that elephant?” one of them bellows. Looking around, Jimmy Durante responds as only Jimmy Durante can: “What elephant?” It turns out there was a reason I only recalled that one moment over the decades, as the rest of the movie proves to be quite the slog. Durante’s Pop Wonder and his daughter Kitty (Day) hope to prevent a hostile takeover of their circus — in the meantime, the show must go on, with the Wonders providing much of the merriment alongside Pop’s longtime squeeze Lulu (Martha Raye) and Kitty’s new boyfriend Sam (a dour Stephen Boyd). Despite Durante’s welcome clowning and George Stoll’s Oscar-nominated adaptation of the original Broadway score by Rodgers and Hart , this one gets defeated by a jerry-built screenplay from Sidney Sheldon that stumbles every which way but smooth.

Blu-ray extras on Romance in the High Seas include the 1948 musical short Let’s Sing a Song From the Movies and the 1948 Bug Bunny cartoon Hare Splitter. The only Blu-ray extra on Lullaby of Broadway is the theatrical trailer. Blu-ray extras on Love Me or Leave Me include two shorts starring Etting, 1930’s Roseland and 1932’s A Modern Cinderella, and a 1955 promotional piece plugging MGM’s upcoming releases (including Love Me or Leave Me). Blu-ray extras on Billy Rose’s Jumbo include the 1933 live-action short Yours Sincerely (featuring music by Rodgers and Hart) and the 1953 Tom & Jerry cartoon Jerry and Jumbo.

Romance on the High Seas: ★★★

Lullaby of Broadway: ★★½

Love Me or Leave Me: ★★★½

Billy Rose’s Jumbo: ★★

KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL (1952). When it comes to staples of film noir, the hard-boiled Kansas City Confidential is the real deal. The only thing missing is a femme fatale — the romantic interest is instead a squeaky-clean college student (Coleen Gray) studying to become a lawyer — but in all other respects, it’s a down and dirty picture with all the requisite blood, sweat, and double-crosses. John Payne headlines as an ex-con who’s set up by a crooked ex-cop (Preston Foster) to take the rap for a bank heist in the title city. The corrupt lawman and his three henchmen — a fantastic rogues’ gallery comprised of Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef, and Neville Brand — hightail it to Mexico, but their perceived patsy isn’t about to let them get away with it. Payne makes for a suitably off-kilter hero while Foster is solid in an unexpectedly complex role. Still, the biggest thrill is watching Elam as the most nervous of the hoods — if actors were paid by the amount of perspiration they displayed, he could have retired right after shooting this flick.

Kansas City Confidential is one of those unfortunate films that fell into the public domain along the way, resulting in scores of inferior DVD copies. It started receiving the polished treatment in 2007 with Fox Home Entertainment’s DVD edition, followed by Blu-rays on three labels all founded by archivist Phil Hopkins: Film Chest in 2011, The Film Detective in 2016, and now this Film Masters release. The only Blu-ray extra on this latest edition is film historian audio commentary. A booklet is also included.

Movie: ★★★½

RED RIDING HOOD (2011). The idea of combining a werewolf tale with a whodunit is an interesting one, and the notion of adding layers of Freud and feminism onto the wolfman saga is positively genius. These angles have been tackled before (The Beast Must Die and The Company of Wolves, respectively), but Red Riding Hood ambitiously tries to conquer the lycanthrope tale on both fronts. A well-cast Amanda Seyfried plays Valerie, a young medieval maiden whose village has long been plagued by a werewolf. A visiting moral crusader (Gary Oldman in camp mode) reveals that the wolfman is actually someone from the village, and this causes everyone to view their neighbors with suspicion and — shades of The Crucible — hurl accusations of witchcraft. Had director Catherine Hardwicke and scripter David Johnson buried themselves in the lore and atmosphere of their setting while accentuating the legend’s leaps into sensuality, violence, and the allure of latent desires, it could have worked beautifully. Instead, the focus is on the love triangle between Valerie and the village’s two cutest boys (Shiloh Fernandez and Max Irons), and while the teen angst that Hardwicke brought to the original Twilight was appropriate, here it creates a modernity that’s at odds with the rest of the film. After all, it’s hard to bury oneself in the moody period setting when the central thrust remains that Valerie basically has to choose between Justin Bieber and a Jonas Brother.

