New Releases for September 24 2024

HAPPINESS (1998) (CRITERION)

As disturbingly funny as it is audaciously empathetic, auteur of unease Todd Solondz’s portrait of damaged souls reaching out for connection reveals the existential void underneath middle-class suburban “normalcy.” An extraordinary ensemble cast—including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jane Adams, Lara Flynn Boyle, Ben Gazzara, and Dylan Baker—embodies an array of loosely connected New Jersey deviants, depressives, and misfits, among them a frustrated phone-sex pest, an all-American dad concealing his pedophilic urges, and a lonely woman with a grisly secret, all of whom want just one thing: to be loved. One of the most controversial films of the 1990s, the unflinching Happiness unnerves precisely because it dares to see the humanity in those most often denied it. (DVD, BLU-RAY + 4KULTRAHD)

DRAGON PAINTER (1919)

Sessue Hayakawa (The Bridge on the River Kwai) plays Tatsu, a painter-turned-hermit living in the wilds of Japan. Thought mad by local villagers, he truly believes that his princess fiancée has been captured by a dragon, an obsession that leads him daily to artistic inspiration. When a surveyor comes across Tatsu while trekking across the mountains, he informs famed artist Kano Indara about his discovery. Kano is desperate to find an heir to teach his art, but when Tatsu meets Kano’s daughter (Tsuru Aoki) and sees only his lost princess, a clash of wills brings the household to the brink of disaster. Long considered lost, THE DRAGON PAINTER survives today as a tribute to Hayakawa’s talents and a shining example of Asian-American cinema. (BLU-RAY)

TAOISM DRUNKARD (1984) 

Directed by and starring Yuen Cheung-yan (The Miracle Fighters), Taoism Drunkard follows a man with a love for wine who accidentally damages a sacred statue. To atone for this blunder, he is asked by an enraged Taoist priest (Hsiao Hou-tao) to find a virginal boy (Yuen Yat-chor) to aid in defending his temple from a demonic sorcerer (Yuen Shun-yi). (BLU-RAY)

TOTALLY F***ED UP (1993) (CRITERION) 

A delirious mix of punk nihilism and deadpan irony, the first film in Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy puts an audaciously queer spin on Jean-Luc Godard’s classic Masculin féminin. Across fifteen jagged episodes, Totally F***ed Up plunges headlong into the lives of a group of queer, disaffected Los Angeles teenagers who form a kind of makeshift family as they navigate desire and heartbreak, societal and familial rejection, and the alienation of growing up gay in an era of relentless moralizing. Both a defiantly raw anthem of outsiderhood and a furious reckoning with all-American homophobia, Araki’s answer to the 1980s teen comedy captures youthful angst with an immediacy that still bruises. (BLU-RAY)

IN A VIOLENT NATURE (2024) 

When a locket is removed from a collapsed fire tower in the woods that entombs the rotting corpse of Johnny, a vengeful spirit spurred on by a horrific 60-year-old crime, his body is resurrected and becomes hellbent on retrieving it. The undead golem hones in on the group of vacationing teens responsible for the theft and proceeds to methodically slaughter them one by one in his mission to get it back - along with anyone in his way. (DVD)