I debated whether it was appropriate to mention in Shelf Life that I did my first audio commentary for a Blu-ray release a few months back. Is it gauche to promote yourself in your own column? I’m still not sure. But these things are done far enough in advance that I was able to put the thought aside for a while—until Cinématographe announced its release of Martha Coolidge’s The Joy of Sex the weekend before I wrote this.

In the end, I am resisting my Midwestern conditioning and plugging the disc, because I think it’s cool that it—along with Female Perversions, also new from Cinématographe—features an all-women lineup of contributors on the special features. I especially want to shout out my co-commentator Elizabeth Purchell, a physical-media pro who made the whole process way less intimidating for me. I hope you enjoy the results.

That’s not the only news on the repertory front this month, of course. A major theme in this edition’s Shelf Life picks—and a lovely one for Black History Month here in the US—is Black love, which takes multiple forms as it transcends boundaries of age, ability and time itself. We’ve also got some fresh titles from the documentary scene. But the one thing that all of the films below have in common is that they’re screening in repertory cinemas in February 2025. Show some love to your local art theater this Valentine’s Day. They deserve it.

The Annihilation of Fish

4K restoration opens at BAM Cinematheque February 14 from Kino Lorber and Milestone Films.

Compensation

4K restoration in theaters February 21 through Janus Films.

Compensation is built around a poem—specifically, a work of the same name by Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose modest eight-line composition appears on-screen at the beginning of Zeinabu irene Davis’s exceptional 1998 film. The movie does rhyme, reaching back and forth across decades of Black life to tell parallel love stories about two couples—one deaf, and one hearing—who are brought together by learning, and torn apart by illness. A spoiler? Maybe, but there’s more going on here than just that.

Compensation immerses us in two disparate, yet interconnected eras: The “Black Metropolis” of early twentieth-century Chicago, and that same community at the end of the ’90s, scarred but resilient amid the AIDS crisis. Each setting has its political and historical nuances: In 1999, Malaika (Michelle A. Banks) is ionate about both her Black and Deaf identities—“this is my world,” she signs furiously to Nico (John Earl Jelks) when he first begins to learn American Sign Language. Malindy (Banks), her counterpart in 1910, is aligned with W.E.B. DuBois and the “talented tenth,” and teaches Arthur (Jelks) how to read written English along with g in ASL. Motherblanca writes that it “flows in and out of time… There’s so much here to absorb: the Great Migration, disability, illness, and how love can be a sweet balm to the hardships we all face in life and it can also simply not be enough.”

Davis casts the same actors as both couples, and the echo gives Compensation a timeless quality that’s also reflected in the storytelling. Much of Compensation is shot in the style of a silent film, a choice that resonates with the film’s deaf theme as well as its historical one: “Davis opts to subtitle almost all of the dialogue, including the ASL sequences, a move that makes the viewing experience accessible” to both communities, as Dr. Ethan Lyon writes on Letterboxd. He adds, “Special attention must be given to the film’s thoughtful depiction of disabled romance, especially between an abled and a disabled person.”

Naked Acts

New 4K restoration in theaters and on Blu-ray from Milestone Films and Kino Lorber.

Cicely’s family dynamic similarly lends itself to examining Black women’s limited roles in popular culture, and how they have (and haven’t) evolved over the years. Cicely’s reluctance to perform nude in the “tasteful” art film being directed by her on-again, off-again lover reflects her discomfort both with this exploitation and her own body, prompting the “conversations about art, exploitation, and what it means to put Black women’s bodies on film” Asiyah cites. I was also struck by the film’s vulnerability around weight and weight loss: Cicely’s career is built on her losing a significant amount of weight, and while everyone around her unilaterally praises the “new her,” she still carries the shame of the old one. It all ties back to a quote from the movie referenced in a popular Letterboxd review: “Emotional work can leave you more exposed than taking your clothes off ever could.”

The films of Frederick Wiseman

4K restorations in theaters worldwide.

Dig! XX

In theaters February through Oscilloscope Laboratories.

Also stretching its legs in theaters this month is the twentieth-anniversary edition of Ondi Timoner’s legendary rock doc Dig!, dubbed Dig! XX for its expanded run time. Part update and part director’s cut, it adds 40 minutes of new footage to a film that Katie Walsh calls “the ne plus ultra of rock docs.” It specifically captures the choking final breaths of ’90s corporate alternative, as told through the story of two bands: self-proclaimed “world’s most well-adjusted band”. The Dandy Warhols, and the extremely poorly adjusted Brian Jonestown Massacre.

It’s really remarkable that the of the BJM are (mostly) still alive, given the number of cigarettes that are smoked, speed that is snorted, and liquor that is consumed on-screen in this film. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Timoner’s picture was embraced, then criticized for the way Timoner inserted herself into the narrative. She lived with these bands for years, riding in the van and crashing on the floors of single hotel rooms with eight people crammed inside. The self-aware pop-star attitude of the Dandys, combined with Newcombe’s sometimes delusional megalomania, make it so that “[it’s] hard not to feel like we’re still somewhat being sold a bill of goods, but the sheen of authenticity for the most part wins out,” as Lexi writes

Dig! XX adds a second narrator, BJM tambourine player and self-proclaimed “sidekick” Joel Gion, to correct a critique of the original: That allowing Dandy Warhols singer Courtney Taylor to tell the story of Newcombe’s one-sided beef with the Dandys showed bias. It’s a lot of narration, and while it might have been necessary to pacify the many clashing egos at work here, it’s unnecessary for the broader narrative. Each version of Dig! captures the yin and yang of artistic creation and self-destruction, both of which live inside all creative people to some extent. We don’t all get high and commune with the spirit of Charles Manson, however. Is that a good thing, or a bad one? Watch the doc and decide for yourself.