A big week, with the biggest showcase being Criterion (hopefully) releasing the definitive Blu-Ray of Do the Right Thing, with almost all of the features from previous releases and the scorching-hot color timing that was mysteriously absent from the last Blu-Ray. I probably don’t need to be the one to tell you that it’s only gotten more relevant in the thirty years since its release, so I’ll just encourage you to point and laugh at Blu-ray.com’s take on it (make sure to scroll to the very end). Also being released by Criterion with an eye on continued relevance is Michael Radford’s adaptation of 1984, poached from the nefarious hands of Twilight Time and given a new 4K restoration to better show off Roger Deakins’ bleak cinematography. I’m less sure about any continued relevancy for Oliver Stone’s The Doors, getting a 4K Blu-Ray despite, even at a time when everybody loved Oliver Stone, being too much Oliver Stone for many to handle. And let’s just say I’m skeptical that John Hughes’ Weird Science, getting a 4K spit-polish from Arrow Video, has held up particularly well even by the standards of John Hughes movies. At least it’s not Sixteen Candles, which Arrow is releasing in the UK this week and which Criterion has been quite understandably sitting on its hands with for the past two and a half years.

Elsewhere, you’ve got Kino rescuing Luis Bunuel’s expectedly irreverent religious satire The Milky Way from Criterion out-of-print status, Shout Factory releasing the classic noir heist film Criss Cross (a fascinating counterpart to Soderbergh’s remake The Underneath, a comparison I’ve written about for this very site), and Arrow giving us Kathryn Bigelow’s debut The Loveless, which is solely interesting in relation to what she made afterwards (something that’s been written about for this very site). New releases are comparatively quite tepid, although Missing Link is apparently a charming bit of lower-tier Laika, and Alita: Battle Angel seems to have spoken to more trans people I’ve encountered online than any film before it. There may be a future Taco Break in how films like Alita and Under the Skin have been so fully reclaimed (or maybe just claimed, in Alita‘s case) by trans readings, but until then, I’ll just say that, in my dipshit opinion, Alita didn’t quite work for me like I wanted it to but it has its moments, including a Mahershala Ali performance better than the one he won his second Oscar for.

1984 (Criterion)
Alita: Battle Angel (Fox)
Criss Cross (Shout Factory)
Death in the Garden (Kino)
Death Takes a Holiday (Kino)
Do the Right Thing (Criterion)
The Doors 4K (Lionsgate)
Easy Living (Kino)
Hellboy (Lionsgate)
The Loveless (Arrow)
The Milky Way (Kino)
Missing Link (Fox)
Pacific Heights (Sony)
Troop Beverly Hills (Sony)
Weird Science (Arrow)