Every week we dive into the cream of the crop when it comes to home releases, including Blu-ray and DVDs, as well as recommended deals of the week. Check out our rundown below and return every Tuesday for the best (or most interesting) films one can take home. Note that if you’re looking to support the site, every purchase you make through the links below helps us and is greatly appreciated.
Belladonna of Sadness (Eiichi Yamamoto)
It all begins with Once Upon a Time. Such a simple introduction for Belladonna of Sadness, a 1973 Japanese animated feature whose newfound legacy includes a decades-long disappearance, a dramatic re-emergence, and a growing reputation as a frenzied, pornographic freakout. The final entry in anime elder statesman Osamu Tezuka‘s erotic Animerama trilogy has remained largely unknown to even the most die-hard cult cinephiles, a fate determined after its commercial failure bankrupted Tezuka’s production company, Muchi Films. That explains why the psychedelic feminist fairy tale fell by the wayside as similar X-rated animated contemporaries, including the T&A fantasies of Ralph Bakshi, lived on to titillate and traumatize poorly supervised video-age kids. Nearly two years after being acquired by Cinelicious Pics, this Aquarius Age curiosity returns in all its fully restored, 4K glory to reclaim its rightful place as a cultural artifact whose explicit themes still resonate today. – Amanda W. (full review)
Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey)
A young woman in a small Kansas town survives a drag race accident, then agrees to take a job as a church organist in Salt Lake City. En route, she is haunted by a bizarre apparition that compels her toward an abandoned lakeside pavilion. Made by industrial filmmakers on a small budget, the eerily effective B-movie classic Carnival of Souls was intended to have “the look of a Bergman and the feel of a Cocteau”—and, with its strikingly used locations and spooky organ score, it succeeds. Herk Harvey’s macabre masterpiece gained a cult following on late-night television and continues to inspire filmmakers today. – Criterion.com
Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater)
Near the end of his essay for the Criterion release of Dazed and Confused, Kent Jones writes, “[Richard] Linklater has a keen, poetic memory for exactly how we did nothing.” Like the best American directors, Linklater understands that the roots of Americana are in a formless wandering, one that was as often about bullshit as transcendence. Everybody Wants Some!!, the spiritual sequel to his 1993 feature, is another rumination on transition, following the residents of a baseball house the weekend before classes at an unspecified college in 1980. It’s a weekend bacchanalia filled with rule-breaking parties, masculinity endurance tests, hotboxed bedrooms, closed-door hookups, and the flickers of a romance that could be about more than getting off. – Michael S. (full review)
Green Room (Jeremy Saulnier)
If one appreciated the stripped-down brutality of Jeremy Saulnier‘s Blue Ruin, his follow-up Green Room is a whole other beast. In mostly one location, Saulnier is able to eke out every bit of tension possible and will have one squirming in their seat in a number of sequences. While it features a number of great performances — including a menacing Patrick Stewart and Imogen Poots’ best turn yet — it’s the late Anton Yelchin that carries it with a do-or-die scrappiness. – Jordan R.
Mountains May Depart (Jia Zhangke)
Though vastly more moderate than its predecessor, the ultra-violent A Touch of Sin, Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart continues the director’s move away from the extremely measured, observational style that characterized much of his earlier work. Even as his narratives have become more charged, however, Jia’s thematic focus has remained constant and Mountains May Depart offers his latest reflection on the momentous societal changes that have swept over China as a result of its entry and ascension in the globalized world economy. If A Touch of Sin expressed Jia’s rage at the contemporary impact of capitalist progress on Chinese society, Mountains May Depart is his lament over the direction in which it is headed. – Giovanni M.C. (full review)
My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin)
Arnaud Desplechin’s My Golden Days bears some superficial similarities to national compatriots Eric Rohmer and Olivier Assayas, two directors who tend to make films about beautiful, young, artistic people going through tough times that results from some combination of inner conflict, government, and the sensibilities of other, equally fashionable people. Of course, these directors aren’t especially alike; Rohmer is concerned with the way a person’s desires and actions — or their ideas and realities — may conflict, particularly in concerns of (heterosexual) love; Assayas’ characters drift apart and float together through means largely outside their control, or at least through means incident rather than integral to their decisions. (His protagonists are generally undone by loneliness and isolation, whereas Rohmer’s encounter trouble when they interact with one another.) My Golden Days contains much of Rohmer’s hapless romance and Assayas’ internal depression, but it is temporally expansive and deploys new tricks at every turn in a way that the films of Assayas and especially Rohmer — whose work takes place in subtly but rigorously established worlds — never would. – Forrest C. (full review)
Recommended Deals of the Week
Top Deal: It’s Amazon Prime Day. See the Blu-ray/DVD deals and all the rest of the deals.
