FILM FRENZY

 Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel in Gilmore Girls (Photo: Warner Bros.)

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 BRIDE! (2026). In James Whale’s 1935 masterpiece The Bride of Frankenstein, Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) offers a toast “To a new world of gods and monsters!” In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s 2026 mess The Bride!, Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) offers nothing nearly as interesting or iconic, but you do get to hear Mary Shelley herself scream, “Here comes the motherfucking bride!” Like Elsa Lanchester in the ’35 version, Jessie Buckley plays both Shelly and the Bride, but with a key difference. This Mary Shelley routinely possesses the woman who eventually becomes the Bride: Ida, a party girl living in Depression-era Chicago and a thorn in the side of a mob boss (Zlatko Burić) who soon has her rubbed out. Enter Frank (Christian Bale), aka Frankenstein’s monster, who’s been wandering around for over a century and pops up in Chicago to ask Dr. Euphronious to provide him with a companion. Thus, Ida is resurrected (albeit with amnesia), and she and Frank hoof it around the country, emulating Bonnie and Clyde when they’re not busy catching movies starring Frank’s favorite actor (Jake Gyllenhaal). The notion of turning the Bride’s story into a feminist manifesto is an intriguing one, but Gyllenhaal (who wrote as well as directed) can’t get her thoughts properly sorted out, resulting in a film that’s by turns heavy-handed (Ida actually states, “Me, too”), contradictory, scattershot, and irksome (Buckley, off her Hamnet Oscar win, is quite terrible here). To be sure, there are moments to savor, but they’re like diamonds quickly sinking into a miasma of foggy intentions and murky results.

Blu-ray extras consist of a handful of making-of pieces featuring select cast and crew members.

Movie: ★★

GILMORE GIRLS: THE COMPLETE SERIES (2000-2007). Originally airing on The WB (and switching to The CW for its final season), Gilmore Girls is packed with talk talk talk, but don’t expect to hear normal dialogue. The main players in this show don’t speak in sentences; they alternate between speaking in quips, the type popularized in vintage screwball comedies and Neil Simon properties, and speaking in pop-culture jargon, as if they were cramming right before appearing on Jeopardy! Created by Amy Sherman-Palladino, Gilmore Girls is set in the fictional town of Stars Hollow, Connecticut, and focuses on 32-year-old single mom Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) and her 15-year-old daughter Rory (Alexis Bledel). As the series begins, Lorelai works at the Independence Inn while Rory is making plans to go to a prestigious college like Harvard. Lorelei has a testy relationship with her wealthy parents, her father Richard (Edward Herrmann) and especially her mother Emily (Kelly Bishop), but she also has many close friends, including the inn cook Sookie St. James (Melissa McCarthy) and diner owner (and future romantic interest) Luke Danes (Scott Patterson). Gilmore Girls is often called a family show, but it doesn’t carry that term’s baggage of excess sentimentality and unearned pathos. Instead, the program is more direct in its dealings with its characters, allowing everything about them to feel real. Well, except for their dialogue — as noted, Lorelai and Rory seemingly possess all the wisdom for all the ages, working in references to everything from Moby-Dick and Rosemary’s Baby to Marcel Marceau and the Trix Rabbit.

The Blu-ray box set not only contains all seven seasons and 153 episodes of the original 2000-2007 run but also 2016’s four-episode follow-up Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. Extras include behind-the-scenes featurettes and deleted scenes.

Series: ★★★½

HI, MOM! (1970). Following his writing and directing debuts with 1968’s Murder a la Mod, Brian De Palma teamed with an unknown actor named Robert De Niro to make three consecutive pictures. Following 1968’s Greetings and 1969’s The Wedding Party was this outrageous black comedy. Returning to the same role he played in Greetings, De Niro is Jon Rubin, a Vietnam vet who decides to film his unsuspecting neighbors in compromising positions and sell the footage to a producer (Allen Garfield) who makes porn flicks. When that career path doesn’t pan out, he takes a gig with a black acting troupe whose experimental production, Be Black, Baby, informs a lengthy stretch late in the film when the black actors, forever attempting to explain how it feels to be black to white people, don whiteface while forcing their white audience members to wear blackface — what follows is unsettling and insane, and it closes with a surprising declaration from the abused audience members. Hi, Mom! anticipates De Palma’s eventual tributes to Hitchcock with an opening that brings to mind Rear Window, and the film also anticipates one of De Niro’s signature roles, as his Jon Rubin has much in common with Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle. De Palma followed this with Dionysus in ’69 (see extra features right below) and Get to Know Your Rabbit (reviewed in From Screen To Stream further below) before helming 1972’s impressive Sisters, which kicked off his career as a helmer of thrillers.

