A jam-packed week, with one title in the middle I want to make sure doesn’t get lost. Miranda July’s Kajillionaire had a mid-pandemic release that may have doomed it to forever fall between the cracks (it’s only gotten a DVD until this week’s Blu-Ray release, two years after it came out), or maybe it was always going to be a niche prospect by virtue of being another Miranda July movie about people who don’t know how to behave in public. This is July’s most accessible work to date by virtue of pretending to be a con-artist/heist movie for awhile, but “accessible” for July still features Evan Rachel Wood as an emotionally stunted young woman who speaks in what can only be described as a “dumb-guy” voice. You can laugh at her all you want but July and Wood take her very seriously, and there’s some incredible emotion to her delayed journey of self-discovery. She even gets to be the center of a great queer romance, opposite Gina Rodriguez revealing oceans of feeling and sadness beneath the guise of being a decent, “normal” person. It’s odd, silly, and uncomfortably sexual (I guess you could’ve guessed that when I said it was a Miranda July movie), and also lovely beyond words.
Onto everything else. Nope is terrific and a confirmation that Jordan Peele is going in the most exciting direction imaginable, the Shyamalan direction (down to the “next Spielberg” affectations). It’s one of very few new releases of note this week, other than the quite unpromising-sounding Gaspar Noe dementia drama Vortex. Catalog titles are where the juice is, highlighted by the Criterion of Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou and various Vinegar Syndrome off-shoot labels putting Cutter’s Way and In the Soup back in print. And there’s plenty of good horror options, particularly a box set of Italian “psychotic women” films and a 4K reissue of The Changeling.
At Close Range (MVD)
The Changeling 4K (Severin)
Columbia Classics Collection: Volume 3 4K (It Happened One Night / From Here to Eternity / To Sir with Love / The Last Picture Show / Annie / As Good as It Gets) (Sony)
Cutter’s Way (Fun City Editions)
Don’t Open Till Christmas (Vinegar Syndrome)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Warner Archive Collection)
Dracula vs. Frankenstein (Severin)
Dressed to Kill 4K (Kino)
Eve’s Bayou (Criterion)
House of Psychotic Women Rarities Collection (Severin)
In Front of Your Face (Cinema Guild)
In the Soup (Factory25)
The Incredibly Strange Films of Ray Dennis Steckler (Severin)
The Invitation (Sony)
Kajillionaire (Universal)
The Last Detail 4K (Shout Factory)
Monsieur Hire (Cohen)
The Motorcycle Diaries (Universal)
Nope 4K (Universal)
Official Competition (IFC)
PVT Chat (Dark Star)
Rob Epstein / Jeffrey Friedman Collection (Milestone)
Satan’s Little Helper (Synapse)
Sin Nombre (Universal)
The Sporting Club (Scorpion)
The Usual Suspects 4K (Kino)
Vanity Fair (Universal)
Vortex (Utopia)