Streaming was supposed to make all of this obsolete. Instead, physical media is finding a new life. Like physical newspapers!
Let’s Get Physical is our guide to what’s actually worth owning: the restorations, the reissues, the special editions and the occasional deep cut you didn’t know you needed. If you like to hold on to the things you love, you’re in the right place.
I’ll Remind You of Everything: The Films of Mike Mills (Criterion)
In 2011, I called “Beginners” heart-on-sleeve, which still undersold how much of Mike Mills’ heart was actually on that sleeve. When I interviewed him at the film’s Los Angeles press junket that year, he told me this: “The history of love has to include the history of the gay struggle to be part of our understanding of love.”
“Beginners” was Mills’ version of that history, drawn from his own father, who came out at 75 after his wife’s death. Christopher Plummer won an Oscar for playing Hal, a man making up for lost time before his death, while his son (Ewan McGregor) slowly learns how to love from him. Mills kept exploring love as a force that changes us, often through the people we least expect, and it’s all there in Criterion’s new box set, “I’ll Remind You of Everything: The Films of Mike Mills.”
The moment I keep returning to is from “Beginners”: Hal calling his son late at night, giddy after a night out, to ask what that music he heard at the club is called. McGregor’s voice alone as he answers — “house music” — is the whole movie in a nutshell, a son watching his father become more fully himself than he’s ever seen him, and slowly realizing he has something to learn from it.
That idea runs through everything Mills has made since. In “20th Century Women,” a teenage boy is raised to be a good man by the women around him. In “C’mon C’mon,” a grown man learns emotional honesty from a 9-year-old. In both, Mills suggests that becoming a better man begins with listening to people traditional masculinity taught you to ignore.
All three films get new Mills-approved 4K masters, plus commentaries from Mills on each and a new documentary in which he talks with filmmaker Kirsten Johnson. His music videos for Air’s “All I Need” and Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” are here too, along with five short films and a booklet featuring writing by “Sentimental Value” director Joachim Trier.
“I’ll Remind You of Everything: The Films of Mike Mills” is available now from the Criterion Collection as a six-disc 4K UHD and Blu-ray set or a three-disc Blu-ray set.
Three Films by Leos Carax (Criterion)
Desire is never just desire in a Leos Carax film. It’s obsessive, possessive and often dangerous. In “Mauvais Sang,” it’s deadly.
Carax isn’t generally thought of as a queer filmmaker, but he has spent four decades speaking the language of the outsider: drifters, thieves, insomniacs and lovers who live by rules no one else would recognize. His first three features, collected in the Criterion Collection’s new “Three Films by Leos Carax,” are full of people who want too much and pay for it. For queer viewers, that’s a familiar story.
“Mauvais Sang” (1986) is set in a Paris where a new virus, STBO, is killing off people who have loveless sex. Alex (Denis Lavant), a sullen kid with quick hands, signs on with an old gangster (Michel Piccoli) to break into a lab and steal the cure. Then he meets the gangster’s girlfriend, Anna (Juliette Binoche), and the stakes change. Carax never names AIDS, but the film breathes the era’s air: sex as a danger, a cure out of reach, the young dying first.
The other two films in the set, “Boy Meets Girl” (1984) and “The Lovers on the Bridge” (1991), round out what’s often treated as a thematic trilogy. Lavant, who would later try on various identities in “Holy Motors,” plays a different young man named Alex in each — the name, not coincidentally, is Carax’s own — and each Alex loves someone more than is good for either of them.
Queer audiences know tortured, doomed love on screen all too well. For once, it’s the straights’ turn.
“Three Films by Leos Carax” is available now from the Criterion Collection as a six-disc 4K UHD and Blu-ray set or a three-disc Blu-ray set.
Pillion (A24)
My mom might love “Pillion,” and I mean that as a compliment to the film. She’s hardly the target audience for a movie featuring bootlicking, butt plugs and an orgy in the woods, but underneath the leather, director Harry Lighton has made a genuinely funny romantic comedy, one that never waters down gay kink culture while delivering every beat of a great romance.
In the film, Colin (Harry Melling, Dudley Dursley all grown up), a shy young Londoner, falls for Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), a magnetic biker dom, and steps into a kink scene he has no map for.
At heart, “Pillion” is a film about bravery, the nerve it takes to choose the life you want. That’s Colin’s arc, and it’s why the film never treats kink as a punchline or a provocation. Skarsgård, meanwhile, plays Ray as a walking fantasy of masculinity who will absolutely wrestle to “I Think We’re Alone Now.” If that’s not a ringing endorsement, I don’t know what is.
A24’s shop-exclusive Blu-ray presents the unrated theatrical cut. Extras include a commentary with Lighton, Skarsgård and Melling, a new making-of featurette called “An Aptitude for Devotion,” Lighton’s 2017 short “Wren Boys” and six collectible postcards featuring Chris Harris’ photography.
“Pillion” is available now from A24 as an unrated Blu-ray edition.
The Stranger (Music Box Films)
Marie asks Meursault if he’ll marry her, and he tells her it makes no difference to him. It’s a small exchange in François Ozon’s “The Stranger,” but it captures Meursault completely: a man who won’t pretend something matters just because he’s been told it should.
It makes sense that Ozon, one of cinema’s great openly gay filmmakers, would be drawn to this material. His treatment of Meursault, an ostensibly heterosexual protagonist, has a homoerotic charge that goes beyond the novel’s questions of alienation. Ozon has always had a soft spot for outsiders, and he understands that “stranger” is who Meursault is. Meursault has accepted his distance from everyone, and that acceptance is what unnerves people most, especially the court.
Shot in black and white, the film unfolds at an unhurried pace that is quietly absorbing. It leaves you with an uncomfortable imbalance. The Arab man Meursault kills pays with his life, while Meursault drifts through his own trial as detached as ever. If he’d just wept on cue, would he have been judged differently?
“The Stranger” is available now from Music Box Films on DVD and Blu-ray.
Let’s Get Physical explores the world of physical media. From special-edition Blu-rays and 4K restorations to vinyl, collectibles, and essential reissues, each installment looks beyond the streaming queue to celebrate the films, music, and other media we love, the stories that stay with us, and the joy of owning something worth holding on to.
