FILM FRENZY

Sam Rockwell in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (Photo: Universal)

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.)

THE CHORAL (2025). Set during World War I, this drama stars Ralph Fiennes as Dr. Henry Guthrie, the controversial pick to lead the choral society in a small British town. An atheistic homosexual who had recently been living in Germany, Guthrie is understandably not embraced by the patriotic Christians around him. Clearly, though, he’s the best choice for the job, more so after he agrees with the locals that performing a piece by the usual suspects like Bach and Beethoven isn’t the best idea since they’re all German. They settle on a work by a still-living British composer, The Dream of Gerontius by Edward Elgar (Simon Russell Beale), but there’s an urgency to mounting the piece since most of the village’s men are being drafted and shipped off to fight. As long as the picture focuses on Guthrie, his troubled (and also gay) pianist (Robert Emms), and the choir’s committee members (including one memorably played by Roger Allam), the story’s in good hands. Much of the movie, however, revolves around the romantic and sexual escapades of the young men and their various girlfriends, and while this material is meant to accentuate the senselessness and unfairness of combat (i.e. make love, not war), it’s not terribly interesting and pales next to the scenes centered on the choir and its older overseers.

There are no Blu-ray extras. (Purchase this title here.)

Movie: ★★½

GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE (2026). Both things can be true at once: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a complete original, and it’s reminiscent of other brain-warping works of recent vintage. With the overriding theme of technology gone wrong, both the main framework and the individual vignettes contained therein feel like refuges from the Black Mirror TV series, while the anything-goes plotting brings to mind the bizarre visions of Everything Everywhere All at Once … although this picture’s monstrous multi-kitty is visually far more disturbing than the previous film’s monolithic bagel. Sam Rockwell plays The Man From the Future, who turns up at an LA diner and announces that the world will be destroyed in an AI apocalypse and he’s there to recruit the right combination of people to help him prevent this from happening. This is his 117th time-traveling visit to this eatery, and among those he chooses this time around are a suicidal woman (Haley Lu Richardson) who’s allergic to WiFi, a mousy type (Juno Temple) who’s communicating with the dead son she lost in a school shooting, and a bickering couple (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz) escaping from hordes of teenagers zombified by social media. Even those of us who believe the Internet is the worst — not the best — of modern innovations might question the film’s sledgehammer approach to its anti-AI themes, but Rockwell is in his element, and director Gore Verbinski and scripter Matthew Robinson manage to keep the surprises coming right until the very end.

The only extra in the 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code edition is a making-of featurette.

Movie: ★★★½

HOUSE CALLS (1978). This delightful romantic comedy offers yet another opportunity to catch one of the screen’s greatest comedians plying his trade. Walter Matthau stars as Charley Nichols, one of the more accomplished doctors at a struggling Los Angeles hospital. Recently widowed, Charley now finds himself pursued by numerous women — he embarks on a string of flings until he meets Ann Atkinson (Glenda Jackson), a no-nonsense divorcee who insists on monogamy. The script, credited to four writers (including Casablanca co-scripter Julius J. Epstein), is packed with amusing exchanges, and few are as good at tackling this sort of smart-alecky dialogue as Matthau. Art Carney, Matthau’s co-star in the original 1965 Broadway run of The Odd Couple, and Richard Benjamin, who played Matthau’s nephew in 1975’s The Sunshine Boys, are amusing as, respectively, Dr. Amos Willoughby, the hospital’s senile head of staff, and Dr. Norman Solomon, Charley’s colleague and best friend. House Calls was successful enough at the box office to lead to a popular television series that lasted three seasons; it starred Wayne Rogers and Lynn Redgrave (replaced in the third season by Sharon Gless). It was also successful enough to warrant another teaming of Matthau and Jackson, this time in the sharp 1980 comedy Hopscotch (see From Screen To Stream below).

Blu-ray extras consist of entertainment journalist audio commentary; the theatrical trailer; and trailers for other films on the Kino label.

