First, let’s get the chaff out of the way; this week, we’ve got several films that sank like a stone this year, including the Sundance-hyped American Animals and A Kid Like Jake, and two disappointments of last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Mary Shelley and Woman Walks Ahead. There’s also Tag, which played at no festivals to the best of my knowledge, and The Rider, which did well at festivals and also in release. Aside from those, you’ve got an eclectic bunch of films, including Alex Cox’s divisive western pastiche Straight to Hell, the fawning Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary RBG, Arrow releasing three underseen works from the director of A Moment of Innocence, and Criterion giving us the Film Foundation restoration of the landmark Cuban drama Memories of Underdevelopment.
What I really want to talk about this week are two very important catalog releases. One is more necessary than the other, and that’s the long-awaited Blu-Ray debut of Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream. A gem in Coppola’s terrific 80s run, it’s previously only been available on DVD in Vittorio Storaro’s dumbass cropped 2:1 ratio, which does no favors to Storaro’s expectedly stunning cinematography (which none other than Steven Soderbergh called “a parade of boner-inducing images”). Coppola has restored it to 2.35:1 for this release and given it a 4K spit-polish that should do wonders, and its $15 price point means you have next to no excuse not to buy it. In comparison, Olive Films’ premium-priced release of the Wachowski sisters’ Bound isn’t quite as special, as it’s just joining together the special features from all the previous Blu-Rays, adding a couple new features, and bumping up the picture quality. But still, the added resolution should do well by Bill Pope’s high-contrast noir imagery, and the movie is so fucking good that owning it in the best possible edition is something I recommend.
Akio Jissoji: The Buddhist Trilogy (Arrow)
American Animals (Lionsgate)
Book Club (Paramount)
Bound (Olive)
A Kid Like Jake (Shout Factory)
Mary Shelley (Shout Factory)
Memories of Underdevelopment (Criterion)
Mohsen Makhmalbaf: The Poetic Trilogy (Arrow)
The Naked and the Dead (Warner)
RBG (Magnolia)
The Rider (Sony)
Straight to Hell (Kino)
Tag (Warner)
A Thousand Acres (Kino)
Tucker: The Man and His Dream (Lionsgate)
Upgrade (Universal)
Woman Walks Ahead (Lionsgate)