Joey’s Home Movies For the Week of January 29th – A Second Course of ‘Thanksgiving’ in the Comfort of Your Own Home!

Welcome back to my Home Movies! This week, the incredibly fun holiday horror film Thanksgiving comes home for seconds. Joining that fright flick today are a pair of strong new (and fairly recent) Criterion Collection releases. What else is hitting shelves? Read on to find out…

Joey’s Top Pick

Thanksgiving

I’d hoped for Eli Roth to eventually make Thanksgiving. I’d even hoped for it to be fun. I never expected it to be really good as well, but here it is, in all its bloody glory. What an enjoyable movie, utilizing everything Roth does well as a filmmaker. Kudos to him, and bring on seconds! My review here includes the following:

It’s no secret that I’ve wanted to see Thanksgiving as a feature film ever since I saw Eli Roth‘s fake trailer during Grindhouse. It just tickled my fancy so much, a slasher movie set during Turkey Day. Well, it’s now real, it’s here, and folks…it’s bloody glorious. Roth has made this horror flick for everyone who loves those good old fashioned slashers. It’s a hoot.

Thanksgiving deserves to play on Black Friday at midnight every year, going forward. It’s a future cult classic, for sure, but it’s also just a good horror movie. There’s plenty of homage to the trailer, but the film definitely exists of its own accord. It’s a throwback type of slasher, but considering how few we get at all these days, that’s still very much a compliment.

Also Available This Week

Eileen

Giant Beasts of Ars: Complete Collection (TV)

Monk: The Complete Third Season (TV)

Silent Night

Criterion Corner

Mudbound

From The Criterion Collection: “In the Mississippi Delta of the 1940s, two farming families—one of white landholders, one of Black tenant farmers—are bound by the unforgiving soil they share as they struggle to survive amid the upheavals of World War II and the poisonous hatred of the Jim Crow South. Each family sends a young man off to battle; when they return home, scarred, and find a common bond, the community is ripped apart. Writer-director Dee Rees, with cowriter Virgil Williams, crafts a uniquely American tragedy, imbuing bitter historical realities with a timeless weight. Featuring bone-deep performances from Rees’s ensemble cast—including Carey Mulligan, Mary J. Blige, Jason Mitchell, Rob Morgan, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Clarke, and Jonathan Banks—and backed by Rachel Morrison’s darkly burnished cinematography, Mudbound is a searing humanist study of inheritance, based upon Hillary Jordan’s novel.”

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Trainspotting

From The Criterion Collection: “A jolt of adrenaline shot straight to the heart of 1990s British cinema, this darkly funny adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel was a major breakthrough for director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald, and screenwriter John Hodge. With live-wire energy and stylistic verve, Trainspotting bounces across the life and times of Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), a Scottish heroin addict who, along with his misfit mates, gets high, gets in trouble, gets clean, and gets high again, all in a bid to outrun the banality of modern existence. Kinetically cut to an iconic soundtrack of techno, rock, and Brit-pop, this indie phenomenon chooses life in all its ugly, beautiful, terrifying exhilaration.”

Stay tuned for more next week…