Shelf Life

Exploding Heads and Expansive Space: on shelves and screens this month

Katie Rife
Mind your head with the 4K Blu-ray of Scanners (1981).
Mind your head with the 4K Blu-ray of Scanners (1981).

In our latest edition of Shelf Life, a Todd Field standout gets its Blu-ray debut, ’60s SoCal is laced with existential dread, a Cronenberg double feature hits 4K, Godzilla does battle and we go to the stars.

Assembling the line-up for this column both is and isn’t difficult. Major rediscoveries happen what feels like every month—for March 2025, it’s Play It as It Lays, which has never been put out on home video and is gearing up for a theatrical release that’s probably going to be bigger than its microscopic initial run. That’s a gimme. In the Bedroom, a movie I hadn’t seen before but many of my colleagues cherish, was another obvious pick.

Beyond the newsworthy titles, you start getting into personal taste. Although I take pride in having broad tastes, I came up as a critic on the genre-festival circuit, and my heart will always beat for psychotronic cinema. That’s why it’s so nice when a respected company like Janus Films/The Criterion Collection brings those worlds together with something such as Godzilla vs. Biollante, a film I love and am excited a lot more people are about to see.

They’re embodying what I’ve always believed to be true: if you really love movies, you love all genres—maybe not equally (that’s a lot to ask) but with an open heart and an appreciation for the art form as a whole.

Play It as It Lays

4K restoration playing now at Film Forum

Play It as It Lays

Play It as It Lays 1972

Directed by Frank Perry

Written by John Gregory Dunne

A legendary adaptation with a screenplay co-written by the internet’s favorite essayist, Play It as It Lays has been at the top of a lot of watchlists for a while now. Despite a major distributor and a thrilling list of top-of-the-line talent—there’s Joan Didion, of course, along with stars Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins—the film has never been released on home video, screening only occasionally on 35mm. So it’s a big deal that Frank Perry’s 1972 existential crack-up is returning to theaters, beginning with a run at NYC’s Film Forum this month.

The key here is that Film Forum is playing a new 4K restoration of the film, opening the door for a theatrical expansion and an actual decent-looking Blu-ray. (Your best bet at the moment is a grainy, interlaced rip on the Internet Archive.) Why has Play It as It Lays remained so obscure? There are your typical red-tape reasons (I’m not sure about the details, so we’ll leave it at that), but I’d also posit that this piercingly intelligent and “criminally underrated” film is still a little dangerous more than 50 years after its release.

Didion’s script is razor-sharp, full of the “dagger-like sentences” DNM praises in their review, adding that “their understated cruelty functions as everyday poetry.” Perry, best known for directing Mommie Dearest, maintains the novel’s shattered quality with detached voiceover and a fractured timeline. The general vibe is sunny and suicidal, Lana Del Rey-style: “That burned-out ’60s SoCal vibe that Tarantino was trying to recreate in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood permeates every frame here and it’s the real deal,” Sonny Jim writes. Perkins, himself a closeted queer person, gives a sensitive performance as a gay movie producer that Isaac, in his beautiful review, says, “speaks to me like nothing else”.

With Hollywood finally (kinda? maybe?) willing to talk about its male power structures and cruel dismissiveness of “older” women (Weld, who plays an actress discarded by the industry, was 29 when this film was released), maybe this film’s time has finally come.

In the Bedroom

On Blu-ray March 25 from Imprint Films

In the Bedroom

In the Bedroom 2001

Directed by Todd Field

Written by …

Another big event in physical media is Todd Field’s In the Bedroom, making its worldwide Blu-ray debut this month through Australia’s Imprint Films. Field’s pictures are detailed and observant, dropping the viewer into worlds that feel like they existed long before the story started and will continue after the credits roll. They’re pointed and provocative, and he doesn’t get to make them all that often, even though they tend to accumulate lots of award nominations. Back in 2013, T_pitty said that In the Bedroom “seem[ed] destined to be underrated, overlooked, and forgotten”—a prediction that turned out to be correct, given that it’s taken 24 years for the movie to come to Blu-ray.

TÁR was a hit among the Letterboxd set, and a wave of reviews from checking out the rest of Field’s filmography came in the wake of that film’s success. But In the Bedroom came out 21 years before TÁR, and isn’t as memeable. It’s got its moments, don’t get me wrong: Letterboxd reviews joke about Supercuts (hi, Mitchell) and Disney World Fastes, but my favorite moment of devastating irony comes when Tom Wilkinson returns to a bitter argument with six king-sized candy bars in his hand. (You’ll see.) The title is weird and kind of misleading (something to do with lobsters?), but that’s okay, because it’s difficult to discuss this film in much detail anyway.

I’m not going to spoil In the Bedroom for you. I managed to go in knowing very little about the story, and this was definitely the ideal way to experience it. Instead, I’ll highlight praise from Letterboxd for the sublime performances of Marisa Tomei and Sissy Spacek, as well as reviews comparing Field to Stanley Kubrick, Lee Chang-dong, Yasujirō Ozu and Ingmar Bergman—all about the nicest compliments you could give to a filmmaker.

Godzilla vs. Biollante

On Blu-ray and 4K UHD March 18 from The Criterion Collection

Godzilla vs. Biollante

Godzilla vs. Biollante 1989

ゴジラvsビオランテ

Directed by Kazuki Ōmori

Written by Kazuki Ōmori

Godzilla is a franchise whose critical re-evaluation is still in progress, at least in America. (I went to a 75th-anniversary screening of the original in Tokyo last fall, and the mood there was very reverential.) Even open-minded cinephiles can be oddly dismissive of Godzilla—a prejudice I attribute to the bad dubs of VHS past, with a little antipathy towards popcorn franchises in general. But if you give them a chance, Godzilla movies are unusually rich in sociopolitical subtext, fun-house mirrors of late twentieth-century history with world-class special effects and super cool kaiju to satisfy the monster kid within. I could talk about them all day.

