Happy Thanksgiving!!! OnVideo is back after a brief hiatus due to illness. Thanks for your patience.

This Week’s Highlights:

Maverick director Peter Bogdanovich affectionately recreates the world of the 1930s Dust Bowl in “Paper Moon” (1973), this beloved, briskly entertaining chronicle of one of cinema’s unlikeliest crime sprees. Real-life father and daughter Ryan and Tatum O’Neal (who became the youngest-ever Oscar winner for her spark-plug performance) play off each other with almost musical agility as a Bible-hawking con man and the precocious, recently orphaned tomboy who falls into his care—and soon rivals her newfound father figure’s skill as a swindler. With period-perfect detail, glowing monochrome imagery by cinematographer László Kovács, and a memorable supporting cast (including the inimitable Madeline Kahn), “Paper Moon” is a witty, loving portrait of two natural-born hustlers on a road trip through Depression-era America. In 4K UHD + Blu-ray, Blu-ray debuts, with new 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack. In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features. Read more here. From The Criterion Collection … Cinema’s great modern mythmaker Guillermo del Toro uses the hallmarks of classic horror and fantasy to tell a strange and sublime fable about outsiderhood, connection, and love’s transcendence in “The Shape of Water” (2017). An ineffably touching Sally Hawkins plays Elisa, a mute janitor at a top-secret government laboratory who finds herself drawn to the facility’s newest research subject: a humanoid amphibian—for whom she is soon risking everything, amid the stifling conformity of 1960s America. A triumph of visual imagination that combines elements of sci-fi, noir, and the golden-age musical, this swooning cinematic dreamscape—winner of four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director — is a monster movie with a human heart. In 4K UHD + Blu-ray, with 4K digital master, supervised by director Guillermo del Toro, with 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack; one 4K UHD disc of the film presented in HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features. Read more here. From The Criterion Collection.

Buzzin’ the ‘B’s:

Notable for being the lowest-grossing film in US history when it was initially released in 2006, “Zyzzyx Road”, starring Katherine Heigl, Leo Grillo and Tom Sizemore, grossed $30 (not a typo) on its opening weekend. The film tells the story of an illicit affair between an accountant locked in an unhappy marriage and a seductive Las Vegas beauty who leads them both down a dangerous path. Grant (Grillo) loves his daughter, but can’t stand the sight of his wife. Determined to make a killing in Las Vegas, he heads into a local casino and crosses paths with Marissa (Heigl). Before long, the pair are back in Grant’s hotel room, where things quickly get hot and heavy. But it all goes wrong when Marissa’s violent ex-boyfriend Joey (Sizemore) crashes through the door in a fit of rage. When the smoke clears, Joey is dead. Determined not to spend the rest of their lives in prison, Grant and Marissa plot to bury the body on Zyzzyx Road. When the corpse goes missing, the couple starts to question whether Joey was ever really dead in the first place. In a two-disc Blu-ray, 4K Ultra HD/Blu-ray Combo. From Dark Arts Entertainment. Read more here.

Foreign Films:

The martial arts “Shawscope Volume 3” is a spectacular 14-disc Blu-ray box set. Before Hong Kong’s mightiest film studio mastered the art of the kung fu film, Shaw Brothers hit box office gold with a very different kind of martial arts cinema, one that channelled the blood-soaked widescreen violence of Japanese samurai epics and Italian spaghetti westerns into a uniquely Chinese form: the wuxia pian. The iconic “One-Armed Swordsman” trilogy, directed between 1967 and 1971 by wuxia cinema godfather Chang Cheh, made household names of stars “Jimmy” Wang Yu and David Chiang and set the template for many films to come. Contrary to Chang’s tales of loyal brotherhood, many wuxia films focused on female protagonists, three very different examples of which we see next: Ho Meng-hua’s “Lady Hermit,” with the great Cheng Pei-pei as a virtuous swordswoman called upon to stop a vicious warlord; Chor Yuen’s scandalous “Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan” in which the titular lady of the night masters every deadly skill she can to get revenge on those who enslaved her; and Cheng Kang’s all-star epic “The 14 Amazons,” in which Shaws’ finest starlets play the real-life women of the Yang dynasty, avenging their fallen menfolk in battle. Next, Chor Yuen adapted several beloved novels by consummate wuxia storyteller Gu Long to the big screen, four of which are collected here: “The Magic Blade,” “Clans of Intrigue,” “Jade Tiger” and “The Sentimental Swordsman,” all starring the redoubtable Ti Lung. As kung fu overtook wuxia at the box office, the genre evolved into unexpected new directions, with its chivalrous knights-errant replaced by conflicted antiheroes, as seen in Sun Chung’s breathlessly exciting “The Avenging Eagle” and goremeister Kuei Chih-hung’s fatalistic masterpiece” Killer Constable.” Finally, just when it seemed the wuxia film had nowhere left to turn, Eighties excess reigned supreme in the special-effects-soaked, fourth-wall-breaking fantastical delights of Taylor Wong’s “Buddha’s Palm” and Lu Chun-ku’s “Bastard Swordsman.” On Blu-ray from Arrow Video/MVD Entertainment. Read more here.

All DVDs and Blu-rays are screened on a reference system consisting of an Oppo BDP-83 Blu-ray Disc Player w/SACD & DVD-Audio, a Rotel RSX-972 Surround Sound Receiver, and Phase Technology 1.1 (front), 33.1 (center), and 50 (rear) speakers, and Power 10 subwoofer.