cinema

Two recently-released comedies are entertaining audiences in theaters as well as streaming.

Maybe you saw Six, the popular stage musical which features the six wives of Henry VIII. They dance, prance, sing. Each had an unfortunate ending, but audiences see the energetic side of each woman, not only her anguish. Not so in Anna Boleyn, the German silent film from 1920 by master filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch.

Manfred Kirchheimer died on July 16 at age 93. In addition to being a longtime instructor of film production at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, he was an award-winning documentary filmmaker. His motion pictures are factual, and they also were artful, even occasionally avant-garde.

As temperatures remain high, staying inside in an air-conditioned room with a TV monitor and streaming subscriptions beats an outdoor pickle ball or tennis game.

Summer nights and rainy weekend days are times for enjoying a good comedy. The program might be feature films, TV shows of the past 75 years, a slapstick silent with Buster Keaton, or a cartoon-filled night. With all the streaming and discs available, the opportunities for enjoying the comedy genre are almost endless.

The most recent movie of German filmmaker Wim Wenders is Perfect Days. It is an art film much in the style of mid-20th century art films. The accent is on mood, and, in this case, a reflection on a single fictional life.

A new Blu-ray from Flicker Alley features two feature-length documentaries by American documentary filmmaker Herbert Kline. It’s called Against the Storm: Herbert Kline in a Darkened Europe. The two films were award winners, highly praised by the mainstream press when they came out in the late 1930s. They haven’t been spotlighted in more recent decades. Both deal with the Nazi takeover of Europe. With the unending interest in movies about the Nazi era, there should be plenty of attention paid to this collection.

The Old Oak, possibly Ken Loach’s last feature film, is playing at film festivals and on home screens across the U.S.

It is no surprise that Anatomy of a Fall won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. This film dares to take a different tack to the old favorite murder mystery genre. In the early minutes of the film, Daniel, an eleven-year-old vision-impaired boy, discovers the bloody body of his father, Samuel, lying near their home. What am I watching? Is it a murder mystery?

Eighty-five years ago, populist movie director made a feature that spoke to political corruption in the United States. If, indeed, it is true that 1939 is the finest year for Hollywood filmmaking, then Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is among the finest movies of that outstanding year.