The 4K + Blu-ray edition also contains (on Blu) De Palma’s following movie, 1970’s Dionysus in ’69. Extras for Hi, Mom! include film historian audio commentary; an archival interview with producer and co-scripter Charles Hirsch; and rare behind-the-scenes footage from the set of the film.

Movie: ★★★

I LOVE LUCY: THE COMPLETE SERIES (1951-1957). How to even begin to describe I Love Lucy’s impact on television, on culture, on American history itself? One of the pioneering TV series in the early years of the medium, this sitcom immediately rewrote the rules on how shows were staged, filmed, and marketed. But beyond its influence and innovations, the program endures simply because it’s one of the funniest series ever produced, with the stars and their characters — Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo, Desi Arnaz as her husband Ricky, and Vivian Vance and William Frawley as their best friends Ethel and Fred Mertz — all becoming household names. The number of classic episodes is an unwieldy one, and everyone has their own personal faves: Lucy hawking “Vitameatavegamin” on TV; the birth of Little Ricky (still one of the most watched TV episodes of all time); Lucy stomping grapes in Italy; Lucy and Ethel working at a candy factory; John Wayne (nuff said); Lucy and Superman; and on and on and on. I Love Lucy was a colossal success, ranking #1 in the Nielsen ratings for four of its six seasons (it was #2 and #3 in the remaining two). It won two Emmy Awards for Best Situation Comedy, one for Ball as Best Actress, and one for Vance as Best Supporting Actress. And of course it’s routinely at or near the top whenever some publication offers its list of the greatest TV shows of all time — as but two examples, Variety ranked it #1 while TV Guide placed it #2, under Seinfeld (gimme a break…).

DVD extras include all three seasons and 13 episodes of the subsequent The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (1957-1960); the original opening and closing; flubs; lost scenes; vintage sponsor spots; and much more.

Series: ★★★★

NICKELODEON (1976). Peter Bogdanovich followed his phenomenal 1971 hit The Last Picture Show with two more resounding successes — 1972’s What’s Up, Doc? and 1973’s Paper Moon — before helming a string of gargantuan bombs that effectively ended his career (since the 1970s, he had only directed eight features over a 33-year span before passing away in 2022). Among these duds was Nickelodeon, which had a troubled production history and resulted in unhappy memories for all involved. But despite its bad rep, I find it a flawed yet charming homage to the early days of moviemaking. Ryan O’Neal stars as Leo Harrigan, an inept lawyer who gets strong-armed by movie mogul H.H. Cobb (Brian Keith) into writing and (later) directing short films during the fledgling days of cinema. As if churning out an endless series of flicks wasn’t stressful enough, Harrigan also has to compete with leading man Buck Greenway (Burt Reynolds) for the hand of young ingénue Kathleen Cooke (model Jane Hitchcock, in her first — and final — big-screen appearance). Tatum O’Neal, Ryan’s daughter (and an Oscar winner for Paper Moon opposite her dad), co-stars as a spunky tomboy who develops a crush on Buck, while John Ritter essays the role of company cameraman Frank Frank. Bogdanovich based his script (heavily reworked from W.D. Richter’s original) on the personal recollections of various veterans of silent cinema, and while many of the slapstick gags fall flat, others work quite well, and the entire cast performs with gusto.

The Blu-ray edition contains both the theatrical version of the film and a black-and-white Director’s Cut. Extras consist of audio commentary by Bogdanovich on the Director’s Cut; an audio interview with Richter; and a video essay.

