Apologies for forgetting to do this last week. As penance, I will start by talking about last week’s best release, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. It’s one of the most purely delightful movies in recent memory, and also one of the most crushing when it wants to be. It could easily slip into maudlin theatrics in how it depicts its precocious youngsters navigating dire poverty, but Baker seems to be having just as much fun as his pint-sized stars are, and that fun is infectious even as the consequences of it start becoming clear. And Willem Dafoe’s performance, sadly the film’s only Oscar nomination, is as good as advertised, an unshowy depiction of basic human decency that’s enough to bring tears to your eyes.

Now, onto everything else, and there is quite a bit of that. We get not one, but two Best Picture nominees this week, the uber-contentious Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Darkest Hour, which might be contentious if anyone had any interest in seeing it. And there’s more notable new releases where that came from, including likely Oscar-winner Coco, Bertrand Bonello’s arty terrorism thriller Nocturama, Kenneth Branagh’s mustache-tastic adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, and, uh, Ron Shelton’s non-triumphant comeback Just Getting Started. And I, in turn, am just getting started describing this week’s releases. Criterion is releasing a Best Picture winner this week, although it’s the not-particularly-loved Tom Jones. Arrow has something for everybody, provided they have a taste for the shocking, like Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case, or the radically political, like the five films Jean-Luc Godard made with Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Groupe Dziga Vertov. The Warner Archive Collection’s two releases are much more natural companions, namely Paul Newman’s two Harper films, and same goes for Kino and their releases of the prostitution-themed anthology film The Oldest Profession (featuring a Godard segment) and the notorious Howard Hughes sexploitation western The Outlaw. And there’s also Olive releasing John Frankenheimer’s Birdman of Alcatraz and Shout Factory releasing a documentary on Psycho‘s shower scene, plus the week’s obvious highlight, the Blu-Ray debut of the Harland Williams vehicle RocketMan.

78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene (Shout Factory)
Basket Case (Arrow)
Birdman of Alcatraz (Olive)
Coco (Disney)
Darkest Hour (Universal)
The Drowning Pool (Warner Archive Collection)
The Florida Project (Lionsgate)
Great Balls of Fire! (Olive)
Hangman (Lionsgate)
Harper (Warner Archive Collection)
Jean-Luc Godard + Jean-Pierre Gorin: Five Films, 1968-1971 (Arrow)
Just Getting Started (Broad Green)
Murder on the Orient Express (Fox)
Nocturama (Grasshopper)
The Oldest Profession (Kino)
The Outlaw (Kino)
RocketMan (Disney)
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Fox)
Tom Jones (Criterion)