For the week of December 11th, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing Kingsman: The Golden Circle to Blu-ray. Unless you're immune to all things pop culture (and if so, why are you reading this?), you've probably figured out that The Golden Circle is the second installment in the Kingsman series. For some, that's a very good thing. The new film's 2014 predecessor is, one or two tasteless sex jokes aside, a nice surprise; while Kingsman: The Secret Service is not quite the piss-take version of the James Bond franchise that it oh-so-desperately wants to be (Austin Powers still holds that particular distinction), director Matthew Vaughn has a brilliant eye for staging violent mayhem (the church massacre is an all-timer), and he gets Colin Firth to deliver the single most enjoyable performance of his career. In some ways, then, it sucks to acknowledge that, as sequels go, The Golden Circle struggles to justify its existence more than most. After a cracking opening chase (scored to Prince's "Let's Get Crazy"), Vaughn fumbles his way through the narrative. The Golden Circle feels like Vaughn shot two movies and then awkwardly condensed them into one. We've got the end (again...) of the Kingsmen and the introduction of their American compatriots (the Bourbon-swilling Statesmen, led by a slumming Jeff Bridges), a cheerily ruthless drug kingpin (Julianne Moore) set on global domination, the relationship woes between Kingsman Eggsy (Taron Egerton, again effortlessly charming) and the Princess of Sweden, AND the return of Eggsy's mentor Harry Hart (Firth), who apparently survived getting shot in the face and now thinks he's a lepidopterist. It's a lot and feels it, and Vaughn keeps dropping the ball along the way, whether he's sidelining Channing Tatum's delightful Statesman for most of the movie or throwing in more and more politically confusing messages. Anyone who didn't know how to react when The Secret Service put Samuel L. Jackson's deranged philanthropist in cahoots with an Obama-esque president will likely have a stroke trying to parse The Golden Circle's platform: Moore threatens billions of lives in an effort to legalize drugs, but before you mistake the film for a right-wing screed, Vaughn introduces Bruce Greenwood as the secondary baddie, a very Trumpian US president. And yet. I mostly enjoyed this mad creation. Like the first Kingsman, I kept wanting to hate what I was seeing, but Vaughn is such a born entertainer that he makes wheel-spinning seem kinetic and exciting. Most of the pieces delight - a big shout-out to Moore, whose Martha Stewart-inspired psychopath might be the funniest thing I've seen all year - and the ones that don't (including sending Eggsy on an...ahem, infiltration that I'd bet Vaughn created just to render apoplectic anyone who hated the anal sex joke from the previous film) flash by with such manic impertinence that we've barely time to register the problem before we get an expertly calculated single-take fight or the wonderful cameo from Elton John, of all people. That's two for two in terms of getting me to like movies I'm almost ideologically predisposed to hate. Attaway, Mr. Vaughn.
Also from Fox is Kathryn Bigelow's bruising docudrama Detroit. The film, which uses the 1967 Detroit race riots as its narrative springboard, is the definition of a flawed masterwork. To wit: the opening images set exactly the wrong tone; Bigelow uses some Jacob Lawrence-inspired art to set the stage for the riots, but a) the information provided is so generic that it adds little to our understanding and b) the aesthetic is so diametrically different from Bigelow and DP Barry Ackroyd's gritty verisimilitude that you're liable to wonder if you've stumbled into a cheaply produced kiddie cartoon (god help any parent who makes that mistake with child in tow). Furthermore, the last forty-five minutes are a rush job, with some editorial and casting decisions (John Krasinski's appearance as a smug lawyer is a groaner on par with Andy Dwyer killing Bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty) marring what Bigelow wants to achieve. However, when Detroit is working, it outstrips almost every American film released this year. The first act, which gives us vérité snatches of chaos in and around the city, benefits immensely from Bigelow's sure sense of menace. The scope in these scenes exceeds even that of Zero Dark Thirty, although Bigelow and editors William Goldenberg & Harry Yoon cannily insert actual footage from the riots to bolster the staged material. If nothing else, Detroit functions as a small masterpiece of historical reenactment. That said, Bigelow has no interest in presenting some stodgy period piece, and to that end, she guides the film into some pitch-dark places I wasn't expecting. Working from Mark Boal's terse, brutal script, Bigelow inexorably brings her main characters (including John Boyega, Will Poulter, Anthony Mackie, Jacob Latimore, Nathan Davis Jr., Hannah Murray, Kaitlyn Dever, and a heartbreaking Algee Smith, who in a perfect world would be a major awards contender for his work here) to the Algiers Motel, where the Detroit PD rounded up a number of "suspects" (for the most racially dubious of reasons) and proceeded to torture them for one long, awful night. This long sequence unfolds in what feels like real time, and Bigelow gives it the agonizing pitch of a horror movie - we could be watching a real-life version of Last House on the Left, so savage is the carnage on display. Yet I couldn't look away. The whole middle hour feels like the culmination of everything Kathryn Bigelow has ever wanted to say about violence. Imagine some terrifying conflation of the Bin Laden raid and Near Dark's roadhouse massacre, only elongated and intensified, and you'll have a sense of Detroit's raw power. Ultimately, Bigelow is making a call to arms, one that looks at authoritarian abuses of power, at the ways that race divides us, and sees only oblivion. It's that righteous anger that endures well past the movie's other faults, and it's what makes Detroit so bracing.
