After a few weeks of slimmer pickings, it’s as if every company got together and decided to release all their shit this week. And I don’t even mean “shit” negatively, except maybe for Gotti. The biggest news this week is Criterion finally restoring Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, and they’ve got Daniel Petrie’s adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun out this week as well. Arrow also has two fine, if mismatched, selections this week; Fred Zinnemann’s pared-down assassination thriller The Day of the Jackal and the ultimate 70s exploitation curio, The Baby (the latter probably goes better with Scream Factory’s release of John Boorman’s legendarily insane Exorcist II). And Sony is giving us the much-desired double-feature of the Jim Belushi vehicle The Principal and Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, which are sort of a Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby for the education system. New releases aren’t much to write home about, with faint praise going to Solo for not being a cobbled-together disaster like Justice League and that praise taken away for it being cinematic tap-water. Other than that, you’ve got Uncle Drew, which is in the running for “best basketball movie starring real players that was based on a popular commercial”, and Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich, which was written by rising cinematic enfant terrible S. Craig Zahler (he didn’t direct it, however, and you can tell because it only lasts 90 minutes).
Andrei Rublev (Criterion)
The Baby (Arrow)
The Cyclops (Warner Archive Collection)
The Day of the Jackal (Arrow)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (Shout Factory)
The Farmer’s Daughter (Kino)
Fraggle Rock: The Complete Series (Sony)
Good Times (Kino)
Gotti (Vertical Entertainment)
Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town (Shout Factory)
The Man Who Cheated Himself (Flicker Alley)
The Principal (Sony)
Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (Image)
Queen of Outer Space (Warner Archive Collection)
Quigley Down Under (Shout Factory)
A Raisin in the Sun (Criterion)
The [REC] Collection (Shout Factory)
Solo: A Star Wars Story (Disney)
The Swarm (Warner Archive Collection)
The Trip to Bountiful (Kino)
Uncle Drew (Lionsgate)
Welcome to the Dollhouse (Sony)