Movie: ★★★½

THE PHANTOM (1996). Even as a fan of nostalgic, no-frills superhero flicks like 1991’s The Rocketeer and (to a lesser degree) 1994’s The Shadow, it was impossible to warm up to this chintzy period yarn. The character of The Phantom was created by Lee Falk back in 1936, and this purple-garbed crimefighter was popular enough to appear in newspaper strips, comic books, animated TV series, and a vintage 1940s movie serial starring Western vet Tom Tyler. Here, however, the character’s feature film debut simply feels like a half-baked rehash of better action films like Raiders of the Lost Ark, with its plot involving the search for some mystical skulls (none, however, made out of crystal). Even taking this with the expected grain of salt doesn’t help overcome the sloppy plotting, wink-wink overkill, cardboard characterizations, and feeble performances by Billy Zane (as Kit Walker/The Phantom), Kristy Swanson (as his spunky girlfriend Diana Palmer), and, alas, longtime fave Treat Williams (hamming it up as megalomaniacal villain Xander Drax). The Phantom is known to many people as The Ghost Who Walks, but The Phantom is simply The Movie That Bores. Extra demerits for utilizing one of the dumbest taglines of the past 50 — make that 100 — years: “Slam Evil!”

Extras in the 4K + Blu-ray edition consist of audio commentary by director Simon Wincer; an interview with Zane; an interview with composer David Newman; the theatrical trailer; and trailers for other films on the Kino label.

Movie: ★½

THE RUNNING MAN (2025). Based on the 1982 Stephen King novel, the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The Running Man is a particular kitschy piece of ’80s Arnie action, with a great premise and some potent underlying themes limply handled by scripter Steven E. de Souza and especially director Paul Michael Glaser. Set in 2017, it takes place in an oppressive United States where the most popular TV show is The Running Man, in which enemies of the state must flee for their lives without being killed by the show’s assassins. With the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World team of writer-director Edgar Wright and co-scripter Michael Bacall at the controls, this new version is better paced and better plotted but not necessarily a better movie — indeed, while their approaches are different, the entertainment value is about the same. This time it’s Glen Powell who does all the hoofing — he’s Ben Richards, who desperately needs money to lift his family out of poverty and thus agrees to take part in the popular series created by Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) and hosted by Bobby T (Colman Domingo). Even if it often bungled its satire, the ’87 version was prescient in its view of 2017 America as a failing nation were the have-nots were screwed harder than ever by the haves. The ’25 take is just a slightly exaggerated view of our present world, meaning its satiric edge has been filed down. What’s left is a fairly decent action yarn, one which maintains interest until its cluttered, clipped, and cacophonous conclusion.

Extras in the 4K + Blu-ray edition include audio commentary by Wright, Bacall, and Powell, and deleted and extended scenes.

Movie: ★★½

STONE COLD (1991). I suppose I should be angry at my beloved Los Angeles Rams (I’ve been a diehard fan since 1978, when Warren Beatty was their quarterback) for subjecting me to Stone Cold, since it was during a blowout loss to the California team that the Seattle Seahawks’ Brian Bosworth sustained a major injury that was the beginning of the end for his brief NFL career. Known more for his obnoxious behavior than for his gridiron prowess, “The Boz” decided he’d be a screen natural, doubtless envisioning a career to match that of Schwarzenegger and Stallone … or at least Van Damme and Seagal. Instead, his debut feature was a sizable box office flop, and he hasn’t headlined a major picture since. He doesn’t exactly command the screen as much as merely take up space, making little impression as maverick Alabama cop Joe Huff. When a biker gang known as The Brotherhood begins murdering politicos and priests alike, the FBI taps Joe to infiltrate the outfit and cozy up to its crazed leader Chains (Lance Henriksen). Those solely seeking action should get their money’s worth — the stuntwork, human and vehicular, largely delivers — but it’s painful to behold in most other regards. Incidentally, that teenage girl with braces who’s taken hostage in the opening scene? Color me startled to see that it was Renee O’Connor, a mere four years before co-starring as Gabrielle on TV’s kick-ass Xena: Warrior Princess.