Movie: ★★★

THE WALK (2015). Released in 2008, the Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire told the amazing true story of Philippe Petit, a French high-wire walker who in the 1970s could always be found risking his life climbing and traversing high points of note (including Notre Dame and Sydney Bridge). When Petit learned of plans to construct the World Trade Center, he waited impatiently over the years for the Twin Towers to become a reality, at which point he and his supporters plotted to set up a line between the two buildings so that he could cross over with only a thin wire under his feet. The Walk is writer-director Robert Zemeckis’ dramatization of this historic event, with Petit charmingly played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Petit’s comrades in arms are fellow visionaries who have all agreed to help him achieve his goal of spanning that imposing empty space between the two towers, and the picture covers the preparations intently, taking care to dot every cinematic i and cross every celluloid t. Only then does Zemeckis hit us with the spectacle: The final half-hour, as Petit takes to the wire, is basically one sustained money shot, with superb effects conveying not only the sheer lunacy of the undertaking but also the determination of one man to achieve the seemingly impossible. Often when a daredevil is asked why he or she wants to climb a mountain, the predictable response is “Because it’s there.” Petit might be expected to make a similar declaration but never does — a surprise, given the degree of arrogance he sometimes flashes. Like an Icarus for our time, he dares to skip across the sky, and anyone not familiar with the outcome will be anxious to learn whether he similarly gets burned.

Extras in the 4K + Digital edition include a pair of pieces on the effects and deleted scenes.

Movie: ★★★

WHITE ZOMBIE (1932). The 1943 chiller I Walked with a Zombie and the 1966 thriller The Plague of the Zombies are the best of the pre-Romero era — indeed, they remain highlights of the entire genre — but of special historical significance is White Zombie, which holds the distinction of being cinema’s first zombie flick. It stars Bela Lugosi as the colorfully named Murder Legendre, who, through a special potion and his own mastery of mind control, turns people into mindless slaves to toil in his Haitian sugar mill. After local bigwig Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer) becomes obsessed with the lovely Madeline (Madge Bellamy), he turns to Legendre, who’s only too happy to help transform her into a walking corpse who will obey his every command. The supporting cast is awful — at least Lugosi is entertaining in his hammy inclinations — and the low budget dictates a few titter-worthy moments (my favorite is when Beaumont’s butler, who’s supposed to be unconscious, can be spotted holding his nose as he’s tossed to his death into a body of water). But the production values aren’t compromised at any point: The atmosphere of dread is pungent, the use of sound is inspired (the creaking heard in the sugar mill is the aural equivalent of Chinese water torture, and the shrieks of a vulture are unnerving), and the makeup by the great Jack Pierce (creator of the classic Universal monsters) and Carl Axcelle is minimal but effective.

There are no Blu-ray extras.

Movie: ★★½

FROM SCREEN TO STREAM

BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945). David Lean’s Brief Encounter stands as one of the greatest love stories ever made, as well as a perennial high point of UK cinema: Years ago, the British Film Institute voted it the second best British film of all time (just below Carol Reed’s The Third Man and right above Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia), while a prominent poll of British filmmakers found it similarly landing in the place position (under Lawrence of Arabia). Adapted by Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan, and Ronald Neame from Noël Coward’s play Still Life, this deceptively simple picture examines a doomed love affair in its entirety, in the process achieving the near-impossible by making audience members wholly sympathetic to the plights of what in essence are two adulterers. It’s entirely by accident that housewife Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) meets Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) inside the cafe at the train station, but they fast become friends. It’s only when these happily married people start to acknowledge the growing attraction between them that matters become particularly sticky. Haunting in its evocative mood — one enhanced by Robert Krasker’s cinematography and Lean’s meticulous, muted direction — Brief Encounter primarily hinges on the extraordinary performance by Johnson, whose presence also graced Lean’s earlier films In Which We Serve and This Happy Breed. Brief Encounter earned three major Oscar nominations: Best Actress, Director, and Screenplay.

Movie: ★★★★

GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT (1972) / REDACTED (2007). Like Hi, Mom!, here are two of the more obscure films directed by Brian De Palma.

