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.
The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks)
L.A. private eye Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) takes on a blackmail case…and follows a trail peopled with murderers, pornographers, nightclub rogues, the spoiled rich and more. Raymond Chandler‘s legendary gumshoe solves it in hard-boiled style – and style is what The Big Sleep is all about. Director Howard Hawks serves up snappy character encounters (particularly those of Bogart and Lauren Bacall), brisk pace and atmosphere galore. This Blu-ray doubles your pleasure, offering two versions of this whodunit supreme: the familiar 1946 theatrical version, full of reshot scenes of incendiary Bogart/Bacall chemistry, and the less-familiar 1945 prerelease version, as a special feature, whose plot and resolution are more linear in fashion. – Official Synopsis
Entertainment (Rick Alverson)
Director Rick Alverson makes some scary comedies. His previous endeavor, The Comedy, showed us the horrors of aging trust fund babies, making for an excellent, funny and headache-inducing result. The challenging experience that is Alverson’s latest film, Entertainment, makes The Comedy feel like a walk in the park. The comedy, which he co-wrote with star Gregg Turkington and co-star Tim Heidecker, follows a bottom-of-the-barrel comedian (Turkington) traveling from gig to gig across the California desert, performing genuinely funny and crude jokes that aren’t for everyone. But then Alverson’s not telling stories for everyone, making his films stand out all the more. – Jack G. (full review)
The Graduate (Mike Nichols)
One of the most beloved American films of all time, The Graduate earned Mike Nichols a best director Oscar, brought the music of Simon & Garfunkel to a wider audience, and introduced the world to a young actor named Dustin Hoffman. Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman) has just finished college and is already lost in a sea of confusion and barely contained angst when he becomes sexually involved with a friend of his parents’, the indomitable Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), before turning his attention to her college-age daughter (Katharine Ross). Visually imaginative and impeccably acted, with a clever, endlessly quotable script by Buck Henry (based on the novel by Charles Webb), The Graduate had the kind of cultural impact that comes along only once in a generation. – Criterion.com
I Knew Her Well (Antonio Pietrangeli)
For one reason or another, Antonio Pietrangeli never took off internationally like his compatriots Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini. Part of that is certainly due to his premature death in 1968, when he drowned while working on a film. But even before that, I Knew Her Well, now newly restored by Janus Films and the Criterion Collection, was never released in the United States. It stars Stefania Sandrelli, who certainly has the makings of a star — five years later, she would help propel The Conformist to international acclaim — and Pietrangeli’s episodic structure, use of pop music, and jarring editing fits with the work of contemporary French New Wavers, and also bore a resemblance to Fellini, particularly La Dolce Vita; even in context of its time, it hardly seems uncommercial. – Forrest C. (full review)
Key Largo (John Huston)
A hurricane swells outside, but it’s nothing compared to the storm within the hotel at Key Largo. There, sadistic mobster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) holes up – and holds at gunpoint hotel owner Nora Temple (Lauren Bacall), her invalid father-in-law (Lionel Barrymore) and ex-GI Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart). McCloud’s the one man capable of standing up against the belligerent Rocco. But the postwar world’s realities may have taken all the fight out of him. John Huston co-wrote and compellingly directs this film of Maxwell Anderson‘s 1939 play with a searing Academy Award-winning performance by Claire Trevor as Rocco’s gold-hearted, boozy moll. In Huston’s hands, it becomes a powerful, sweltering classic. – Official Synopsis
Spotlight (Thomas McCarthy)
One of the best movies about journalism since All the President’s Men, Thomas McCarthy’s Spotlight bears all the earmarks of an old-fashioned ensemble entertainment from another era while capturing enough wistful, crucial details to serve as a reminder and warning to the current media-saturated climate we live in. McCarthy scales back his style in a way similar to his best film, The Visitor, and Spotlight houses a similar moral outrage beneath a veneer of the day-to-day grind belonging to everyday people. What is specifically powerful about Spotlight is the way it eschews the intimate details of the Catholic Church’s individual molestation cases, instead focusing on this issue from the eyes of survivors and the community. We are not goaded into complicity with these newspaper men and women, but drawn into their fight through an experience as immersive as any this year. The cast, led by Michael Keaton, is one of the strongest 2015 had to offer, and they inhabit these people in a way that draws this struggle from the recent past in clear, immediate lines. – Nathan B.
Also Arriving This Week
The Good Dinosaur (review)
Secret in Their Eyes (review)
Recommended Deals of the Week
A Clockwork Orange (Blu-ray) – $7.99
A Serious Man (Blu-ray) – $9.99
The American (Blu-ray) – $7.11
Amelie (Blu-ray) – $7.82
The Assassin (Blu-ray) – $14.99
Attack the Block (Blu-ray) – $9.59
Beginners (Blu-ray) – $8.69
Blackhat (Blu-ray) – $9.96
Brokeback Mountain (Blu-ray) – $10.00
The Brothers Bloom (Blu-ray) – $10.30
The Cabin in the Woods (Blu-ray) – $7.64
Captain Phillips (Blu-ray) – $8.99
Casino (Blu-ray) – $9.33
Dear White People (Blu-ray) – $9.99
Eastern Promises (Blu-ray) – $8.99
Good Will Hunting (Blu-ray) – $7.50
Gravity (Blu-ray) – $8.00
A History of Violence (Blu-ray) – $9.69
Holy Motors (Blu-ray) – $13.61
Inglorious Basterds (Blu-ray) – $9.49
Interstellar (Blu-ray) – $8.00
Jaws (Blu-ray) – $7.91
John Wick (Blu-ray) – $8.00
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Blu-ray) – $9.69
The Lady From Shanghai (Blu-ray) – $8.77
Looper (Blu-ray) – $9.93
Lost In Translation (Blu-ray) – $9.49
Mad Max: Fury Road (Blu-ray) – $14.99
Magic Mike (Blu-ray) – $7.73
Magnolia (Blu-ray) – $9.53
Margaret (Blu-ray) – $9.49
Martha Marcy May Marlene (Blu-ray) – $6.48
Michael Clayton (Blu-ray) – $9.69
Munich (Blu-ray) – $12.49
Never Let Me Go (Blu-ray) – $8.00
No Country For Old Men (Blu-ray) – $6.99
Obvious Child (Blu-ray) – $9.99
ParaNorman (Blu-ray) – $9.99
Pariah (Blu-ray) – $6.58
Persepolis (Blu-ray) – $6.23
Pulp Fiction (Blu-ray) – $7.99
Reality Bites (Blu-ray) – $5.00
Re-Animator (Blu-ray) – $9.99
Road to Perdition (Blu-ray) – $8.99
Seven (Blu-ray) – $6.99
Seven Psychopaths (Blu-ray) – $6.99
Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Blu-ray) – $6.11
Shaun the Sheep (Blu-ray) – $13.00
Short Term 12 (Blu-ray) – $9.89
Shutter Island (Blu-ray) – $5.99
A Single Man (Blu-ray) – $4.99
Snowpiercer (Blu-ray) – $6.99
Synecdoche, NY (Blu-ray) – $6.25
There Will Be Blood (Blu-ray) – $9.15
The Tree of Life (Blu-ray) – $5.99
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Blu-ray) – $5.96
Volver (Blu-ray) – $5.95
The Walk (Blu-ray) – $12.99
Where the Wild Things Are (Blu-ray) – $7.88
Whiplash (Blu-ray) – $9.99
The Wrestler (Blu-ray) – $7.19
What are you picking up this week?