All Your Faces (2023/Distrib/Icarus DVD)/American Fiction (2023/MGM/Amazon/Orion/Warner Blu-ray)/La Chimera (2023/NEON/Decal Blu-ray)/The Shining Hour (1938/MGM/Warner Archive Blu-ray)

Picture: C/B-/B-/B Sound: C/B/B-/B- Extras: C-/D/C-/C+ Films: C+

PLEASE NOTE: The Shining Hour Blu-ray is now only available from Warner Bros. through their Warner Archive series and can be ordered from the link below.

These dramas have some humor on the side or other indirect ways...

Jeanne Herry's All Your Faces (2023) knows it is a film that involves endless talking heads throughout and uses its title to be shameless and even ironic about itself, but that does not prevent it from being a film that is non-stop talking heads just the same. In this case, it deals with the perpetrators and victims of crimes, but that does not necessarily always work.

No matter the crime and how much hurt, pain and trauma it might have brought, this tries to keep this going for 118 minutes (!!!) and does have some good moments. However, despite a decent cast, I thought it was on the uneven side and though it did not trivialize anything serious, it did not thoroughly deal with all it took on either.

Extras include three trailers for other Distrib releases.

Cord Jefferson's American Fiction (2023) rightly received much critical acclaim with Jeffrey Wright (Westworld, the Craig Bond films) plays a book writer at a crossroads when he is sick of his smart work not having the commercial success it deserves, so he makes a book that follows stereotypical trends and stereotypes to the point he pretends to be a tough street guy to give credibility to the exploitation 'street' book he has written.

However, the film is not that simple, being a character study and examination of where media stands today, how it is still regressive and some progress has lost out to more regressiveness, but it is also the characters so well played by the cast, including a pair of performances by Issa Rae and Tracee Ellis Ross that are standouts and display great chemistry with Wright.

On the other side of things, some of his is a little predictable and sadly so because of all the things that need to change and have not, but the makers seem to know this and may even be playing it a bit coy when those parts show up. Definitely worth a look, Sterling K. Brown, Leslie Uggams and Adam Brody also star.

There are sadly no extras.

Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera (2023) is the kind of smaller comedy/dramas the studios or their prestige subdivisions used to pick up all the time, this time an Italian film from the underrated Neon company. The title refers tot he one thing everyone searches for in life and this film wants to use that idea to get the audience to think and maybe dream to some extent. Arthur (Josh O'Connor) does not know what that might be, but brings us all over Italy in the process.

Unfortunately, as nice as this is and as pleasant as it can be, it becomes some kind of romanic comedy after all the more interesting side roads are figuratively and literally given up on. Still, this is not as shallow and obnoxious as the thousand of brain-damaging Hallmark Network telefilms (especially the ones set in Christmas, as if EVERYONE actually celebrated that) and never condescends to its audience like that (what does?) and those interested might want to give it a look.

A trailer for the Neon horror film release Cookoo is the only extra.

Last but not least is Frank Borzage's The Shining Hour (1938) with Joan Crawford, based on a big hit Broadway play at the time, Joan Crawford (who fought for the film and got it) is a nightclub dancer who marries a farmer (Melvyn Douglas) she thinks she is in love with, even with his financial success. However, when she meets his brother (Robert Young in his leading man days) she is in a love triangle she never expected.

Well done with some predictability and a little more melodrama than I would have liked that dates it a bit, it is still a top rate production and MGM backed this one, it certainly has its moments and the cast has some serious energy and chemistry. Margaret Sullivan is Young's wife, Fay Bainter, Allyn Joslyn, Frank Albertson and Hattie McDaniel, it is definitely worth a good look.

Extras include an Original Theatrical Trailer, Radio Scenes for the film within the MGM radio special Good News Of 1939 and classic cartoons: Love and Curses, Porky's Five & Ten and The Sneezing Weasel.

Now for playback performance. The 1080p 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image on Fiction has good color and is consistent, yet is a little softer in the fine detail portions than I would have liked, while its DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix is better and the best sonically on the list. Dialogue is very clearly recorded and mixed, the music never in the way.

The 1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Chimera also has some good color and shots, but it too has some softness issues throughout that can get a little annoying in parts, but is consistent otherwise, while the Italian DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix is good but sometimes flawed and trying. Otherwise, the two meld together well enough.

The 1080p 1.33 X 1 black & white digital High Definition image transfer on Hour can show the age of the materials used, but this also happens to be the best looking transfer on the list with great depth and detail, showing the archives took care of this film and Warner Archive has done an ace job of restoring another classic in their catalog. As well, the DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 2.0 Mono lossless mix is surprisingly clean and clear for its age and otherwise, so we know it will never sound better than it does here.

That leaves us with the soft, anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Faces that just never gets clearer or sharper as you watch, possibly a bad digital reduction of the digital shoot, but the lossy French Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo mix is also on the surprising weak side and not just because we get plenty of dialogue and talking. Glad for the English subtitles.

To order The Shining Hour Warner Archive Blu-ray, go to this link for it and many more great web-exclusive releases at:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/ED270804-095F-449B-9B69-6CEE46A0B2BF?ingress=0&visitId=6171710b-08c8-4829-803d-d8b922581c55&tag=blurayforum-20

- Nicholas Sheffo