6 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.0 | |
Overall | 2.0 |
When a brutal murder occurs among the Hasidic Jewish community and looks like an inside job, tough New York cop, Emily Edith (Melanie Griffith), goes undercover as a Hasid to find the culprit.
Starring: Melanie Griffith, John Pankow, Tracy Pollan, Lee Richardson, Mia SaraRomance | 100% |
Crime | 34% |
Drama | 22% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
French: Dolby Digital 2.0
Spanish: Dolby Digital 2.0
English SDH
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 2.0 | |
Video | 3.0 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 2.0 |
Director Sidney Lumet (Network, Dog Day Afternoon) ranks as one of the most prominent and prolific filmmakers of his time, widely praised for both the number and quality of films in his canon. A Stranger Among Us ranks as one of the rare flops, a film that stumbles under the burden of a misfire of a lead performance and an internal identity crisis. The film offers a rich, but never compelling, look inside New York's Hasidic Jewish community under the pretext of theft and murder. The film flashes potential, though certainly not from its lead, its flimsy narrative structure, its sluggish pacing, and a host of other problems that keep the film in a middling purgatory where resides an ever-increasing number of movies that are too good to be considered bad and too bad to be considered good.
A Stranger Among Us doesn't exactly dazzle, but Mill Creek's presentation is fairly firm and more than adequate. The image transitions from soft to somewhat sharp; some lower light and more warmly lit shots sometimes struggle to maintain an edge, but well-lit scenes often manage to impress with tangible sharpness and filmic definition. Textural essentials rarely dazzle, but city exteriors, select clothes, and faces find acceptable detail levels. Colors are neutral, like the detailing not particularly stout but never appearing excessively faded. Black level fluctuation is noticeable but minimal, always hovering somewhere relatively close to true. Ditto flesh tones. A modest grain structure remains intact, but it does compete with some occasional macroblocking and processing noise.
A Stranger Among Us features a two-channel DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. It delivers pleasing enough spacing and musical clarity with surprisingly rich notes and detail of presentation. City din never wants for much more spacing and immersion under the two-channel constraints, but clarity is sometimes left by the wayside in favor of a general mushiness. That holds true for much of the track; even without the efficiency and pinpoint clarity of newer, more robustly engineered multichannel tracks, most elements find adequate-to-agreeable positioning and serviceable detail, even more intensive elements like screeching police sirens, beeping equipment in the back of an ambulance, or gunshots. Dialogue finds a nicely imaged front-center location. Vocal clarity is fine.
This Blu-ray release of A Stranger Among Us contains no supplemental content. The film begins playback immediately upon selecting it from the main menu screen.
There's an interesting duality at work in A Stranger Among Us, the story of an undercover cop and her attraction to a man whom she cannot have, but the two never jive. The world is well defined, as is Ariel's adherence Hasidic code, but Lumet and Writer Robert J. Avrech struggle with tonal balance and approach. The tales never feel joined in a purposeful manner, always playing as more independent of one another rather than organically connected. Griffith's performance is stale at best and Lumet and Editor Andrew Mondshein's pacing struggles to make sense of the movie's dual narratives. Mill Creek's featureless Blu-ray delivers adequate 1080p video and fair two-channel lossless audio. Worth a look on the super-cheap.
(Still not reliable for this title)
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