A fine Allen romance
New on Blu-ray Café Society Lionsgate DVD, $29.95; Blu-ray, $39.99; also available on VOD
Woody Allen probably won’t ever hit his ’70s and ’80s highs again, but “Café Society” is one of his better later films — a wistful romance set both in Golden Age Hollywood and Prohibition-era New York. Jesse Eisenberg plays the very Allen-esque lead, an ambitious young man who takes a job in Los Angeles with his uncle, a high-powered agent played by Steve Carell. There he falls in love with the glamour and his uncle’s freethinking assistant (a marvelous Kristen Stewart), but when his dreams are dashed, he scampers back to New York to work for his gangster brother. Allen’s dialogue doesn’t sparkle like it used to, but his affection for the time period is palpable, and Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography brings a soft glow to a story that has unexpectedly jagged edges. Special features: One brief featurette
VOD King Cobra Available Friday
Based on a seedy truecrime story, writer-director Justin Kelly’s “King Cobra” follows a young gay porn star (played by Garrett Clayton) who becomes a modest star, then finds himself caught between rival producers (played by Christian Slater and James Franco). There’s not much story here, and the film plays it a little too coy with its eroticism, playing up the shock value of its sex scenes while stopping well short of being as explicit as this kind of B-movie should be. But the actors are all terrific, and Kelly creates a rich world around his characters, emphasizing how they’re all trying to live the high life without any of the respectability.
TV set of the week The Night Of HBO DVD, $49.99; Blu-ray, $59.99
HBO delivered one of the summer’s most satisfying TV obsessions with this adaptation of the BBC series “Criminal Justice” that had been in the works since 2012, when the late James Gandolfini was set to star. John Turturro fills in for Gandolfini as John Stone, a scrappy, budget-priced New York defense attorney who signs on to help a Pakistani American student (played by Riz Ahmed) accused of murder. The creative team of Richard Price and Steven Zaillian — two of the business’ best screenwriters — are hindered a bit by the plot contrivances of their source material. But for the most part they deliver a top-shelf urban mystery, which explores what happens to a polite, studious young man when he descends into the New York City court and prison systems with only one
From the archives Trilogía de Guillermo del Toro Criterion DVD, $99.95; Blu-ray, $99.95
Writer-director-producer Guillermo del Toro has become a one-man geek-friendly showbiz industry, lending his name and talents to such ventures as TV shows, cartoons and genre pictures of every stripe. But his reputation springs from his own imaginative, personal films, three of the best of which are collected in the new Criterion box set “Trilogía de Guillermo del Toro.” “Cronos,” “The Devil’s Backbone,” and “Pan’s Labyrinth” share a common language (Spanish), and they all use creative makeup effects and a muted, melancholy mood to reinvent classic horror tropes. Del Toro puts his own twist on vampires, ghosts and extra-dimensional monsters, calling back to old Hollywood movies while crafting elaborate, pointed metaphors. His work is suitably gasp-inducing but also comments on authoritarianism in ways that — sadly — will continue to be relevant for generations to come. Special features: Commentary tracks on all three films, plus deleted scenes, interviews, featurettes and a bonus Del Toro short
Three more to see
Alice Through the Looking Glass Walt Disney DVD/Blu-ray combo, $39.99; also available on VOD Independence Day: Resurgence 20th Century Fox DVD, $29.98; Blu-ray, $39.99; 4K; $39.99; 3-D, $49.99; also available on VOD Our Kind of Traitor Lionsgate DVD, $19.98; Blu-ray, $24.99