January is the cold turkey sandwich of the film world. Although there are always exceptions, traditionally the inaugural month of the year is when movie studios unload the previous year’s leftovers onto audiences who spent the last two months gorging on awards-season fare.

Now, some people love a cold turkey sandwich—when I worked at The AV Club, my colleagues and I looked forward to the first theatrical release of every year with perverse excitement. (I still maintain that Escape Room was pretty good!)

But if leftovers just aren’t your thing, the dining room is always open in the world of repertory cinema and physical media. So pack away the holiday lights and get out your watchlists for this month’s Shelf Life recommendations.

Solomon King

On Blu-ray now from Deaf Crocodile through Vinegar Syndrome.

Vinegar Syndrome pulls off the miraculous so often that you have to be careful not to get complacent. “Oh, another lost film rediscovered, restored and delivered right to my doorstep? Yawn.” Solomon King is a good film with which to count one’s cinematic blessings: The latest product of VinSyn’s partnership with Deaf Crocodile Films began when Deaf Crocodile co-founder Dennis Bartok picked up the soundtrack LP for a movie called Solomon King in a record store. He loved the music, and so he looked for the movie, with no luck. That sparked an obsessive hunt that eventually led to co-director/​producer/​co-writer/​star Sal Watts’ widow Belinda Burton-Watts, with whose cooperation Deaf Crocodile was able to restore the film with new color grading and audio.

Burton-Watts has released a poetic statement on the restoration that reads, in part, “Much like Langston Hughes’ poem ‘Harlem’ where he asks, ‘What happens to a dream deferred?’, we will have an opportunity to see just that. I choose to believe that like a mustard seed, the dream grows and grows.”

Sal Watts was a fascinating man who financed Solomon King, his one and only feature, with the profits from his Mr. Sal’s Fashion clothing stores. (You can tell: any Black film from the ’70s is going to feature some cool outfits, but Solomon King goes above and beyond in this regard.) At the restoration’s world premiere at Fantastic Fest, audience giggled at the appropriate moments—most of the film’s cast were not professional actors, it can’t be helped—but also appreciated the indomitable spirit and ion for filmmaking that drove Watts to conceive, execute and most importantly finish this DIY labor of love.

VinSyn’s Justin LaLiberty notes in his review that Solomon King “has more in common with the films of the LA Rebellion or something decidedly idiosyncratic like Top of the Heap rather than mainstream Blaxploitation offerings.” But Solomon King does have a few elements common in Blaxploitation fare: it’s a fabulous time capsule of Black life in Oakland, CA circa 1973, for one; two, the soul-funk soundtrack is incredible; and three, Watts’ character sticks it to the Man in very satisfying ways.

The Lukas Moodysson Collection

Blu-ray collection available January 31 from Arrow Video.

All of which is to say that sometimes Moodysson’s films are sensitive and true to life, and at other times they’re challenging and deliberately off-putting. Take the teen lesbian romance Show Me Love (pictured above), also known as Fucking Åmål. (Åmål is the name of the town, not the girl, as I thought until embarrassingly recently.) “I want a glass of chocolate milk to match the warm fuzzies in my heart,” Zara writes of this charming coming-of-age film. Compare that to reviews of Moodysson’s 2004 DV provocation A Hole in My Heart, which Shookone calls “an ugly social burp. Irritating provocation lust in amateurish fragments,” and Lilya 4-ever, of which Eli Hayes wrote, “First things first, don’t watch this movie. Don’t watch it if you want to come out of it feeling anything remotely close to euphoric, don’t watch it for purposes of entertainment and don’t watch it in order to escape.”

The man has range, in other words, and the full breadth of what Lukas Moodysson can do will be collected in one place—Arrow Video—at the end of January.

The Conformist

4K restoration in theaters at Film Forum January 6–19 from Kino Lorber.

As for what the restoration actually looks like: yes, it’s dingier than the 2014 Raro Video Blu-ray—my original point of reference for the film. But it also has more detail, which makes me wonder if maybe there is something to this “blown out ’90s DVD” hypothesis. Regardless, my favorite thing about the look of The Conformist is the exquisite work Bertolucci and Storaro did with shadows, so I’m going to remain agnostic on the color question. Regardless of how you watch it, The Conformist’s classic status isn’t in question: 74 percent of Letterboxd who have seen it rated the film four stars or higher.

The Doom Generation

4K restoration in theaters at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival from Strand Releasing.

Gregg Araki’s totally straight, not even a little bit homoerotic 1995 ode to how sexy it is when meathead rocker dudes wear earrings is tragically hard to find. It’s not streaming on any of the major services (not even Tubi!), and the out-of-print 2012 DVD is currently fetching some impressive prices online. And that’s probably fine with Araki, as he’s about to re-introduce his foul-mouthed, misanthropic, meth-smoking baby to the world.

