There’s been more inspiring slates of new releases than this week’s, I’ll say that much. I guess the one the most people will be buying is Sing, Illumination’s latest money-laundering scheme and a horrible waste of a good cast and one of the finest music video directors of the 90s and 2000s. The best of the new titles are far and away the documentaries Fire at Sea and Tower and Pedro Almodovar’s latest, Julieta, which adapts three Alice Munro short stories. And the rest is in the middle ground of not being good but not being particularly fun to mock. There’s the Assassin’s Creed movie, in which a talented director (Justin Kurzel, bringing along his equally talented cinematographer Adam Arkapaw) and a talented cast take on the Sisyphusian task of making a good movie out of a video game, with the expected results. There’s Miss Sloane, which has another talented cast (including Jessica Chastain, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michael Stuhlbarg, John Lithgow, Mark Strong, Sam Waterston, and Alison Pill) and exists, I guess. There’s Bakery in Brooklyn, which I literally only know about because it features actor/superhero/professional good podcast boy (and enemy to the bad zoo boy) Griffin Newman. And there’s Live by Night, which, judging by rumors, may overturn the DC Cinematic Universe quicker than any bad review could. Judging by reviews, it’s at least a solid showcase for a). some typically stunning Robert Richardson cinematography and b). the ever-talented Elle Fanning. Of course, you only have to wait a week for the home video release of a superior Elle Fanning showcase…

Thankfully, catalog titles are here to pick up the slack. Criterion is on-hand to give us the long-awaited home video debut of John Waters’ Multiple Maniacs (which sounds like it will be only the first of Criterion’s work on Waters’ catalog) and the definitive home video release of Hal Ashby’s Being There. Kino finally lets American audiences get to see Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat in HD, and Arrow finally gives American audiences their release of Cinema Paradiso. Plus there’s Olive releasing Robert Altman’s debut, The Delinquents, and Shout! Factory giving the five people who demanded it their special editions of the RoboCop sequels. But one stands above all these other titles, and it’s Teen Witch. Basically a nightmare hallucination of the 80s masquerading as a fantasy film (I watched it the same weekend I watched Todd Haynes’ [safe], and the two fit disturbingly well together in that regard), it features more impromptu rap numbers than you know what to deal with and some pretty horrifying morality throughout. Top that, so to speak.

Assassin’s Creed (Fox)
Bakery in Brooklyn (Gravitas Ventures)
Being There (Criterion)
Cinema Paradiso (Arrow)
The Delinquents (Olive)
Evolution (Shout Factory)
Fire at Sea (Kino)
In Dubious Battle (Momentum)
Insecure: The Complete First Season (HBO)
Julieta (Sony)
Lifeboat (Kino)
Live by Night (Warner)
Miss Sloane (Fox)
Multiple Maniacs (Criterion)
RoboCop 2 (Shout Factory)
RoboCop 3 (Shout Factory)
Sing (Universal)
Teen Witch (Kino)
Tower (Kino)