If a movie directed by Denzel Washington and starring Michael B. Jordan is released into thousands of theaters and yet no one (and I mean no one) watched it, did it actually come out? This is the question posed by A Journal for Jordan, which is now out on home video to either develop a reputation of any kind or continue its run of total anonymity even with factors that should draw at least some people to give it a shot. The same can be said for The Nowhere Inn, the Carrie Brownstein-St. Vincent mockumentary/horror-comedy (I think?) that even I haven’t watched out of morbid curiosity yet. Meanwhile, the most important release this week is of a movie (and director) finally being remembered after years of toiling in obscurity, Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street.
Oh, and The Matrix Resurrections is out this week too. Miraculously, rather than another assembly-line legacyquel, we’ve been given another high-price-tag, hyper-personal Wachowski “mess” (it doesn’t get more personal than Lana Wachowski adapting a past suicide attempt for a major plot point). It seems at first to merely be an open fuck-you to Warner Bros. and every force that commoditized and neutralized the effect of The Matrix, but as it always does in the Wachowskis oeuvre, it comes back to a love of humanity and a romantic love so strong that they can defeat the systems in place to temper them. Even more than a continuation of the Matrix universe, this feels like the culmination of every Wachowski project before it, including echoes and direct recreations of several even beyond the footage taken from the original trilogy; half the cast of Sense8 is present, there are multiple references to Bound, and the ending tweaks one bit of Matrix iconography to also be a Jupiter Ascending homage. I can only hope we get any more Wachowski movies after this, but if this ends up as Lana’s swan song, it’s exactly as beautiful, dopey, and sincere a farewell as could be hoped for.
Adoption (Criterion)
Brooklyn Nine-Nine: The Complete Series (Universal)
Coming 2 America (Paramount)
Downton Abbey 4K (Universal)
Hester Street (Cohen)
Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (Paramount)
A Journal for Jordan (Sony)
The Matrix Resurrections (Warner)
National Champions (Universal)
The Nowhere Inn (RLJ)
Phenomena 4K (Synapse)
Redeeming Love (Universal)
Silent Night (RLJ)