Extras in the 4K + Blu-ray edition include scene-specific audio commentary by director Craig R. Baxley; interviews with Bosworth and Henriksen; and a VHS release ad.

Movie: ★½

20,000 YEARS IN SING SING (1933) / CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS (1937). From his very first film role in 1930’s Up the River (opposite another newbie named Humphrey Bogart), Spencer Tracy was movie-star material, always playing leads or second leads. Here are two of his triumphs from his prolific first decade before the camera.

Too short at 80 minutes, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing marks the only screen pairing of two-time Oscar winners Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis. Yet Davis is only here for support; Tracy takes control of the screen as cocksure criminal Tommy Connors, who arrives at the famous prison certain that his outside connections have ensured him a comfortable time behind bars. But the honest warden (Arthur Byron, playing a character based on real-life Sing Sing warden Lewis E. Lawes) won’t tolerate any tampering with the law, and he treats Connor no differently than he does any other prisoner. Connor soon learns some measure of humility, enough that when his girlfriend (Davis) is gravely injured, the warden trusts him enough to offer him a one-day pass to visit her. Tracy’s fun to watch in an atypical role as a tough guy, even if he’s no threat to James Cagney (the first choice for the part).

Although it was Tracy who walked away with the accolades, it was child star Freddie Bartholomew who received top billing for Captains Courageous, an adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling novel. He plays Harvey Cheyne, a spoiled rich kid who, while traveling with his widowed, workaholic father (Melvyn Douglas), falls off an ocean liner and ends up on a fishing schooner captained by Disko Troop (Lionel Barrymore). Tracy plays Manuel, the Portuguese fisherman who pulled the lad out of the water and proceeds to teach him the trade. Tracy is earnest, but if that’s a Portuguese accent he’s sporting, then I’m Katharine Hepburn — if anything, his performance appears to be based on Chico Marx. Still, this is top-notch entertainment, powered by many stirring sequences as well as Harvey’s relationships with both his real father and his surrogate father. Nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Screenplay, and Film Editing, it won Tracy the award for Best Actor, the first of two consecutive victories (he also won the following year for Boys Town).

Blu-ray extras on 20,000 Years in Sing Sing include the 1933 live-action short 20,000 Cheers for the Chain Gang and the 1932 cartoon The Queen Was in the Parlor. Blu-ray extras on Captains Courageous include the 1937 live-action short How to Start the Day and a radio promo for Captains Courageous. (Purchase these titles here and here.)

20,000 Years in Sing Sing: ★★★½

Captains Courageous: ★★★½

FROM SCREEN TO STREAM

HOPSCOTCH (1980). Based on the novel by Death Wish author Brian Garfield, with Garfield himself penning the script alongside director Ronald Neame, Hopscotch is an extremely satisfying confection that derives most of its juice from yet another superlative Walter Matthau performance. Here, the comic legend stars as Miles Kendig, a veteran CIA agent who’s always done things his own way. This irks his officious superior, Myerson (Ned Beatty), who demotes the field officer to a job in the filing department. Incensed, Kendig leaves the CIA, whereupon he lets it be known that he plans to write his tell-all memoirs — this of course really angers Myerson, who uses the agency’s resources to chase the wayward spy all over the globe. Loose and lighthearted, Hopscotch is breezy entertainment, offering fine supporting turns from Glenda Jackson as a former agent who becomes Kendig’s accomplice, Sam Waterston as Kendig’s sympathetic replacement in the agency, and especially Herbert Lom as a KGB officer who holds Kendig in high esteem. Mainly, though, there’s Matthau, whose character has a plan — and a quip — for every situation that might come up.