After helming a handful of films in New York, De Palma headed to Hollywood to make Get to Know Your Rabbit … and was subsequently fired from the picture for creative differences with the studio and star Tom Smothers. Smothers (of The Smothers Brothers fame, natch) plays a corporate suit who gets tired of the rat race and drops out to become a magician. After receiving training from a veteran of the trade (Orson Welles), he takes his act on the road, tapping his former boss (John Astin) to be his manager and finding romance with a wide-eyed fan (Katharine Ross). De Palma’s next picture (Sisters) would land him in the thriller field that would eventually make his name, but here, he still manages to include some neat stylistic touches in a film that’s most dependent on Jordan Crittenden’s offbeat and wildly uneven screenplay.

Like Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, here was another 2007 debacle helmed by a once-great director now sputtering along on fumes. While De Palma’s 1989 Casualties of War, set during the Vietnam War, centered on American soldiers (including one played by Sean Penn) raping and killing a Vietnamese girl, Redacted, set during the Iraq War, centers on American soldiers raping and killing an Iraqi girl. Directed with more restraint than usual by De Palma, Casualties of War was disturbing but worthwhile; Redacted, on the other hand, is terrible in just about every regard. This was not only the worst of the glut of Iraq War films that came out in 2007, it also ranks as the worst picture in De Palma’s entire career. It only has the filmmaker’s moral outrage going for it; in all other respects, it’s like watching a YouTube skit made by amateurish clods.

Get to Know Your Rabbit: ★★½

Redacted: ★

OUR BRAND IS CRISIS (2015). The 2005 documentary of the same name related how James Carville and his team were hired to put candidate Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada over the top in the 2002 Bolivian presidential election. For some reason, this fictionalization changes names and even a gender, so we’re basically left with Sandra Bullock playing James Carville. Her character, “Calamity” Jane Bodine, is a political strategist with a rocky résumé, but she’s nevertheless up to the challenge of trumpeting a candidate (Joaquim de Almeida) who trails in the polls by 28 points, even if the frontrunner is being handled by her sworn enemy, a slick operator with a Cheshire cat grin and the moniker Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton). Perhaps mindful that he’s working under David Gordon Green, the man who directed Your Highness and The Sitter, scripter Peter Straughan packs the proceedings with numerous moronic interludes, the sort more at home in a broad Will Ferrell comedy than an ostensibly hard-hitting political drama. Even worse than the frat house humor, though, is the naiveté that’s often displayed in this type of picture, where seasoned vets are shocked — shocked, I tell you! — to learn that politicians are crooks and liars. Ultimately, the movie’s brand isn’t crisis as much as it’s absurdity.

Movie: ★★

VERTIGO (1958). Red herrings are a common staple in mysteries, but this film takes the concept one step further: The first half-hour of Alfred Hitchcock’s stunning film — indeed, the mystery itself — is nothing more than a red herring, and the flick is soon revealed to be one of the most painfully acute explorations of obsession ever put on celluloid. This psychologically dense drama about a detective (James Stewart) who falls for a mysterious blonde (Kim Novak) is dreamy in both the best and worst senses of the word: Sexy, lush, and leisurely paced, it also gnaws on your brain like an unsettling nightmare that refuses to dissipate with the morning sun. It’s understandable that this picture continues to disturb unsuspecting audiences: Unlike most films of its era (spoilers ahead), innocent people die, villains get away with murder, and the so-called hero, who eventually exhibits a nasty side, never quite manages to tame his demons. But by casting affable Jimmy Stewart, cinema’s ultimate Everyman, in the leading role, Hitchcock inexorably draws moviegoers into his tangled web of longing and deceit and makes us savor every uneasy moment. This isn’t my favorite Hitch by a long shot — Psycho, Notorious, and Rear Window are among the handful I would rate higher — but it is the picture that after 60 years finally displaced Citizen Kane at the top of Sight & Sound’s decennial (since 1952) list of the all-time greatest films in 2012 … and it was itself displaced by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruzelles in 2022. This earned a pair of Oscar nominations for its sets and sound.

Movie: ★★★★