I guess I gotta talk Ready Player One? Any belief that Spielberg could pull off a radical, Jaws-esque improvement on its subject matter was sadly misplaced, and if the movie is rarely offensive, it’s also rarely distinctive, blowing its wad midway through with a sequence that can only be Spielberg still working through his A.I. baggage and then continuing with a series of dull, overly busy action sequences. The real Spielberg magic is mostly in Mark Rylance, whose register as the central Willy Wonka figure (a video game creator named James Halliday) is somewhere between “extremely antisocial” and “stoned out of his mind”. Many of the other performances are good (particularly from Lena Waithe and star-in-the-making Olivia Cooke), but Rylance is the one inspired element in a film that seemingly goes out of its way to be uninspired.

Okay, let’s get to the good stuff now. The best of the good stuff is the long-awaited restoration and HD release of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, which should finally do justice to Jack Cardiff’s gorgeous Technicolor cinematography (yes, I’m aware the screencap I chose for it is in black-and-white, it’s hard to find good ones in the right aspect ratio). And Shout! Factory does pretty well this week too, giving us the complete series of Gravity Falls on Blu-Ray and releasing two John Carpenter movies. That one of them is Memoirs of an Invisible Man is forgiven by the other being In the Mouth of Madness.

Beyond Re-Animator (Lionsgate)
Dagon (Lionsgate)
Gravity Falls: The Complete Series (Shout Factory)
Happy End (Sony)
I Walk Alone (Kino)
In the Mouth of Madness (Shout Factory)
A Matter of Life and Death (Criterion)
Memoirs of an Invisible Man (Shout Factory)
Ready Player One (Warner)
Supergirl (Warner)