Joey’s Home Movies For the Week of November 7th – ‘The Power of the Dog’ Comes to Criterion

Welcome back to my Home Movies! This week, Netflix and the Criterion Collection continue their fruitful partnership with their joint home video release of none other than The Power of the Dog. What else is hitting shelves today? Well, read on in order to find out just that…

Joey’s Top Pick

The Power of the Dog

Jane Campion turning her attention to masculinity produced one of the best films of 2021. The Power of the Dog packs a wallop, as we detailed all throughout last year. As a Criterion release, it perfectly continues Netflix’s relationship with the company. This one, as much as any, deserves a physical release. Back at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, I had this to say about the movie:

The Power of the Dog is very deliberate, though never anywhere close to boring. What could have been a static Academy Award hopeful that feels like medicine instead is utterly watchable and builds to something stunning. Even as you may know where it’s going, Campion is prepared to pull the rug out from under you.

The Power of the Dog packs a punch. Even beyond its across the board awards potential, it’s just compelling cinema. As a filmmaker told me yesterday, it’s cinema with a capital C. They’re right, too.

Also Available This Week

Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm

Casablanca (4K)

Dig

A Discovery of Witches: Season Three (TV)

Young Rock: The Complete Second Season (TV)

Criterion Corner

The Power of the Dog

From The Criterion Collection: “Jane Campion returns to the kind of mythic frontier landscape—pulsating with both freedom and menace—that she previously traversed in The Piano in order to plumb the masculine psyche in The Power of the Dog, set against the desolate plains of 1920s Montana and adapted by the filmmaker from Thomas Savage’s novel. After a sensitive widow (Kirsten Dunst) and her enigmatic, fiercely loving son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) move in with her gentle new husband (Jesse Plemons), a tense battle of wills plays out between them and his brutish brother (Benedict Cumberbatch), whose frightening volatility conceals a secret torment, and whose capacity for tenderness, once reawakened, may offer him redemption or spell his destruction. Campion, who won an Academy Award for her direction here, charts the repressed desire and psychic violence coursing among these characters with the mesmerizing control of a master at the height of her powers.”

Stay tuned for more next week…