Joey’s Home Movies For the Week of September 29th – ‘The Life of Chuck’ is Here to Warm Your Heart

Welcome back to my Home Movies! Today, we have one of the absolute best films of the year hitting shelves in Mike Flanagan‘s The Life of Chuck. I’ve been on the record calling this movie an absolute masterpiece, so it’s no surprise that it’s my top pick. This week also features several 4K re-releases, as well as a number of Wes Anderson-centric Criterion Collection debuts. What else do we have on tap? Read on to find out…

Joey’s Top Pick

The Life of Chuck

What Mike Flanagan has achieved with The Life of Chuck is nothing short of a miracle. I’ve championed this film for much of the year, going back to my preview piece here, so it’s not new to hear or see me rave about the flick. I also spoke to Flanagan here about the movie, as well as cast members Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan here, David Dastmalchian here, Matthew Lillard here, and Kate Siegel here. Plus, we have my absolute four star rave review here, where I said the following:

A movie like The Life of Chuck doesn’t come along very often. Films can do all sorts of things, but it’s the rare work that can be a balm for your soul. Mike Flanagan, working off of the Stephen King source material, has achieved this feat. In the tradition of Frank Darabont, Flanagan has taken King’s non-horror output and made an instant classic. A double feature between this and The Shawshank Redemption would not be out of place. Not only is this film one of the best I’ve seen in some time, easily the best of 2025 so far, it’s potentially an all-timer. The flick just packs that much of a wallop.

The Life of Chuck absolutely bowled me over. Taking an incredibly simple message and premise, one we all too often forget, and expanding it out to cosmic and universal proportions is stunning to witness. Flanagan engages just about every emotion one can have while engaging with cinema. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this is one of the most fulfilling films to come along in a great long while. It’s the type of movie that may actually save lives, that’s how important it could become to viewers that let it in.

Also Available This Week

Airport (4K)

American Pie (4K)

Dogtooth (4K)

The Good, the Bad, the Weird (4K)

My Life as a Zucchini (Blu-ray)

A Nightmare on Elm Street Collection (4K)

Pelle the Conqueror (Blu-ray)

Criterion Corner

The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years

From The Criterion Collection: “Wes Anderson’s first ten features represent twenty-five years of irrepressible creativity, an ongoing ode to outsiders and quixotic dreamers, and a world unto themselves, graced with a mischievous wit and a current of existential melancholy that flows through every captivating frame. This momentous twenty-disc collector’s set includes new 4K masters of the films, over twenty-five hours of special features, and ten illustrated books, presented in a deluxe clothbound edition.”

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The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun

From The Criterion Collection: “A salute to writers and expatriates, Wes Anderson’s tenth feature takes the form of the final edition of The French Dispatch, a weekly magazine chronicling life in the city of Ennui-sur-Blasé, France (for American readers). Made up of three featured stories—a profile of a tortured artist, a report on student revolutionaries, and a recounting of a tabloid kidnapping with a gourmet twist—plus an obituary and a travelogue, this dazzlingly constructed anthology mixes everything from theatrical interludes to tableaux vivants to comic-book animation. The superb ensemble cast includes Adrien Brody, Timothée Chalamet, Benicio del Toro, Frances McDormand, Léa Seydoux, Owen Wilson, and Jeffrey Wright.”

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Isle of Dogs

From The Criterion Collection: “Wes Anderson conjures a dystopian future Japan in magical stop-motion. After a canine virus outbreak, the dogs of Megasaki are exiled to a vast island garbage dump. When Atari (the daring twelve-year-old ward of the city’s mayor) sets out to rescue his beloved Spots, he meets a pack of mongrel friends and is launched on an epic quest. Innovatively blending English and Japanese dialogue through a cross-cultural voice cast that includes Bryan Cranston, Greta Gerwig, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, Yoko Ono, and Koyu Rankin, this fable of loyalty and disobedience combines Anderson’s signature themes—friendship among outsiders, the adventure of rebellion—with a delight in the boundless possibilities of animated storytelling.”

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Misericordia

From The Criterion Collection: “A web of secrets, suspicions, and desires ensnares the inhabitants of an insular French village in this tantalizing comic thriller from ever-audacious auteur Alain Guiraudie. Returning to his rural hometown to attend the funeral of the mentor he loved, enigmatic, sexually fluid drifter Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) stirs up long-simmering feelings of lust, jealousy, and rage among those he left behind—including the dead man’s widow (Catherine Frot), her hot-tempered son (Jean-Baptiste Durand), and a curiously protective local priest (Jacques Develay) with whom Jérémie forges a twisted bond. Amid the evocatively earthy milieu, Guiraudie constructs a slippery, continuously surprising moral universe where love and hatred, eroticism and violence, spiritual grace and mortal sin, are intimately entwined.”

Stay tuned for more next week…