Call it a gift guide and a salute to excellence — as well as a lament that it’s so hard to shop for new Blu-rays and 4Ks in person in the city anymore — but these are among the best releases of 2024 and worthy of your attention. The format of the release is listed next to each film’s title.
Film
Andrew Haigh’s film starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal opens this week at the Belcourt
All of Us Strangers (Criterion UHD/Blu-ray)
One of last year’s best films, reprieved from the Searchlight digital graveyard thanks to the Criterion Collection, All of Us Strangers is an empathetic and profound work that somehow gathers even more strength and cumulative power with the passage of time and the general enshittification of the world around us. A strong belief in something more than this, freed from the vicissitudes of the streaming era. Simply essential.
All the Haunts Be Ours: Volume Two (Severin Blu-ray)
All the Haunts Be Ours: Volume Two
Nobody does an expansive box set like distribution company Severin Films. Like Volume One of this series back in 2022, like that unreal Laura Gemser/Emanuelle Nera box last year, Severin takes a concept, a mood, a genre, and applies the Jim Steinman axiom of more being better than less. Volume One of this folk-horror collection was an incredible flex, bolstered by the staggering array of material here. My first stop was the documentary about Suzzanna, the Queen of Indonesiansploitation cinema, and there’s so much more — 23 more films, in fact.
Brokeback Mountain (Kino Lorber UHD/Blu-ray)
The Brokeback Mountain UHD does an incredible job with Rodrigo Prieto’s Oscar-nominated cinematography, with the kind of textures you get from Apichatpong or Clare Denis films. And, well, the film remains a remarkable portrait of trying to find a way through society at its most unfriendly. The loss of Heath Ledger is still painful, because he knocks this one out of the park.
Can’t Stop the Music (Kino Lorber UHD/Blu-ray)
You’ve never seen anything quite like Can’t Stop the Music — a biopic of the Village People in which everyone is straight. It features quite a few extravagant musical numbers (yes, “YMCA” is done bathhouse Busby Berkley style, and you will find it difficult to get “Milkshake” out of your head), and stars Steve “Police Academy” Guttenberg, Valerie “Superman” Perrine and a pretransition Caitlyn Jenner. This is absolutely what happens when some of the filmmakers behind Grease try to recapture lightning in a bottle — to unreal effect.
Forgotten Gialli: Volume Seven (Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray)
If it had done nothing else but provide a proper cinemascope restoration of 1987’s Obsession: A Taste for Fear, this would be one of the most essential offerings of the year. But this remarkable trio of ’80s Italian slashers is an impeccable survey of elegant trash and gutter glory, with 1987’s Sweets From a Stranger being one of the biggest surprises I’ve seen in years — a remarkable film where a gang of sex workers team up and form a vigilante squad to take out a bike-riding, straight-razor-wielding murderer. 1983’s Mystère is a fun riff on Beineix’s Diva, but Obsession: A Taste for Fear is a majestic sci-fi fashion-future giallo where being a model is a death sentence, breakfast is Champagne and strawberries, and a murderer is recording their crimes on LaserDisc. This is the exploitation-cinema Holy Grail of 2024.
The People’s Joker (Altered Innocence Blu-ray)
This one features the most astonishing menu screen since the early Aughts. An essential work of queer cinema at its most Bugs Bunny wise-assed, The People’s Joker is capable of refreshing comic-book films on the whole, and this Blu-ray is stacked with extras.
Produced by Val Lewton
Produced by Val Lewton (Criterion UHD/Blu-ray)
Val Lewton was the master of low-budget, high-concept productions for RKO in the ’40s, and this exquisite pair of 1943 shockers delivers atmosphere and elegant menace like few other films ever have. I Walked With a Zombie is a creepy look at voodoo conspiracies and the way colonialism absorbs and weaponizes whatever spiritualities and traditions it encounters, and The Seventh Victim is like no satanic cult film you’ve ever seen — a jaw-dropper of a film that feels unmatched in the intervening 80 years. And this UHD is giving high-contrast black-and-white nightmares that stay with you.
