Every Tuesday, discriminating viewers are confronted with a flurry of choices: new releases on disc and on demand, vintage and original movies on any number of streaming platforms, catalogue titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This twice-monthly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you\u2019re watching.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n PICK OF THE WEEK: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Mean Streets<\/em><\/strong><\/a>: <\/strong>New to the Criterion Collection in a grimy yet vibrant 4K edition, Martin Scorsese\u2019s 1974 breakthrough picture was something of a spiritual sequel to his first feature Who\u2019s That Knocking At My Door<\/em>, featuring the same leading man (Harvey Keitel) and many of the same themes. It\u2019s a vivid, keenly observed portrait of street hoods and would-be businessmen\u2014the kind of workaday \u201cgrinders\u201d that were mostly left out of The Godfather<\/em>. Scorsese pops up not only in a cameo (as a hitman), but in voice-over, his interior monologue battling Keitel\u2019s own, in a kind of dialectic battle for the young man\u2019s soul. And while Keitel is the protagonist, the picture belongs to Robert De Niro, who makes his first appearance blowing up a mailbox (seemingly for the sheer fuck of it) and turns in an electrifying performance as an untetherable force of reckless nature. Oh, and it finds the filmmaker making perhaps his savviest use of popular music (no small statement, that), from the evocative home-movie accompaniment of \u201cBe My Baby\u201d to the goofy nonsense lyrics of \u201cRubber Biscuit\u201d paralleling the actions of a drunken Keitel to the clean, crisp \u201cPlease Mr. Postman\u201d incongruently scoring the ugly, messy pool hall brawl to, finally, De Niro shimmying and shaking to \u201cMickey\u2019s Monkey,\u201d a dead man dancing. (Includes selected-scene audio commentary, new and archival interviews, video essay, archival featurette, Mardik: Baghdad to Hollywood<\/em> documentary excerpt, and trailer.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n ON NETFLIX: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Minari<\/em><\/strong><\/a>:<\/strong> Lee Isaac Chung\u2019s Academy Award winner (and Best Picture nominee) concerns a Korean-American family\u2019s immigration to the greener pastures (literally) of Arkansas, but this is no simple-minded fable of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. Their story is stressful from frame one, with the marriage between parents Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica (Yeri Han) already in distress; \u201cThat land is your dream?\u201d she asks, incredulously, and his can-do spirit and gee-whiz enthusiasm begins to melt away in the reality of what they\u2019ve taken on. Minari<\/em> is modest on is surface, moving along in a series of comic vignettes and mild arguments. But there are tempest and torrents just underneath, as the picture slowly, expertly works its way to a point of simultaneous devastation and satisfaction<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ON AMAZON PRIME:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Lighthouse<\/em><\/strong><\/a>: <\/strong>The relentless blasting of the foghorn fills the soundtrack of Robert Eggers\u2019s follow-up to The Witch<\/em> like a warning bell; it\u2019s the sound of the oncoming and inevitable madness of its protagonists. Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson star as a pair of late-19th century lighthouse keepers losing their bearings on their remote island outpost as a storm rails unceasingly, and both actors shine, though Dafoe, sporting his customary wild-eyed intensity, walks away with the picture thanks to his magnificently grizzled, eccentric performance. Eggers pitches it like a fever dream, but has a way of composing his images for maximum comic effect (some of it plays like straight-up slapstick), and takes this strange story into some, to put it mildly, unexpected territory. It\u2019s a wild piece of work<\/a>, a twisted sea shanty, warbled by a lunatic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ON 4K \/ DVD \/ VOD:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Oppenheimer<\/em><\/strong><\/a>: <\/strong>If The Dark Knight <\/em>was Christopher Nolan doing a Michael Mann movie, this is his riff on \u201890s Oliver Stone\u2014 like JFK<\/em> or Nixon<\/em>, it\u2019s a big, bombastic historical epic, with the director orchestrating an all-star cast and a striking bag of cinematic tricks<\/a>. Cillian Murphy turns in an admirably knotty performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, and Nolan thankfully eschews the cradle-to-grave biopic structure; instead, he zeroes in on a handful of key moments throughout his life, and moves between them freely and often ingeniously to create a complex portrait of a complicated man. It feels less like a biopic than an exploration of big ideas and unfathomable processes. (Includes featurettes.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n