DVD/Blu-ray Release Calendar: August 2019

▣ Amazing Grace (1972) Trailers

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In January 1972, Aretha Franklin performed over two days with a gospel choir at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Southern California's Watts neighborhood, and the resulting live album culled from those sessions became a massive hit. Fortunately, director Sydney Pollack was also on hand to film the performances; unfortunately, technical snafus meant that the resulting footage was completely unusable. But recent developments in digital technology finally enabled the film to be salvaged, and it was hailed as an all-time great concert documentary when it was finally released late last year.

▣ Plus One Trailers

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An audience award winner at this year's Tribeca, Plus One is a rom-com from a pair of first-time feature directors, Andrew Rhymer and Jeff Chan. Jack Quaid (The Hunger Games) and Maya Erskine (PEN15) star as a pair of single college friends who agree to spend a busy summer of weddings as each other's dates. Critics mostly felt that the film was able to overcome its formulaic nature with warmth and winning performances, with critics singling out Erskine as a breakout star.

▣ Pokemon Detective Pikachu Trailers

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No, the world still doesn't have a good videogame movie. But you can do far worse in the genre than this first-ever live-action adaptation of the Pokémon franchise (and, specifically, the Detective Pikachu adventure game spinoff). Director Rob Letterman's (Goosebumps) film stars Justice Smith as a young man investigating the disappearance of his father with the help of his father's former partner: Detective Pikachu (voiced by Ryan Reynolds). Pokémon fans will probably find enough here to sustain interest; others likely won't.

▣ The Souvenir Trailers

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At the time of its release (following a series of ecstatic reviews that began with its world premiere at Sundance early this year, where it was the unanimous winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema competition), The Souvenir was 2019's highest-scoring film, though it has since dropped all the way to #2 behind an even better Cannes hit. British writer-director Joanna Hogg (Unrelated, Archipelago, Exhibition) pulls from her own life experiences to tell the story of Julie (newcomer Honor Swinton-Byrne, delivering what could be a star-making performance), a well-off but inexperienced cinema student (and Hogg surrogate) who falls for the troubled Anthony (Tom Burke) in the 1980s. It's her first real love, and Julie finds herself giving too much of her time and (her parents') money to Anthony, to the exclusion of her friends and her budding career as a filmmaker. Swinton-Byrne's real-life mother, Tilda Swinton, plays her mother in the film, and Richard Ayoade also makes an appearance. A sequel is already in production.

▣ Avengers: Endgame Trailers

The most recent entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn't just another box office hit; it is now the highest-grossing film in history, breaking a nearly 10-year-old record set by Avatar. A direct sequel to last year's Avengers: Infinity War that closes out Phase 3 of the MCU, Endgame returns the Russo brothers as directors and virtually the entire cast of the prior film, joined by several returning Marvel stars who did not appear in Infinity War. The latter group includes Frank Grillo's Crossbones and Tessa Thompson's Valkyrie, plus Jeremy Renner, whose Clint Barton adopts a new superhero identity: Ronin.

▣ Shadow Trailers

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It's a return to form for Chinese director Zhang Yimou after the disappointment of his English-language debut The Great Wall. In fact, he's made a wuxia film (based on the Chinese legend of the Three Kingdoms) to rival the heights of his earlier releases House of Flying Daggers and Hero thanks to some remarkable imagery and memorable fight sequences, including one featuring umbrellas made of razor-sharp daggers.

▣ The Biggest Little Farm Trailers

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In this documentary, John Chester and his wife Molly document their risky, seven-year endeavor of moving an hour outside of Los Angeles to start their own farm. The film benefits from John’s experience as a cinematographer, resulting in what Indiewire’s Eric Kohn describes as a “gorgeous and often devastating look at good intentions slamming into harsh practical challenges” and the “rare eco-friendly documentary that reaches beyond the celebratory formula to explore the application of its environmental message in detail.”

▣ Brightburn Trailers

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It seems like an intriguing idea on paper: take the Superman formula, but twist it, so that the young Clark Kent character grows up to be evil rather than a hero. But in the hands of director David Yarovesky, that original idea turns out to be poorly executed, resulting in a "super-silly" but "humorless" and "brutal" exercise in graphic violence. That said, a few critics did like Brightburn, which stars Jackson A. Dunn as the superantihero and Elizabeth Banks and David Denman as his adoptive parents.

▣ The Wild Pear Tree

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After winning the Palme d’Or in 2014 for Winter Sleep, Nuri Bilge Ceylan returned to Cannes in 2018 with another long, dense, dialogue-heavy film, which reached North American theaters in early 2019. Charting the return of Sinan, a recent college graduate with dreams of being a writer, to his hometown and his father’s debts, the film is another unique and powerful piece of cinema from the Turkish director.

▣ Apocalypse Now: Final Cut

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Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 masterpiece was always a very long film, but in 2001 it gained an extra 49 minutes when Coppola restored a number of scenes that had been excised from the original film, releasing the new cut as Apocalypse Now Redux. Now, on the film's 40th anniversary, the director appears to have had a change of heart once again, and has re-edited the film (which has also been remastered in 4K) into yet another version with a running time somewhere in between the first and second versions. This new edit—which critics praised at its Tribeca unveiling this spring—will receive a first-ever IMAX theatrical screening on August 15 and August 18 (it'll also play on conventional screens on those dates) before heading to home video on August 27 in a multi-disc set that will include all three versions of the film.

▣ Godzilla: King of the Monsters Trailers

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This May sequel to the 2014 version of Godzilla boasts a decent cast (Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Bradley Whitford, Sally Hawkins) but turned out to be inferior in every way to its predecessor. The third directorial effort from Michael Dougherty (Krampus) excels in its visuals but fails at its human elements and storytelling, according to critics.

▣ The Last Black Man in San Francisco Trailers

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Director Joe Talbot won a directing award (with his film also picking up a Special Jury Award) at Sundance for his feature directorial debut, an at times dreamlike tale of a gentrifying San Francisco that is inspired by the true story of Talbot’s friend and star, Jimmie Fails. A lifelong resident of the city, Fails’ main desire in life is to reclaim the Victorian house built by his grandfather. When he gets his chance, he struggles to reconnect to his family and the community that has disappeared around him.

▣ Rocketman Trailers

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Given the massive success of last year's Bohemian Rhapsody—which grossed over $900 million and received four Academy Awards—it's safe to say that you'll be seeing more rockstar biopics in the coming years. The most recent example is Rocketman, which stars Taron Egerton as Elton John in a look at the singer-songwriter’s breakthrough years. Directed by Dexter Fletcher (yes, the same man who took over as director of Bohemian Rhapsody after Bryan Singer was fired) from a script by Lee Hall (Billy Elliot), the long-gestating film also stars Jamie Bell as John's longtime collaborator Bernie Taupin, plus Bryce Dallas Howard, Richard Madden, Steven Mackintosh, and Gemma Jones. Made with input from John himself, Rocketman takes a less conventional, more fantasy-like approach than did Bohemian Rhapsody, and Egerton does all of his own singing.