The Criterion Collection’s Showa-era set was a turning point for Godzilla’s reputation in the West, and now that project expands into the Heisei era of the ’80s and ’90s with Godzilla vs. Biollante. Biollante is an interesting case: Difficult to find in North America until Criterion’s new 4K/Blu-ray, it blends “the dark, almost horrific tone” of the franchise’s more somber entries “while taking the Heisei era into a new, delightfully weird direction,” as Luke Williams writes in one of several reviews.

Despite its relative unavailability, however, it’s a fan favorite that has become a consensus pick for one of the series’ best. (I placed it highly in my own Godzilla ranking.) The effects are typically incredible, and the cinematography unusually good. You do have to get past the whole “Saradian terrorist” subplot—there’s that sociopolitical context—that’s shoehorned into this mad-scientist tale, but fans love this “unique and unorthodox” film despite (or perhaps because of) its weirdness: As Chrissy-Jade writes, “It’s just so utterly unhinged in the most beautiful and charming way.”

And Biollante. Our genetically engineered gigantic femme rose-monster queen! One thing I love about the current Godzilla fandom is its embrace of the feminine, and Biollante is one of the series’ few canonically female characters. “Her first form is so awe-inspiring,” Cameron writes. “It’s one of those moments you can really feel the magic and mythology behind these giant monsters.” Lewis is awestruck by the artistry: “How can anyone look at Biollante’s practical work and not be absolutely amazed this thing exists, let alone even functions properly?” he writes. “I can’t respect the filmmakers enough for pulling this off.”

The Criterion release is pretty awesome as well, featuring a commentary track from Eros + Massacre podcast host Samm Dieghan.

The Brood / Scanners

On 4K UHD/Blu-ray March 31 from Second Sight Films

The Brood

The Brood 1979

Directed by David Cronenberg

Written by David Cronenberg

Scanners

Scanners 1981

Directed by David Cronenberg

Written by David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg has had quite the redemption arc. Once declared a degenerate whose films were a waste of taxpayer money, Cronenberg has become a revered elder statesman not only of Canadian cinema but of art-house movies generally. To wit: his latest, The Shrouds, premiered in competition at Cannes, while earlier features The Brood (pictured above) and Scanners were distributed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. These early films are schlocky, for sure. But they’re undoubtedly the work of the same director, obsessed with perverted intimacy and the revolutionary transhumanism Josh identifies in his Scanners review.

Revisiting some of Cronenberg’s emerging work (there’s also Shivers, and Rabid, my favorite), it was interesting to see each of these modes playing out separately as Cronenberg found his feet as a storyteller. Samantha Eggar’s sacs in The Brood are iconic, of course, and everyone re the exploding head effect that Dick Smith cooked up for Scanners (sometimes at the expense of everything else in the movie). And both films have Letterboxd who call  them Cronenberg’s first great one, while there are other who call them trash.

I hadn’t seen either of these features since the DVD era, and what struck me this time around was how sophisticated the themes were underneath the low-budget shock value. It was also an interesting insight into Cronenberg the wife guy (my favorite thing about him, evident in later works like Crash and The Shrouds), given that The Brood is, as Jamelle Bouie puts it, “very obviously the film of a guy who just experienced a bitter and contentious divorce.” Previously by Janus Films/Criterion, they’re now becoming objets d’shelf art through deluxe limited editions from the UK’s Second Sight label.

Signals: A Space Adventure / In the Dust of the Stars

Available on Blu-ray from Deaf Crocodile

Signals: A Space Adventure

Signals: A Space Adventure 1970

Signale - Ein Weltraumabenteuer

Directed by Gottfried Kolditz

Written by Claus-Ulrich Wiesner

In the Dust of the Stars

In the Dust of the Stars 1976

Im Staub der Sterne

Directed by Gottfried Kolditz

Written by Gottfried Kolditz

Star Trek fans often champion the franchise’s progressive values, pointing towards its inclusive casting and utopian vision of the future. Which is great and all, but it’s nothing compared with this East German sci-fi double feature recently released on Blu-ray by the Eastern Bloc ephemera enthusiasts at Deaf Crocodile. The Stalinist GDR was no utopia, of course. But one of the great pleasures of period sci-fi is seeing other eras’ and cultures’ interpretations of the future. And the GDR’s Gottfried Kolditz had an especially groovy one.

Not that we in America would know anything about that.) Stars is also the looser and kookier of the two films—as a Zardoz apologist, it was my favorite.

I wouldn’t call either film a masterpiece, to be clear. But their aesthetics are consistently, jaw-droppingly on point: think retro-futuristic conversation pits and psychedelic pythons slithering through halls of mirrors and bad guys who dress like futuristic leather daddies. Mr. Balihai captures the whole vibe perfectly, calling In the Dust of the Stars “an utterly improbable viewing experience, filled with a random parade of enchantingly retro-futuristic WTF Moments, set to an eccentric soundtrack of eight-bit synth noises, wah-wah pedal funk, and ethereal Teutonic folk singing.” Far out!

‘Shelf Life’ is a monthly column and newsletter by Katie Rife, highlighting restorations, repertory showings and re-releases in theaters and on disc.

Katie Rife

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