The Doom Generation only screened in its unedited form once, at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival. It was subsequently cut at the distributor’s request, and then chopped down further for what Araki calls “a ridiculous R-rated version made without my approval for Blockbuster Video, which has over twenty minutes chopped out and makes no sense.” (Throughout the ’90s, Blockbuster acted as a de facto censorship board by refusing to carry NC-17-rated movies, resulting in studio hack jobs like the one Araki’s referring to here.) Araki also makes reference to the “climactic reel” of the movie being problematic to the suits, which—if you’ve seen it—absolutely tracks.

Sundance 2023 gives Araki the opportunity to correct this error with the debut of a new 4K restoration from Strand Releasing, which will present The Doom Generation completely uncut. This most ’90s of ’90s indie movies is built on a foundation of quippy dialogue, convenience-store snacks, consumer satire that seemed edgy at the time, and intermittent ultraviolence, with a soundtrack featuring Slowdive, Lush, Medicine, Belly and a bunch of other bands I hadn’t thought about in a while. Letterboxd reviews for the film keep up the air of snarky detachment: “He probably threw up while typing ‘a heterosexual film by Gregg Araki’ into the script,” St. 10 quips, while Aaron says, “Gregg Araki movies are my dream blunt rotation.”

The Killer Elite

On Blu-ray now from Imprint Films.

The cast is great, first of all: Robert Duvall co-stars as Caan’s best friend-turned-arch enemy, and Burt Young and Bo Hopkins both turn in colorful performances as a Mob-adjacent mechanic and a psychopathic gun nut, respectively. The film is set in Dirty Harry’s San Francisco, a cynical hodgepodge of hippie chicks in houseboats, ethnically imprecise Asian gangsters and gritty tough guys on the thin, bell-bottomed line between order and chaos. Electricwizardx (appropriate name, to be honest) sums up the film’s appeal nicely:

“This is a rare (probably the only) face-value film from Peckinpah. There’s no deeper meanings or subtext on display, it’s just pure trash spectacle approaching Eurocrime and exploitation turf … With all the double crossing, ninjas, guns, explosions, breasts, blades, taxi bombs, jokes and lack of Robert Duvall wrapped in a plot so dense with convolution it essentially makes no sense whatsoever, I can understand why this gets shit on. But there’s something about a Peckinpah-directed action sequence involving James Caan, Burt Young and an unhinged Bo Hopkins gunning down waves of sword wielding ninjas on a boat that speaks to me on a primal level.”

Big Time Gambling Boss

On Blu-ray now from Radiance Films.

Big Time Gambling Boss is reportedly a favorite of Paul Schrader’s, which makes sense given the novelistic detail in its screenplay and pressure-cooker performances from its leads. In his five-star review, Nathan Stuart writes that “the cast is nothing short of spectacular, with the legendary Koji Tsuruta delivering one of his absolute best performances… Wakayama too, is at his peak, he commands the screen with a great power and sense of presence.”

Bollywood Horror Collection

Blu-ray collection available for pre-order now from Mondo Macabro.

Now that RRR has kicked open the door, it’s time for the Ramsay brothers to barge through. The eight of the Ramsay brothers filmmaking dynasty—it’s technically seven brothers and their dad, but we’ll stick with “brothers” for clarity—are big names in India. Specifically, they’re the first family of Bollywood horror, responsible for establishing a foothold for the genre in Hindi cinema with their charmingly sleazy output in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.

But, as was once the case with S.S. Rajamouli (no more!), their fame doesn’t translate to North America. Here, only the most adventurous genre fans are familiar with their work. Mondo Macabro, a label whose stated mission is to expose Westerners to “the wild side of world cinema”, is here to correct this imbalance. The Bollywood Horror Collection consists of region-free Blu-rays of six of the Ramsays’ greatest hits, none of which have been logged by more than 500 .

Like most Indian films, Ramsay brothers movies give you the full buffet, incorporating music, romance and comedy along with supernatural fright. The creaking doors and claps of thunder are straight out of a Hallowe’en sound-effects CD, and the scores shamelessly rip off the themes from famous Western horror movies. (Their 1984 genre-defining hit Purana Mandir goes even farther, making extensive use of camera tricks lifted from The Evil Dead.) The plots are byzantine, the comedy is broad and the monsters themselves are just familiar enough to make uncanny additions to the thick gravy of retro nonsense smothering the screen. They’re glorious.

“Never let it be said that you don’t get your money’s worth with Indian horror cinema,” ElTopo68 says of the Ramsays’ take on Dracula, Bandh Darwaza. Kyle Faulkner calls the supernatural revenge tale Veerana (pictured above) “utter delirium from start to finish… I had to watch it on my feet, I was so over-stimulated.” The 2006 ghost story Aatma is the newest film on the list, and also the least seen, with only 31 Letterboxd diary entries and two reviews. Sarah says that “it’s silly and over the top and there’s random Bollywood dances for no reason—what more could you ask for?”, which kind of makes further commentary on the film irrelevant.