Extras on this Blu-ray reissue consist of additional scenes.

Movie: ★★

TOM AND JERRY: THE GOLDEN ERA ANTHOLOGY (1940-1958). There have been Tom & Jerry collections before, but this is inarguably the best of the bunch. It brings together all 114 of the Hanna-Barbera / MGM toons featuring the cat-and-mouse team that were released theatrically during the Golden Age of Hollywood, every one of them restored and uncut. (As with all the Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes sets offered by Warner, there’s a back-cover disclaimer that these animated shorts are “Intended for the Adult Collector and May Not Be Suitable for Children.”) The collection naturally includes numerous classics and fan favorites, including the seven that won Academy Awards for Best Short Subject: Cartoons (including four consecutive winners from 1943 through 1946) and the other six that received nominations (including 1940’s Puss Gets the Boot, the very first T&J cartoon). Admittedly, Tom and Jerry have never been my cup of tea as much as the Looney Tunes efforts or even those early and completely bizarre Disney toons, but they’re nevertheless great fun, and diehard fans will certainly want to raise my rating to a perfect 4 stars.

Blu-ray extras include audio commentaries on 20 of the cartoons by animation experts; a look at the various supporting characters in the T&J toons (including Spike and Tyke); a featurette on one specific supporting character, Mammy Two Shoes; excerpts of Tom and Jerry performing opposite Gene Kelly in 1945’s Anchors Aweigh and Esther Williams in 1953’s Dangerous When Wet; and three T&J-less cartoons previously offered in last year’s Blu-ray set Tom and Jerry: The Complete CinemaScope Collection: 1955’s Oscar-nominated Good Will to Men and the 1957 pair of Give and Tyke and Scat Cats, the only two cartoons to showcase Spike and Tyke in starring rather than supporting roles.

Collection: ★★★½

FILM CLIPS

BLACK PHONE 2 (2025). Roughly on par with 2021’s middling The Black Phone, this sequel finds a way to continue the story (and pocket more bank) even though [Spoiler, I reckon] the character of The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), a psychopath who snatches and murders young kids, died at the end of the first picture. The Grabber returns as a Freddy Krueger wanna-be, seeking revenge on the teenager (Mason Thames) who killed him by haunting the dreams of his supernaturally endowed sister (Madeleine McGraw). Like too many sequels struggling to establish their own identities, this one similarly ties the pasts of all the characters together in an unfulfilling and even irritating manner, but the setting of a lakeside camp blanketed by a blizzard allows for some inspiration.

Blu-ray extras include audio commentary by director and co-writer Scott Derickson; a piece on the cast; and deleted scenes.

Movie: ★★½

I LOVE YOU AGAIN (1940). This inventive nonsense finds William Powell and Myrna Loy co-starring for the umpteenth of umpteen times. He’s Larry Wilson, a boring and parsimonious businessman who gets accidentally conked on the head; when he awakens, he remembers he’s actually a con man named George Carey, and he realizes he’s been suffering from amnesia for the past nine years! He keeps his true identity a secret from everyone except fellow grifter Doc Ryan (Frank McHugh) — that includes his, or rather Larry’s, lovely wife Kay (Loy), who was all set to divorce her dull-as-dirt hubby until she discovers he’s now a changed man. The dialogue is about as sparkling as one might reasonably expect.

Blu-ray extras include the 1940 live-action short Cavalcade of San Francisco; the Oscar-winning 1940 cartoon The Milky Way; and a radio broadcast of I Love You Again starring Loy and Cary Grant.

Movie: ★★★

FROM SCREEN TO STREAM

BAADASSSSS! (2003). A movie about the making of 1971’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song should in good faith boast a title equally as memorable, and writer-director-producer Mario Van Peebles did his part by naming this How to Get the Man’s Foot Outta Your Ass. Predictably, the MPAA nixed the title, and Van Peebles complied by renaming it Baadasssss! in order to gain wider acceptance — an ironic compromise, since the whole point of the 1971 picture was that its creator, Mario’s dad Melvin Van Peebles, backed down from no one in his efforts to bring his groundbreaking film to the screen. With Mario playing his own father, the new Baadasssss! tells the fascinating back story of how Melvin turned down an offer to be the major studios’ token black filmmaker in order to realize his goal of producing a raw, edgy work that spoke directly to African-American audiences tired of seeing themselves portrayed primarily as subservient buffoons. Sweetback turned out to be a monster moneymaker, one of the first of the “blaxploitation” flicks, and an important stepping stone in the development of independent cinema, but this new picture chronicles how the process of bringing it to the screen took a major toll on Melvin’s health, family, and finances. Shot in an appropriately rough’n’tumble style that occasionally gives this the illusion of a documentary, the movie is ultimately a son’s affectionate tribute to his dad, an often difficult man who may have floundered as a regular father but established himself as a “founding father” of a different sort.

