There have been better weeks for home video, I’ll say that much. Not even catalog titles offer very much, mostly just Criterion’s upgrade of Louis Malle’s debut Elevator to the Gallows and Arrow’s release of the documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno. New releases are maybe a little better, but still dire, with the best of the bunch being Tom of Finland, the biopic on the famous homoerotic artist, and the apparently solid fireman weepie Only the Brave, which seems to be a departure for the man who brought you the pretty conclusively unemotional Tron Legacy and Oblivion. But what I really want to talk about is Suburbicon. If George Clooney’s post-Good Night and Good Luck output had been disappointing before this, this one is outright disastrous on every level. It’s a Coen brothers-penned darkly comedic farce, except the whole thing is played so deadly straight that you need to squint to make out where the jokes are (if you can’t get a laugh out of paunchy Matt Damon escaping danger on a child’s bike, you’ve fucked up big-time). It’s an expose on suburban racism, except it forgets to give its black family even one dimension, showing them stoically reacting to hatred without more than twenty lines of dialogue between them (and most of those are for the kid; the mother maybe gets five, and the father gets absolutely none). And as a combination of those two things, it rises from bad to truly inexplicable, complete with maybe the worst, most insulting final shot in recent cinematic memory. Oscar Isaac is fun in it for about five minutes, and Glenn Fleshler is a great intimidating Coens fat man, but everybody else would be better off trying to erase this from their IMDb pages.

All I See Is You (Universal)
Angie (Kino)
A Bad Moms Christmas (Universal)
Batman: Gotham by Gaslight (Warner)
Benji (Mill Creek)
Boys (Kino)
Elevator to the Gallows (Criterion)
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (Arrow)
LBJ (Sony)
Only the Brave (Sony)
Suburbicon (Paramount)
Taboo: Season One (Echo Bridge)
Tom of Finland (Kino)