Well, last week’s drought of titles was exceedingly short-lived. We have so much goddamn stuff this week, and a lot of it is good! Admittedly, not a lot of the wealth is in new titles. The far-and-away highlight of those is Toni Erdmann, the German tragicomedy that seems to possess the ability to turn even the most verbose critics into Chris Farley Show hosts, and even this is tempered by Sony only releasing it on a BD-R (god willing, this means Criterion is in its future). The second-place finishers are the new seasons of the HBO comedies Veep and Silicon Valley, and then there’s an even steeper drop to the rest. You’ve got this year’s two most okay Best Picture nominees, Lion and Hidden Figures, John Michael McDonagh’s disappointing third feature War on Everyone, the goddamn Bye Bye Man (now only the second most embarrassing thing Faye Dunaway has been involved with this year), and the film that is dead-set on tearing the Dissolve Facebook group apart, Monster Trucks. May Creech be with us all.

Catalog titles form the real meat of this week. Maybe the biggest of the bunch is Cohen’s release and restoration of the seminal piece of African-American and female cinema, Daughters of the Dust, or maybe it’s the box set of all the Phantasm films, including the newly-restored first one. For those who were enchanted by La La Land but who are also stingy bastards, Criterion has helpfully separated the two most well-known titles from its Jacques Demy box set, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (which will break you) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (which will build you back up better than ever). And Shout! Factory finally puts the hi-def spotlight on the one-and-only collaboration between John Stamos and Gene Simmons (let alone Simmons playing an hermaphrodite), the teen secret-agent film Never Too Young to Die. But the undisputed star label of this week is Arrow, which is giving its American supporters access to all kinds of goodies previously only afforded to the British. There’s the extensive special edition of Luchino Visconti’s Ludwig, a set of the first two House films, releases of Django, Prepare a Coffin and Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive Trilogy, and biggest of all, the US debut of their Kiju Yoshida box set. The only label releasing a similar quantity this week is Twilight Time, and I will admit they have some pretty good titles out this week as well, including William Wyler’s heist comedy How to Steal a Million, the Fred Astaire-Rita Hayworth musical You’ll Never Get Rich, and best of all, Woody Allen’s very underrated character drama Another Woman. There’s also Billy Wilder’s lesser comedy The Fortune Cookie, which I mention last so I can lead into its supremely hideous cover. I will post it after the release listing, to give you room to back out in case you’re not ready to look at it. Trust me, you may very well not be ready for it.

36 Hours (Warner Archive Collection)
Another Woman (Twilight Time)
The Bye Bye Man (Universal)
The Crucible (Kino)
Daughters of the Dust (Cohen)
Dead or Alive Trilogy (Arrow)
Demented (Shout Factory)
Django, Prepare a Coffin (Arrow)
The Fortune Cookie (Twilight Time)
Hidden Figures (Fox)
House: Two Stories (Arrow)
How to Steal a Million (Twilight Time)
Kiju Yoshida: Love + Anarchism (Arrow Academy)
Lion (Anchor Bay)
Ludwig (Arrow Academy)
Monster Trucks (Paramount)
Never Too Young to Die (Shout Factory)
The Phantasm Collection (Well Go)
Silicon Valley: The Complete Third Season (HBO)
Toni Erdmann (Sony)
Tristan & Isolde (Kino)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Criterion)
The Vampire (Shout Factory)
Veep: The Complete Fifth Season (HBO)
War on Everyone (Lionsgate)
Year of the Comet (Twilight Time)
You’ll Never Get Rich (Twilight Time)
The Young Girls of Rochefort (Criterion)

This is your last chance to back out. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.