Movie: ★★★

THE KID (1921). After writing, directing, and starring in approximately 50 silent shorts over the span of seven years, Charlie Chaplin took a shot at making a feature-length picture with The Kid, a resounding success that kicked off his rapid ascension as one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century. The movie opens with the words “a picture with a smile — and perhaps, a tear,” a mission statement that would serve the artist well over the ensuing decades. The Kid is less uproarious than later Chaplin efforts, serving more as a testing ground as it offers a charming yet tough-minded tale in which the Tramp locates an orphaned baby amidst the tenement rubble and, after much deliberation, elects to raise the child as his own. The Child grows older (and is played by 6-year-old Jackie Coogan, who instantly became a star), at which point he becomes the object of attention for a meddling doctor, a heartless orphanage head, and even his own mother (Edna Purviance), who had abandoned the boy in his infancy and now doesn’t realize he’s her own flesh and blood. The best sequences involve the Tramp making his pad more child-friendly (I love what he does with the chair), but the whole film retains its timeless charm — I first showed this to my oldest daughter when she was 12, and her tearful reaction to the heartrending scenes was a testament to Chaplin’s enduring ability to reach out across the years and touch someone.

Movie: ★★★

OBSESSION (1976). If Dressed to Kill is Brian De Palma’s take on Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, then Obsession is his variation on the Master’s Vertigo. Released two months before his other film from 1976, the excellent Carrie, burned up the box office, De Palma and co-scripter Paul Schrader crafted this atmospheric thriller in which land developer Michael Courtland (Cliff Robertson) witnesses the deaths of his wife (Genevieve Bujold) and daughter (Wanda Blackman) after a botched kidnapping. Sixteen years later, he decides to visit Florence, Italy, where he first met his wife; there, he encounters a young woman (also Bujold) who looks exactly like his dearly departed spouse. Anyone who’s seen Vertigo will be able to nail everything in this picture before it happens, and even those who have never been privy to Hitchcock’s classic will at least be able to peg the character played by John Lithgow (Michael’s business partner) from his first appearance. But the fun in Obsession comes not from its plot but from its sweeping passions: the soaring score by Bernard Herrmann, the swirling camerawork by Vilmos Zsigmond, and the tortured yearning embodied by Robertson. Obsession isn’t De Palma at his best, but it’s still worth a watch or two. The great Herrmann, whose credits include Citizen Kane, Psycho, and, yes, Vertigo, produced two scores in 1975 before passing away on Christmas Eve; both of them — for Obsession and Taxi Driver (also released in 1976) — earned him posthumous Oscar nominations.

Movie: ★★★

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962). Forget James Bond and Indiana Jones: When the American Film Institute offered its picks of the top movie heroes in its 100 Greatest Heroes and Villains special in 2003, it was Atticus Finch, the soft-spoken protagonist of To Kill a Mockingbird, who emerged at the top of the list. It was a fitting tribute not only to the memorable character created by Harper Lee in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel but also to the actor who played him: Gregory Peck, who passed away nine days after the AFI’s picks were revealed. Peck’s performance is the bedrock of this classic film, one of those rare instances when a movie perfectly captures the essence of its source material without compromising it in any way. One of the best films ever made about children and the unique way in which they view the world around them, this also benefits from the perceptive work by Mary Badham as Scout, Atticus’ young daughter who learns about justice and integrity by watching her lawyer dad defend a black man (Brock Peters) against fraudulent rape charges in a small Southern town. Nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director (Robert Mulligan), and Supporting Actress (Badham), Mockingbird had the misfortune of being released the same year as Lawrence of Arabia; it still managed to snag three well-deserved awards, for Peck as Best Actor, Horton Foote for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration.

Movie: ★★★★