We here at Substream love to give you our fresh takes on the best new theatrical and VOD releases, but what if you love something enough to want to own a physical copy? This is our rundown of this week’s best new releases on DVD and Blu-ray, so that you know what films to add to your home video library.
The Handmaiden
1930s Korea, in the period of Japanese occupation, a new girl (Kim Tae-ri) is hired as a handmaiden to a Japanese heiress (Kim Min-hee) who lives a secluded life on a large countryside estate with her domineering Uncle (Jo Jin-woong). But the maid has a secret. She is a pickpocket recruited by a swindler posing as a Japanese Count (Ha Jung-woo) to help him seduce the Lady to elope with him, rob her of her fortune, and lock her up in a madhouse. The plan seems to proceed according to plan until Sookee and Hideko discover some unexpected emotions.
Inferno
Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), the famous symbologist, follows a trail of clues tied to the great Dante himself. When Langdon wakes up in an Italian hospital with amnesia, he teams up with Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), a doctor he hopes will help him recover his memories. Together, they race across Europe and against the clock to foil a deadly global plot.
The Light Between Oceans
On a remote Australian island in the years following World War I, lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) and his wife, Isabel (Alicia Vikander), discover a boat washed ashore carrying a dead man and a two-month old baby. Rescuing the infant, they make the decision to raise her as their own but the consequences of their choice prove to be devastating.
The Vessel
Ten years after a tsunami destroyed a small-town elementary school with all the children inside, a young man builds a mysterious structure out of the school’s remains, setting the town aflame with passions long forgotten.
The Monster
A divorced mother (Zoe Kazan) and her headstrong daughter must make an emergency late night road trip to see the girl’s father. As they drive through deserted country roads on a stormy night, they suddenly have a startling collision that leaves them shaken but not seriously hurt. Their car, however, is dead, and as they try in vain to get help, they come to realize they are not alone on these desolate backroads—a terrifying evil is lurking in the surrounding woods, intent on never letting them leave.
Black Girl
NEW TO THE CRITERION COLLECTION: Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most renowned African director of the twentieth century—and yet his name still deserves to be better known in the rest of the world. He made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl. Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot—about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both figuratively and literally—into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by M’Bissine Thérèse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement—and one of the essential films of the 1960s.