Movie: ★★★

THE HOUSE BUNNY (2008). According to IMDb, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner appeared as himself (or a variation thereof) in over 300 movies, TV shows, and video productions, including Laverne & Shirley, The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, and (as the U.S. President) Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV. Personally, I don’t think he ever topped his cameo in the Roman Empire segment of Mel Brooks’ History of the World: Part I, but he does enjoy more screen time in The House Bunny. The then-82-year-old Hef serves as a father figure of sorts to Shelley Darlingson (Anna Faris), a Playboy Bunny who lives at his legendary mansion. But right after her 27th birthday (59 in Bunny years, she’s told), she’s tricked by a rival into leaving the house, although it’s not long before she finds herself with a new gig: serving as a house mother to the socially awkward girls (including one played by Emma Stone in only her third film appearance) from the Zeta Alpha Zeta sorority. Soon, she’s instructing them on how to attract boys while they’re teaching her how to depend on more than just her looks. This was co-written by the same women (Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith) who penned Legally Blonde, and their roots are clearly showing: This is basically an inferior version of that Reese Witherspoon hit, and it isn’t even up to the middling standards of Amanda Bynes’ similarly plotted 2007 comedy Sydney White. But the talented Faris strikes the proper airhead notes, and Lutz and Smith take care to feed her some funny lines now and then.

Movie: ★★

INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996) / INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE (2016). A gargantuan commercial smash back in its day — only five films from that decade grossed more — Independence Day also feels like one of the most derivative movies ever made. Borrowing liberally from The War of the Worlds, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and seemingly every other sci-fi outing this side of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, the picture somehow manages to recycle these reference points and come up with something that works on its own terms. A monster of a movie, it overloads our senses with its Oscar-winning visual effects, a disarmingly mixed bag of heroes straight out of a ’70s disaster flick, and a surefire premise that should automatically snare anyone who has ever gazed at the stars and pondered their secrets. After an extra-terrestrial invasion decimates the world’s major cities, pockets of survivors elect to fight back; stateside, this includes the U.S. President (Bill Pullman) and the First Lady (Mary McDonnell), a cocky fighter pilot (Will Smith) and his girlfriend (Vivica A. Fox), a computer genius (Jeff Goldblum) and his badgering father (Judd Hirsch), and a drunken crop duster (Randy Quaid) who claims he was once kidnapped by aliens. Rousing entertainment, the film is often silly and packed with unlikely narrative coincidences — then again, I suppose that’s why it’s called science fiction.

The first inanity in Independence Day: Resurgence arrives when it’s revealed that the entire global community felt so connected in a United Colors of Benetton sort of way following the defeat of the invading aliens 20 years ago that everyone has lived in peace ever since. There have been no territorial wars, no terrorist psychos blowing up buildings, no televised Sean Hannity rants against the dangers of “libtards,” apparently not even a couple of kids throwing spastic punches in the schoolyard. And that Kumbaya feeling only expands once those nasty e.t.’s return for the 20-year reunion, again set on annihilating all of humankind. Several actors from the original return — Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Brent Spiner, Robert Loggia — but the problem isn’t with the old-timers but rather the newcomers. While the original ID contained characters who kept us entertained, this picture adds characters — and their attendant actors — who are so devoid of personality, they barely register as living organisms. Chief among the culprits is Liam Hemsworth as a cross between Top Gun‘s Maverick and a rock, Jessie T. Usher as the son of Will Smith’s character (that adorable little kid in ID, played by Ross Bagley, must have had all the personality beaten out of him to have grown into this stiff) and Travis Tope and Nicolas Wright as irritating nerds. In Independence Day, we pulled for the humans; in this daft, dreary, and derivative sequel, our sympathies rest entirely with any otherworldly creature who can just shut these guys up.

