A bountiful holiday feast this week, with one indisputable all-time cinematic classic (Criterion’s 4K of The Red Shoes) and some of the best films of this year. The best of those is Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter, which will not surprise as the latest model of the Schrader “God’s lonely man” archetype but may surprise for how it’s as good as any of Schrader’s past movies on the subject. Few movies of any kind commit to such a dire vision of the American landscape, the horrors committed at Abu Ghraib and antiseptic casinos and hotels representing the same rot at America’s heart. And then, to paraphrase Nelson Muntz, you didn’t think he was gonna be able to do the Pickpocket ending (because of how overwhelmingly bleak the rest of the movie is), but then bam!, second encore! It achieves a catharsis that does not occur in this week’s other great new release, The Last Duel. It concludes with the brutal, exhilarating titular duel, where the only relief coming at the end is the knowledge that one of the assholes fighting will kill the other. It’s a cynical ending to a very cynical movie, where men’s obsession with their own status is bound to end in some kind of violence against women.
Elsewhere, Shout Factory’s box set of Cartoon Saloon’s The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, and Wolfwalkers should be an ideal holiday gift for the animation dweeb in your family, as should Sony’s Mitchells vs. the Machines. But I am not an animation dweeb, so what I want this Christmas is the 4K of The Wolf of Wall Street. I want the privilege of seeing Martin Scorsese’s most frightening and hilarious movie as big as it can be seen.
The Card Counter (Universal)
Cartoon Saloon’s Irish Folklore Trilogy (Shout Factory)
Damnation (Arbelos)
Ivanhoe (Warner Archive Collection)
Jack Frost (MVD)
The Last Duel (Disney)
The Learning Tree (Criterion)
The Mitchells vs. the Machines (Sony)
My Stepmother Is an Alien (Arrow)
The Red Shoes 4K (Criterion)
The Seduction of Joe Tynan (Kino)
The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (Arrow)
Venom: Let There Be Carnage (Sony)
The Wolf of Wall Street 4K (Paramount)