Generally, end-of-the-month weeks aren’t very promising for home releases, but this week has a lot of good stuff. Not really in new releases, though. The best of the bunch are probably Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, which rode the success of that other Wonder Woman movie all the way to instant obscurity (in spite of it getting good reviews and by all accounts having a fantastic Rebecca Hall performance), and the Oscar-nominated Loving Vincent. And then there’s Last Flag Flying, Richard Linklater’s most disappointing movie since Fast Food Nation, which is to still say it’s pretty good on the whole, if marked by some pretty serious natures. Namely, Bryan Cranston is a total liability, hamming it up to no real good effect as a parody of a crusty former Marine (or, more accurately, an imitation of Jack Nicholson’s imitation of a crusty Marine), and the movie around him is sometimes an odd mixture of too ham-fisted and too unstructured, never being as engaging as the best of Linklater’s hangout movies. Still, it’s Linklater, so it’s got some good stuff in it, namely a heartbreaking Steve Carell performance and a wonderful scene in a train car.

Catalog titles, meanwhile, have some real good stuff. Lionsgate has both the sci-fi schlock classic Class of 1999 and the typically demented Ken Russell movie Gothic, while Olive runs the table on Spanish-language cinema, most notably Belle Epoque and Jamón Jamón. Criterion gives us two of GW Pabst’s earliest sound films, Kameradschaft and Westfront 1918, while Arrow goes Italian with Roberto Rossellini’s Viva l’Italia and the anthology film The Witches (not boasting a segment from Rossellini, but ones from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti). And in case watching the news hasn’t done enough damage to you, Severin is giving us a Blu-Ray of Threads.

Belle Epoque (Olive)
Boo 2! A Madea Halloween (Lionsgate)
Class of 1999 (Lionsgate)
Gothic (Lionsgate)
Jamón Jamón (Olive)
Kameradschaft (Criterion)
Last Flag Flying (Lionsgate)
Loving Vincent (Cinedigm)
The Pink Panther Cartoon Collection: Volume 1 (Kino)
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (Sony)
The Red Squirrel (Olive)
Threads (Severin)
Tierra (Olive)
Vacas (Olive)
Viva l’Italia (Arrow)
Westfront 1918 (Criterion)
The Witches (Arrow)