Hey guys, I hope I’m not rocking the boat too much here, but Damien Chazelle’s La La Land is out this week and it’s a good movie. The central romance is involving and performed to movie-star perfection by Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, it’s gorgeously-shot and -designed, the musical numbers are fun, and it builds to an immaculate gut-punch (that improbably but perfectly combines Jacques Demy with the ending of a particular Spike Lee movie). It’s no 20th Century Women, but what is these days?

Hope you’re not one of that movie’s detractors, because without it you will be at a complete loss for interesting new titles this week. There’s the latest Underworld film, the unusual zombie film The Girl with All the Gifts, a movie about Sandra Oh and Anne Heche fighting, and that’s pretty much it. Thank god for the catalog titles, which aren’t even the most exciting they’ve been recently but are enough to feel like a lot in comparison. Criterion has two titles out this week, those being the classic ramen-focused comedy Tampopo (long unavailable in satisfactory form in the U.S., and now newly restored) and Francis Ford Coppola’s teen story-as-experimental film Rumble Fish. But maybe even besting them this week is Olive Films, with their releases of Claude Chabrol’s Ophelia, the omnibus film The World’s Most Beautiful Swindlers (including segments by Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard), and a series of Walerian Borowczyk releases, including his short films, Blanche, Theatre of Mr. and Mrs. Kabal, and Goto, Isle of Love. Aside from them, across the board we’re getting a bunch of lesser-known horror this week, including Mario Bava’s directorial debut Caltiki, the Immortal Monster, as well as the pivotal nature documentary (and subject of a piece in the first Dissolve edition of Lovefest) Microcosmos and Arrow’s U.S. release of their restoration of Francesco Rosi’s Three Brothers.

Animal Kingdom: The Complete First Season (Warner)
Blanche (Olive)
Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (Arrow)
Catfight (MPI)
Daredevils of the Red Circle (Kino)
The Daughter (Kino)
Don’t Give Up the Ship (Kino)
Double Exposure (Vinegar Syndrome)
Exterminator 2 (Shout Factory)
From Hell It Came (Warner Archive Collection)
Gianfranco Rosi Collection (Kino)
The Girl with All the Gifts (Lionsgate)
Goto, Isle of Love (Olive)
I Bury the Living (Shout Factory)
La La Land (Lionsgate)
Man of la Mancha (Shout Factory)
Microcosmos (Kino)
Ophélia (Olive)
Psycho Cop Returns (Vinegar Syndrome)
Rumble Fish (Criterion)
The Screaming Skull (Shout Factory)
Tampopo (Criterion)
Theatre of Mr. & Mrs. Kabal (Olive)
Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies (Kino)
Three Brothers (Arrow Academy)
Walerian Borowczyk – Short Films Collection (Olive)
We Are X (Magnolia)
The World’s Most Beautiful Swindlers (Olive)