Kino continues its run of Clint Eastwood releases this week, with new restorations of The Eiger Section, Play Misty For Me, and The Beguiled. Criterion finally gives Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends, the Ground Zero for pretty much every piece of 2010s media about twentysomething New Yorkers, a proper release. And Disney tries to squeeze a few more pennies out of their recent Mulan remake, obviously hurt by the pandemic but also by seemingly being liked by no one at all. But, of course, what I really must talk about is A Rainy Day in New York, quite likely the worst movie Woody Allen has ever made and one that suggests, as Michael Shannon succinctly said about old Trump voters, “it’s time for the urn” for ole Woody. Never has Allen seemed so transparently bankrupt of ideas, lazily spinning his wheels on his usual topics (it’s all here, infidelity, the magic power of the Big Apple, age-inappropriate relationships; the only thing missing is a murder) and crafting fifth-rate one-liners that make no sense coming out of the mouths of anyone below AARP age, let alone Timothee Chalamet and Elle Fanning. Chalamet and Fanning are unusually awful in this too, both straining so hard to get anything from this nothing script that they look constantly on the verge of an aneurysm; Selena Gomez is the only cast member who achieves something like natural charm, while the adult cast members just look like they’re politely waiting for their lunch break. Usually even the worst late-period Allen movies are tolerable by virtue of being showcase reels for the world’s greatest cinematographers, but Vittorio Storaro was asleep at the wheel for this one, with none of the vibrant color work that enlivened Cafe Society and the otherwise-bad Wonder Wheel, and blocking that would be insultingly thoughtless from a first-year film student. Anyway, it’s now on Blu-Ray after floating around the internet for about a year. I forgot to mention that Chalamet plays a (contemporary!) college student named Gatsby Welles. Gatsby Welles.

Amazon Women on the Moon (Kino)
The Beguiled (Kino)
Bill & Ted Face the Music (Warner)
The Brides of Dracula (Shout Factory)
Burst City (Arrow)
The Eiger Sanction (Kino)
Girlfriends (Criterion)
Mulan 4K (1998) (Disney)
Mulan (2020) (Disney)
The Odd Couple II (Paramount)
The Original Kings of Comedy (Paramount)
Play Misty for Me (Kino)
A Rainy Day in New York (MPI)
Tennessee Johnson (Warner Archive Collection)