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.
47 Meters Down
On the rebound after a devastating break-up, Lisa (Mandy Moore) is ready for adventure while on vacation in Mexico. Even still, she needs a little extra persuasion when her daring sister Kate (Claire Holt) suggests they go shark diving with some locals. Once underwater in a protective cage, Lisa and Kate catch a once in a lifetime, face-to-face look at majestic Great Whites. But when their worst fears are realized and the cage breaks away from their boat, they find themselves plummeting to the bottom of the seabed, too deep to radio for help without making themselves vulnerable to the savage sharks, their oxygen supplies rapidly dwindling.
Pop Aye
A successful Bangkok architect in the midst of a midlife crisis is reunited with an elephant he knew growing up. The two embark on a road trip to the man’s childhood home in the idyllic Thai countryside. Along the way, they meet a colorful cast of characters that includes a pair of nonplussed local police officers, a forlorn transgender sex worker, and a mysteriously wise drifter.
The Death of Louis XIV
Versailles, August 1715. Back from hunting, Louis XIV (Jean-Pierre Léaud) feels pain in his leg. A serious fever erupts, which marks the beginning of the decline of the greatest King of France. Surrounded by a horde of doctors and his closest counselors who come in turns at his bedside sensing the impending power vacuum, the Sun King struggles to run the country from his bed.
David Lynch: The Art Life
NEW TO THE CRITERION COLLECTION: A rare glimpse into the mind of one of cinema’s most enigmatic visionaries, David Lynch: The Art Life offers an absorbing portrait of the artist, as well as an intimate encounter with the man himself. From his secluded home and painting studio in the Hollywood Hills, a candid Lynch conjures people and places from his past, from his boyhood to his experiences at art school to the beginnings of his filmmaking career—in stories that unfold like scenes from his movies. This remarkable documentary by Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, and Olivia Neergaard-Holm travels back to Lynch’s early years as a painter and director drawn to the phantasmagoric, while also illuminating his enduring commitment to what he calls “the art life”: “You drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint, and that’s it.”
The Piano Teacher
NEW TO THE CRITERION COLLECTION: In this riveting study of the dynamics of control, Academy Award–winning director Michael Haneke takes on Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s controversial 1983 novel about perverse female sexuality and the world of classical music. Haneke finds his match in Isabelle Huppert, who delivers an icy but quietly seething performance as Erika, a piano professor at a Viennese conservatory who lives with her mother in a claustrophobically codependent relationship. Severely repressed, she satisfies her masochistic urges only voyeuristically until she meets Walter (Benoît Magimel), a student whose desire for Erika leads to a destructive infatuation that upsets the careful equilibrium of her life. A critical breakthrough for Haneke, The Piano Teacher—which won the Grand Prix as well as dual acting awards for its stars at Cannes—is a formalist masterwork that remains a shocking sensation.