All the President’s Men (Blu-ray) – $8.99
The American (Blu-ray) – $6.91
Amelie (Blu-ray) – $6.38
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Blu-ray) – $7.88
Beginners (Blu-ray) – $5.89
The Brothers Bloom (Blu-ray) – $9.99
The Cabin in the Woods (Blu-ray) – $8.86
Casino (Blu-ray) – $9.49
The Conformist (Blu-ray) – $13.99
Cloud Atlas (Blu-ray) – $7.99
Dear White People (Blu-ray) – $9.99
The Deer Hunter (Blu-ray) – $10.39
Eastern Promises (Blu-ray) – $8.14
Far From the Madding Crowd (Blu-ray) – $7.99
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Blu-ray) – $6.99
Greenberg (Blu-ray) – $5.10
The Guest (Blu-ray) – $9.99
Heat (Blu-ray) – $7.88
Holy Motors (Blu-ray) – $10.59
The Informant! (Blu-ray) – $8.01
Inglorious Basterds (Blu-ray) – $7.99
Interstellar (Blu-ray) – $7.99
The Iron Giant (Blu-ray pre-order) – $9.99
Jaws (Blu-ray) – $7.88
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Blu-ray) – $9.69
Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (Blu-ray) – $9.79
The Lady From Shanghai (Blu-ray) – $8.99
Looper (Blu-ray) – $7.88
Lost In Translation (Blu-ray) – $9.49
Macbeth (Blu-ray) – $9.99
Mad Max: Fury Road (Blu-ray) – $11.99
Magnolia (Blu-ray) – $9.11
The Man Who Wasn’t There (Blu-ray) – $9.49
Margaret (Blu-ray) – $9.85
Martha Marcy May Marlene (Blu-ray) – $5.26
The Master (Blu-ray) – $11.64
Michael Clayton (Blu-ray) – $8.07
Moneyball (Blu-ray) – $9.99
Nebraska (Blu-ray) – $8.89
Never Let Me Go (Blu-ray) – $8.61
No Country For Old Men (Blu-ray) – $5.99
Obvious Child (Blu-ray) – $9.99
Pan’s Labyrinth (Blu-ray) – $7.99
ParaNorman (Blu-ray) – $9.48
Persepolis (Blu-ray) – $5.79
The Piano (Blu-ray) – $7.34
Pulp Fiction (Blu-ray) – $9.99
Raging Bull: 30th Anniversary Edition (Blu-ray) – $9.00
Re-Animator (Blu-ray) – $9.99
Rio Bravo (Blu-ray) – $5.99
Road to Perdition (Blu-ray) – $8.99
The Searchers / Wild Bunch / How the West Was Won (Blu-ray) – $10.19
Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Blu-ray) – $6.40
Short Term 12 (Blu-ray) – $9.89
Shutter Island (Blu-ray) – $6.79
A Separation (Blu-ray) – $6.80
A Serious Man (Blu-ray) – $6.09
Seven Psychopaths (Blu-ray) – $7.99
A Single Man (Blu-ray) – $6.00
Somewhere (Blu-ray) – $5.20
Synecdoche, NY (Blu-ray) – $6.89
There Will Be Blood (Blu-ray) – $9.19
The Tree of Life (Blu-ray) – $6.99
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Blu-ray) – $6.02
Volver (Blu-ray) – $5.95
Where the Wild Things Are (Blu-ray) – $7.95
The Witch (Blu-ray) – $14.96
The Wrestler (Blu-ray) – $7.26
What are you picking up this week?