Independence Day: ★★★

Independence Day: Resurgence: ★½

MONSIEUR VERDOUX (1947). Another Charlie Chaplin release, another certified gem. Yet unlike such universally beloved efforts as The Gold Rush and City Lights, Monsieur Verdoux was greeted with hostile reviews and zero box office upon its original release. Chaplin’s personal travails at the time (legal, political, and more) certainly contributed to the film’s demise, but there was also the fact that the movie was unlike anything Chaplin had made before, and it took a couple of decades before its bracing brilliance was finally appreciated and embraced by critics and cineasts. Working from an idea conceived by Orson Welles (and loosely based on a true story), the picture stars Chaplin as a dapper gentleman who woos wealthy older women and then murders them for their money. On the side, Verdoux has an invalid wife and young son that he loves dearly, but his termination from his bank job of many years is theoretically what drives his sordid new profession. Chaplin is marvelous as the cutthroat Casanova, and his scenes opposite a fabulous Martha Raye as the most indestructible of his conquests are the movie’s best, brimming with some of the filmmaker’s most hysterical bits. Yet for all its mirth, the movie frequently displays a darker side: A prolonged sequence in which Verdoux plots to test out a poison on a beautiful young woman (Marilyn Nash) who’s down on her luck is by turns suspenseful, poignant, and meditative, and Chaplin also manages to include some valid moralizing in his climactic monologue. Despite the general animosity, this did earn him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

Movie: ★★★½

RANGO (2011). An Academy Award winner for Best Animated Feature, Rango isn’t merely a kid flick by any stretch of the imagination: Instead of a G rating, it sports a PG, and I daresay even a PG-13 wouldn’t have been out of the question. Then again, that’s perfectly in line with a work that in its finest moments comes across as a Coen Brothers film with anthropomorphic animals instead of flesh-and-blood humans. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die director Gore Verbinski has teamed with Michael (2026, not 1996) scripter John Logan and reunited with his Pirates of the Caribbean star Johnny Depp to fashion a frequently warped and always humorous quasi-Western in which a chameleon (voiced by Depp) who had previously enjoyed the comfy life of a family pet winds up in the dusty town of Dust, where he gets elected sheriff after convincing the locals that he’s one tough hombre. Rango is so imaginatively realized in terms of its camera angles and backdrops that the sense of detail brings to mind a live-action flick rather than an animated one — it makes sense seeing ace cinematographer Roger Deakins (Blade Runner 2049) listed in the closing credits as “visual consultant.” As for the narrative, it’s a film buff’s delight, expertly incorporating elements from, among others, Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, Cat Ballou, Apocalypse Now, and, with its plot thread of the villain trying to control a town’s water rights(!), Chinatown. For the PG set, the classic line “Forget it, Jake; it’s Chinatown” will have no relevance, but “Remember it, Jake; it’s Rango” might.

Movie: ★★★½

THE WATCH (2012). After The Watch flopped hard at the American box office, it was suggested in more than one circle that this comedy about the members of a neighborhood watch was the victim of horrible timing: It debuted in theaters five months after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of ogre George Zimmerman, and its original title of Neighborhood Watch was even changed specifically because of the Florida tragedy. It’s a sound theory, but the greater truth is that the movie would have tanked at any time because it’s frequently terrible. After the night watchman (Joe Nunez) at an Ohio suburb’s Costco gets brutally murdered, the concerned manager (Ben Stiller) takes it upon himself to form a citizens’ outfit to routinely patrol the area. The only volunteers — one cheerful (Vince Vaughn), one meek (Richard Ayoade), one potentially psychotic (Jonah Hill) — are more interested in hanging out and drinking beer than in protecting the streets, but that changes once they learn that the mayhem is being caused by outer space invaders. A few modest chuckles save this from being a complete bomb, but the script’s dissimilar elements never manage to coexist peacefully — subplots involving sterility and teen sex are ill-formed and crash against the equally dull e.t. framework — and the actors aren’t taxed enough to break a sweat. At least the expected Viagra cracks are kept to a bare minimum (just one), although Trojan Magnum condoms — large size, of course — receive a few shout-outs during some of the penis-obsessed exchanges.

Movie: ★½