This would be a good week anytime, but after two weeks of near-nothingness, this is a breath of fresh air. Admittedly, new titles are really not so good, with the best being Oz Perkins’ moody horror-thriller The Blackcoat’s Daughter, and the rest being different shades of disposable (in the case of The Shack, disposable is an invitation to throw it in a landfill where no one can find it). But catalog titles have some real gems this week. As is often the case, the biggest titles there are from Criterion, with them giving Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World the special edition it has so rightfully deserved since the dawn of DVD and putting out a second box set of underseen international films restored by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation (including two particularly big titles, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon and Edward Yang’s long-MIA Taipei Story). But they’re hardly the only ones doing good work this week. Kino actually has a very interesting slate of titles, including Billy Wilder’s Cold War farce One, Two, Three, the Rudolph Valentino films The Sheik and The Son of the Sheik, and one of the more minor entries in Alfred Hitchcock’s career, The Paradine Case. Elsewhere, Lionsgate is releasing the nice little spelling bee drama Akeelah and the Bee and the least-known film in the “Kevin Spacey in an office” series, The Big Kahuna, and Film Movement is giving the Palme d’Or and Oscar-winner Pelle the Conqueror a well-needed restoration and special edition.

Akeelah and the Bee (Lionsgate)
Before I Fall (Universal)
The Big Kahuna (Lionsgate)
The Blackcoat’s Daughter (Lionsgate)
Blackenstein (Severin)
The Blood of Fu Manchu / The Castle of Fu Manchu (Blue Underground)
Collide (Universal)
Evil Ed (Arrow)
Fist Fight (Warner)
Ghost World (Criterion)
The Hearse (Vinegar Syndrome)
Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, No. 2 (Criterion)
One, Two, Three (Kino)
The Paradine Case (Kino)
Pelle the Conqueror (Film Movement)
The Shack (Lionsgate)
The Sheik (Kino)
The Son of the Sheik (Kino) (no Son of the Shack, though)
Spotlight on a Murderer (Arrow Academy)
Tough Guys (Kino)