From Lionsgate comes the 4K remaster of last year's Academy Award-winning drama Moonlight. I liked writer/director Barry Jenkins' first film, the wry relationship drama Medicine for Melancholy, but nothing in that picture prepared me for what he's done here. In telling the story of Chiron (Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes), a lonely African-American man struggling with his sexuality and identity over a thirty-some-year period, Jenkins achieves an emotional power that outstrips just about anything released in 2016. Only Andrea Arnold's American Honey and Mike Mills' 20th Century Women come close, but Moonlight has a real delicacy of tone and narrative economy that make it far more accessible than those two. In either case, though, you get the sense of the real America, of vast emotional realities being exposed, of ambiguity and nuance winning over melodramatic uplift. Conventional wisdom would suggest that one treat Moonlight's subject matter in as baldly didactic terms as possible. Jenkins is, after all, looking into what it means to be a) male, b) black, and c) gay in this country, and if Spike Lee were at the helm, the resulting film might privilege its political agenda above all else. However, as the title suggests, Jenkins sees the world in poetic terms. He downplays moments of kitchen-sink realism (the drugs and violence on the fringes of Chiron's life; Naomie Harris' fearsome, pathetic crack addict) in favor of an ethereal, free-floating mysticism. Chiron's first sexual experience has the lyricism of a Jean Cocteau fantasy, as does the transcendent moment where his kindly mentor Juan (Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali) takes Chiron swimming and somehow exposes him to all the spiritual possibilities the world has to offer. Even the film's central creative conceit - that Chiron is played by three very different actors at three very different times in the character's life - forces the viewer to approach the film in subjective, elliptical terms. Jenkins uses the unique physicality of each actor to shorthand Chiron's psychological condition, and he turns the breaks between each of the film's three sections into an exercise in viewer engagement, where we have to infer unseen moments of great significance. The result almost has more in common with a studio installation piece even as the picture never loses its narrative rigor. I hate to resort to hyperbole, but Moonlight is somewhat of a cinematic miracle: what Jenkins and his team have done is to take a story that seems so culturally specific and personal and make it universal. This business of discovering one's own identity is always terrifying and liberating, and Moonlight heightens those qualities with rapturous abandon. One of the twenty-first century's great films.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is offering a gorgeous new version of D.A. Pennebaker's iconic concert film Monterey Pop. People often leave out this 1968 classic when discussing the greatest concert films ever made, but even if Monterey Pop isn't as technically accomplished as Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense or as sprawling as Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock (or as scary as the Maysles Brothers' Gimme Shelter), Monterey Pop did so much to popularize the rock documentary as a genre that it still earns a place in the pantheon. In capturing the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, Pennebaker and his team got more than a simple video record: rather, they helped epitomize all the vitality and passion of the '60s counter-culture. The roster of on-screen talent here outstrips what Wadleigh filmed for Woodstock - you're getting the Platonic Ideals of the Mamas and the Papas, of Simon and Garfunkel, of Jefferson Airplane. Furthermore, the technical limitations Pennebaker faced only add to the intensity of the finished film. Even though he used a special high-speed 16mm stock, Pennebaker couldn't cover the entire festival (oh, how one yearns for the days of digital, if only to score more footage of the Steve Miller Band, Lou Rawls, and Buffalo Springfield), so what we get comes at us in concentrated blasts. It's like Pennebaker is giving us only the hot spots 'cause he doesn't have time for anything else. Yet this run-and-gun aesthetic also yields moments of surprising visual poetry. At under eighty minutes, Monterey Pop maintains a near relentless pace, but Pennebaker also knows exactly when to slow things down and devastate us. How else to explain the showcase he gives Jimi Hendrix, which seems to shred the fabric of the film as much as it demolishes what we expect from conventional rock performances, or the extended Ravi Shankar set that wears us down until we're almost in a yogic trance? I might give highest honors to how Pennebaker's films Otis Redding, with the singer's head bobbing in and out of colored backlights like some impressionistic signal-flare. On that note: Redding aficionados should only settle for Criterion's three-disc The Complete Monterey Pop Festival edition. Not only does this box set provide hours of outtakes and extended performances, but it also adds the standalone Jimi Plays Monterey and Shake! Otis at Monterey features. Those two alone warrant the purchase, unless you've a problem with Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding being brilliant. In that case, why are you still reading this?
Of the set, Svet Atanasov wrote that "there is no doubt in my mind that Criterion's decision to reissue Monterey Pop after the film was restored in 4K was the right one. While I was quite happy with the previous release, the new presentation offers numerous upgrades in quality that strengthen the film's organic appearance across the board and the end result is truly quite impressive. Naturally, I think that the new release is definitely worth picking up."