From the Big Screen:

No Major Theatrical Releases This Week

This Week’s Highlight:

Jean-Luc Godard’s first English-language narrative feature, “King Lear” (1987), is a radical anti-adaptation of Shakespeare’s masterpiece that finds the visionary filmmaker continuing to reinvent the syntax of cinema. In a post-Chernobyl world where culture has been lost, William Shakespeare Jr. V (played by theater director Peter Sellars) attempts to reconstruct his ancestor’s play, abetted by a cast that includes Molly Ringwald, Burgess Meredith, and Godard himself as a crazed avant savant. Through a dense layering of sounds, images, and ideas about everything from language to the economics of filmmaking to the very meaning of art in a ruined world, Godard fashions a puckish and profound metacinematic riddle to be endlessly analyzed, argued over, and savored. On DVD, Blu-ray, with New 2K digital restoration, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. Read more here. From The Criterion Collection.

“Buzzin’ the ‘B’s:

In “Flesh + Blood” (1985), starring Rutger Hauer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Burlinson, Susan Tyrrell, Jack Thompson and Fernando Hilbeck, director Paul Verhoeven (“Basic Instinct,” “Total Recall”) brings no-holds-barred action and sensuality to the Middle Ages. A band of mercenaries led by Martin (Hauer) triumph in battle for their leader Arnolfini. When Martin is betrayed by the tyrant Arnolfini, he seeks revenge. Martin’s mercenaries abduct Agnes (Jason Leigh), a convent girl and the bride-to-be of Arnolfini’s son Steven (Burlinson). She in turn manipulates Martin to protect her from his men. But is she feigning devotion in order to survive or has she fallen in love? On DVD, Blu-ray, from Capelight Pictures/MPI) … A young Brooke Shields meets an untimely end in “Alice, Sweet Alice” (1976), a religious-themed proto slasher par excellence from director Alfred Sole. On the day of her first communion, young Karen (Shields) is savagely murdered by an unknown assailant in a yellow rain mac and creepy translucent mask. But the nightmare is far from over – as the knife-wielding maniac strikes again and again, Karen’s bereaved parents are forced to confront the possibility that Karen’s wayward sister Alice might be the one behind the mask. Bearing influences from the likes of Hitchcock, the then-booming Italian giallo film and more specifically, Nicolas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now,” “Alice, Sweet Alice” is an absolutely essential – if often overlooked – entry in the canon of 1970s American horror. Brand new 4K restoration of the original theatrical version from the original camera negative by Arrow Films. Ultra HD presentations of three versions via seamless branching: Communion (original), Alice, Sweet Alice (theatrical) and Holy Terror (re-release). On 4K UHD from Arrow Video/MVD Entertainment. Read more here.

On the Indie Front:

Siblings Violeta and Eva live in California with their mother, but every summer they travel to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to spend time with their loving but unpredictable father, Vicente in “In the Summers” (2024), starring René “Residente” Pérez Joglar, Sasha Calle, Lío Mehiel, Sharlene Cruz, Leslie Grace and Emma Ramos. Over the course of four formative summers that span adolescence to early adulthood, Violeta and Eva learn to appreciate their father as a person, his flaws and limitations inseparable from his passion and tenderness. Lovers come and go, the backyard goes to seed, but the idea of home remains knotty and elusive. On DVD, Blu-ray, VOD, Digital, from Music Box Films. Read more here.

Foreign Films:

Anticipating the cool aesthetic of Seijun Suzuki’s “Branded to Kill” and based on a crime novel by Shinji Fujiwara, the author of the original material for the same year’s “A Colt is My Passport,” “A Certain Killer and A Killer’s Key” (1967 — Japan) are similarly stylish contemporary hitman thrillers directed by Daiei’s top director of jidai-geki, Kazuo Mori and starring the studio’s top actor Raizo Ichikawa. In “A Certain Killer,” Shiozaki’s low-profile existence as a chef at a local sushi restaurant serves as a front for his true job as a professional assassin whose modus operandi is poisoned needles. He’s approached by Maeda, a low-ranking member of a local yakuza group, to take out a rival gang boss. But the sudden arrival into his life of a spirited young woman, Keiko (Yumiko Nogawa), has dramatic ramifications on his relationship with his new employer. Ichikawa’s lone wolf assassin is back in “A Killer’s Key,” this time masquerading as a traditional dance instructor named Nitta who is called in to avert a potential financial scandal that threatens to engulf a powerful yakuza group with ties to powerful figures in the political establishment. Co-scripted by the director Yasuzo Masumura and featuring masterful scope cinematography with an expressionistic eye for color by one of Japan’s most esteemed cinematographers, Kazuo Miyagawa (“Rashomon,” “Ugetsu”), these Japanese crime drama essentials are presented for the very first time to the English-language home video market. On Blu-ray from Arrow Video/MVD Entertainment. Read more here … The story of Nadia Nadim, a young Afghan girl who took refuge in Denmark following the execution of her father by the Taliban is at the center of “Nadia” (2021 — France). Today, Nadia is an international football star. How can you rebuild yourself when you lose your father and your homeland forever at the age of 8? Nadia Nadim, whose dad was killed by the Taliban in 2000, has embarked on this quest. The young Afghan woman, her 4 sisters, and their mother fled Kabul in the wake of the violence. Like millions of their countrymen, they were ground down by a conflict that has lasted for decades, as Russian and then American forces occupied the country. Today, the Taliban have returned to rule. Football passion is what saved Nadia. She became a striker on the national team of her adoptive land, Denmark, then for the Paris-Saint-Germain women’s team. Nadia, having achieved football stardom, wants to return to Afghanistan, to find out more about her father’s fate. But the country is torn by terrorism as the Taliban and ISIS sow chaos daily. Giving up the trip, Nadia must grieve for another loss. However, she is unsinkable, and has plans for the future: graduate as a reconstructive surgeon and heal her people. On DVD, VOD, Digital, from IndiePix Films.