Our monthly release round-up is as stacked with physical media must-haves, but we should note right out of the gate that several titles are missing from this list due overwhelmingly high demand. This feature will only include the titles you can still get your hands on at the time of writing, and all release dates are subject to change – keep checking our site for updates.
First things first, here are the titles hitting shelves at the very start of the month…
Monday, 1st July
Three very different 4K steelbooks are coming your way on the 1st, offering the kind of variety you would expect to find in a box of chocolates. But whereas there, you never know which one you’ll get, here, you know for sure that you’ll be picking up the Forrest Gump 30th anniversary collector’s edition, the first season of Andor, or Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black.
Those are the headline releases this week, but there are more intriguing curios to discover if you scratch the surface. 88 Films are releasing The Holy Virgin Vs The Evil Dead, billed as the “Chinese Indiana Jones”, albeit with more elaborate fistfights and over-the-top horror – the great Donnie Yen takes the lead role.
Radiance Films are amongst the best in the business for rescuing offbeat gems from cinematic obscurity, and their Limited Edition boxset of three films from French director Jean-Pierre Mocky is one we’re intrigued to seek out. There’s folk horror, there’s a football hooligan revenge movie, and there’s a paranoid thriller about climate change – Vive la France!
For something a bit more low key, the BFI have restored a landmark of Japanese cinema – Floating Clouds – and Second Sight have put together a six-disc set of Heimat, a world-renowned miniseries chronicling a century of German life. Finally, Cult Classics are reissuing Night of the Eagle, a paranoid supernatural thriller about the occult.
Monday, 8th July
Our guides always focus on older titles, so here are a couple of new titles to keep an eye out for; Dev Patel’s directorial debut, Monkey Man, on 4K, and the psychological Kiwi thriller Loop Track, which Arrow Video are releasing on limited edition Blu-ray.
If they have you hungry for even more depraved cinematic films, then Shameless Screen Entertainment have you covered. They’re releasing a Limited Collector’s Edition of Strip Nude For Your Killer, a 70s giallo every bit as sleazy and gory as it sounds.
Monday, 15th July
A lot to get through this week, so let’s start with the steelbooks, shall we? The Rocky collection is now complete thanks to the releases of Rocky V and 2006’s Rocky Balboa, the second season of Halo will be getting a physical release, and Cult Classics will be releasing controversial Civil War epic Soldier Blue.
Next up, a wide array of films both classic and brand spanking new arriving on 4K. Two limited edition releases of particular note are the 50th anniversary collector’s set of The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s excellent conspiracy thriller - insane to think he directed this and The Godfather Part II in the same year. Arrow Video have remastered an intergalactic cult classic too, with The Last Starfighter blasting out of the arcade and onto your shelf.
Three very different movie classics will be joining them on 4K; Spike Lee’s epic biopic Malcolm X, with a God-tier Denzel Washington performance, leads the pack, but Once Upon a Time in the West and Criterion’s release of Le Samouraï aren’t far behind. If you’re looking for movies fresh from the cinema on 4K, then director Alex Garland’s controversial dystopian drama Civil War is a must-have.
One of the most delightfully strange British filmmakers working today is Peter Strickland, and Curzon’s limited edition boxset featuring all five of his films to date belongs on the shelf of any fan of the weird and wonderful in genre cinema. Elsewhere, we have the 20th anniversary edition of Samurai Champloo, a landmark anime series from the creator of Cowboy Bebop, the BFI’s rerelease of 1980s Britflick Remembrance, starring Gary Oldman and Timothy Spall, and the Warner Archive’s release of Carl Weathers vehicle Action Jackson.
Finally, 88 Films are releasing gory sequel Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings - an essential for fans of the Video Nasties era - and Anthropophagous, one of the most notorious video nasties of all. The BBFC genuinely thought this cannibal movie was a real snuff film!
Monday 22nd July
For this week’s releases, let’s start in Japan and move further west. Hailing from the Land of the Rising Sun is the Mobile Suit Gundam Film Trilogy, with each entry in the anime franchise arriving on 4K.
The seventies saw lots of oddball space operas arrive in cinemas in the wake of Star Wars, but few are quite as wild as Message from Space, which is the exact space opera you’d expect from the director who’d go on to make Battle Royale.
Sailing across the Korea Strait, we land at Second Sight’s 4K limited edition of A Bittersweet Life, one of the bloodiest crime sagas of the noughties. Slightly further west, we arrive in Hong Kong, and the Eureka Classics release of The Double Crossers, a martial arts inflected noir that went by the awesome original title of The Kung Fu Killers.
Then we take a big flight west, with the BFI’s remaster of British classic Die, Monster, Die!, and three very different American films; Brian de Palma’s glorious homage to Rear Window, Blow Out, arriving on 4K from Criterion, George A. Romero’s low-budget overlooked gem Bruiser, and the early nineties thriller Single White Female.
Monday, 29th July
We’re saving the most stacked week of the month for last, so allow us to take a deep breath and rattle through this eclectic range of new releases…
First up, Arrow are bringing Guy Ritchie’s underrated spy caper The Man From U.N.C.L.E to 4K, Criterion are inviting Tom Cruise into their collection for the first time with his star-making turn in Risky Business, and there’s a new DC steelbook in the form of Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths Part 3. Other 4K’s launching this week include the surreal horrors of Santa Sangre, the biting satire of Election, and one of the most demanded 4K releases (at least in terms of people asking us about it) in recent memory: the Oscar-winning lizard western Rango.
Glengarry Glen Ross, the foul-mouthed 90s riff on Death of a Salesman, is getting a limited edition Blu-ray release, but there are plenty more titles you may have never even heard of also getting that treatment. Radiance alone are offering gruelling Yakuza drama (Eighteen Years in Prison), an erotic noir from Francois Truffaut (Mississippi Mermaid), a tender French neo-noir (Tchao Pantin), and the offbeat directorial debut of one of the most heralded filmmakers of the 70’s, Hal Ashby (The Landlord).
88 Films are whisking us off to 1980s New York City with tender drama An Autumn’s Tale, starring Chow Yun-Fat, breaking our hearts with tragic romantic drama Immortal Story, pushing us to the edge of our seats with vintage British sci-fi Night of the Big Heat, and making us shout “we’re watching it for the plot, honest!” to our partners with Italian softcore drama The Pleasure. The company is also expanding their slasher collection with the Manson Family inspired Skinned Alive, a movie which succeeds in making audiences reach for the sick bags, and making us enter a “dead-and-breakfast” in Funeral Home.
If that wasn’t enough, 88 Films also have the Boris Karloff-starring psychedelic scare fest The Sorcerers and the irresistible “technicolour gothic” of The Curse of the Crimson Altar. Finally, Raro Video are serving up Revenge of the Blood Beast, and Arrow have a boxset of joyously demented works from B-movie maestro Nico Mastroakis.
Browse and pre-order all new releases here.
