This week sees the release of three Oscar nominees this year. The first is the unseen-by-me Fences, Denzel Washington’s August Wilson adaptation that most importantly provided Viola Davis with the Oscar she’s deserved since Solaris. It was also the subject of complaints about it not being cinematic enough, but I expect I’d agree with those takes as much as I do with the complaints about Spotlight and Manchester by the Sea allegedly looking like TV (especially with Charlotte Bruus Christensen behind the camera). The second is Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, which I have seen and which I think is a brilliantly twisted combination rape thriller and cringe comedy, anchored by an absolutely superb central performance by Isabelle Huppert. And the third… is Morten Tyldum’s Passengers. Even the best I’ve heard about this suggests that it just massively shits the bed at the end, and the worst makes it sound almost unfathomable. I’m sure it’s got crisp lensing from Rodrigo Prieto, at least, although Silence is coming out on home video in two weeks to better scratch that particular itch.

And that’s not all! This week, we get two movies with abominable premises for the price of two, with the release of Collateral Beauty, which sounds like it goes even beyond the idea of the man who gave you Marley & Me remaking Gaslight in terms of horror. Or if you want, you know, a good movie, there’s always Oscilloscope’s release of Anna Biller’s loving tribute to 60s cinema The Love Witch. And those are just the new titles. There are many catalog titles of note this week, between Criterion rescuing the classic of Mexican cinema Canoa: A Shameful Memory, Twilight Time giving us Blu-Rays of Our Man in Havana and Peyton Place, Shout Factory putting out special editions of Firestarter and Red Dawn, and, very best of all, Kino bringing Leos Carax’s epic romance The Lovers on the Bridge to Blu-Ray.

Baby Boom (Limited Edition to 3000) (Twilight Time)
The Bitch (Kino)
Canoa: A Shameful Memory (Criterion)
Certain Fury (Kino)
Collateral Beauty (Warner)
Demon Seed (Warner Archive Collection)
Drive-In Massacre (Severin)
Elle (Sony)
Firestarter (Shout Factory)
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (Limited Edition to 3000) (Twilight Time)
The Love Witch (Oscilloscope)
The Lovers on the Bridge (Kino)
The Man Who Could Cheat Death (Kino)
Our Man in Havana (Limited Edition to 3000) (Twilight Time)
Passengers (Sony)
Peyton Place (Limited Edition to 3000) (Twilight Time)
Red Dawn (Shout Factory)
Return of Kung Fu Trailers of Fury (Severin)
The Skull (Kino)
Solace (Lionsgate)