Scala! (Severin Blu-ray)
If FOMO were a documentary — a mood, a space in time of limitless artistic and horny potential, told with love and packaged with lust. Tens across the board for anyone with one foot in the grindhouse and one foot in the arthouse.
Both films will screen this month at the Belcourt
Werckmeister Harmonies (Criterion UHD/Blu-ray)
Despite its inexplicable choice for a cover image (one utterly meaningless to anyone who hasn’t already seen the film), this languid and pitiless diagram of society slipping into fascism finally has a gorgeous English-subtitled transfer. In the 24 years since it was first released, what was an austere allegory has become something unspeakably real — a slow-motion collapse before our very eyes.
Behind the Beaded Curtain
A peek in the primo offerings from the video store backroom, for adults only …
Hard Wood (Severin Blu-ray)
Hard Wood is a collection of beloved weirdo Ed Wood’s later, naughtier work, presented with love and a discerning eye for those who dig deeper than Plan 9 or Glen or Glenda. Both a scholarly trawl through the Hollywood gutter and a reassessment of the man’s post-infamy years, this is made with care, not irony, and is a fascinating look into the industry’s transition into hardcore and what that meant to subsistence-level filmmakers of the era.
Sex Demon and Other Hauntings (AGFA/Mélusine Blu-ray)
That old axiom that you can make porn out of anything with an adventurous enough spirit is proven true by this trio of ’70s horror-themed shockers. Sex Demon gets the pole position (ha!) because of its rescue from oblivion by disc host and commentator Liz Purchell (alongside the velvet-voiced KJ Shepherd), and also because it’s a gay version of The Exorcist, but all three of the films are unexpected backroom bangers.
As well as the previously discussed Closed Circuit, Daniel Isn’t Real, The Devil’s Honey, The Drifter, eXistenZ, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Leviathan.
Books
Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras
Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras by Odie Henderson
A delightful history that is both densely informative and laugh-out-loud witty (do not pass up the audiobook, read by the author), this is as comprehensive a survey of the Blaxploitation movement as one could hope for. Author Odie Henderson has a gift — he conveys social history and economic theory and diagrams the parallel histories of Hollywood with an incisive eye and the timing of a peerless comedian working blue at the late show.
Cocktails From the Crypt by Jonathan Dehaan and Kimberley Elizabeth
This is a remarkable gift for anyone who wants to complement an evening movie’s horrors with the perfect libation, with maximum creativity and a stunning amount of aesthetic adventurousness. Your movie may be gross, but there’s no reason for your drink to be so, and Dehaan and Elizabeth really do the work.
Corpses, Fools & Monsters: The History of Transness in Cinema by Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay
A perceptive and thoughtful look at what trans film is, has been and could be. This is probably banned somewhere in Tennessee, so get it while you can.
Dayspring by Anthony Oliveira
Marvel comics author, Toronto film programmer and onetime Scene contributor Anthony Oliveira has crafted one of the most important theological works of the year, and it’s the kind of book that’ll make closed-minded brains explode. An unexpected gospel that serves as the latest ecstatic testament in a tradition that goes back millennia.
Hallyuwood by Bastian Meiresonne
The film scholar and Vanderbilt alum will present a July 24 screening of ‘The Last of Sheila’ at the Belcourt
This is an impressive dive into the cinema history of South Korea, compiled with enthusiasm and a sense of historical perspective. Anyone looking to take a leap into Korean film after dipping their toes would be well-served by Meiresonne’s work here, of coffee-table book ambition but of a slightly more reasonable size.
The Queer Film Guide by Kyle Turner
A great companion to Alonso Duralde’s Hollywood Pride (mentioned below), this dives deeper into its selected titles, letting Kyle Turner (a gifted critic of the driest wit) explore aspects of LGBTQ cinema in whichever way the muse directs.
As well as the previously discussed Hollywood Pride and With Love, Mommie Dearest.
