The slow reemergence of John Sayles as a beloved auteur continues with this week’s 4K of Alligator, the superior Jaws knock-off Sayles wrote and infused with both his eye for character detail and his open leftism. It dials up the anti-capitalist subtext of Jaws to Parasite proportions and then also has the gall to be a terrific character study of Robert Forster as the weary police detective on the giant alligator’s tail; he’s 99% of the way to Max Cherry here. Alligator leads a week of several high-profile 4K catalog titles, including the Tomas Alfredson Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (for the reminder that Gary Oldman isn’t just a ham sandwich), the slightly less butchered international (but not director’s) cut of John Woo’s compromised but beloved Hard Target, and the “we have Shawshank Redemption at home” of The Green Mile. No 4K, however, for Ridley Scott’s latest Oscar loser House of Gucci, perhaps Universal saw the writing on the wall there. The fact that House of Gucci is solid enough, if quite flawed and inconsistently performed, should not take away from the fact that that level of failed prestige-grabbing is always hilarious.

The 355 (Universal)
Alligator 4K (Shout Factory)
Alligator II: The Mutation (Shout Factory)
American Underdog (Lionsgate)
Bartleby (Powerhouse)
Boat People (Criterion)
The Douglas Sirk Collection II (Kino)
Drop Dead Fred (Vinegar Syndrome)
Edge of Darkness (Warner Archive Collection)
Escape from L.A. 4K (Paramount)
The Green Mile 4K (Warner)
Hard Target 4K (Kino)
House of Gucci (Universal)
The King’s Man (Disney)
Lies and Deceit: Five Films by Claude Chabrol (Arrow)
Man on the Moon (Kino)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 4K (Kino)
The Triple Echo (Powerhouse)
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (Powerhouse)