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 Bringing Out the Dead<\/em><\/strong><\/a>: <\/strong>Seldom discussed among his finest pictures, weirdly dismissed by audiences (and most critics) at the time of its 1999 release, and previously only available for home viewing on an old and crummy DVD, this haunting and powerful drama<\/a> reteams director Martin Scorsese with Taxi Driver<\/em> writer Paul Schrader for a similar story of a lonely man (this time, an ambulance driver) cruising through the New York night. It vibrates with a punk edge, its kinetic 911 calls shot and edited at a fever pitch, but its real turbulence is internal; Nicolas Cage\u2019s Frank is a man on the edge, on the verge of either falling into the abyss or pulling himself back. He\u2019s a more thoughtful character than Travis Bickle, and one capable of a different outcome\u2014where, instead of lashing out in vengeful violence, he reaches deep into his soul and tries to find a peace within. Robert Richardson\u2019s starkly contrasting jet-blank and hot-white lighting schemes have rarely been so thematically appropriate, and Paramount\u2019s crisp 4K transfer do them justice. And, bonus, you can also read it as Scorsese\u2019s version<\/a> of A Christmas Carol<\/em>. (Includes interviews and featurettes.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n ON NETFLIX:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n His Three Daughters<\/em><\/strong><\/a>: <\/em>Three adult sisters assemble as their father, whose cancer is \u201cvery advanced,\u201d is going into hospice care in this staggeringly good comedy\/drama from writer\/director Azazel Jacobs. The personality types are established early: the bossy one (Carrie Coon), the ne\u2019er do well (Natasha Lyonne), and the peacemaker between them (Elizabeth Olsen), though one of the small miracles of Jacobs\u2019s screenplay is how keenly it understands that we all end up merely filling the roles we\u2019ve been placed in, no matter the accuracy. In fact, the intelligent and insightful writing makes it clear that they\u2019re all flawed and complicated and petty and fascinating, caught at a moment in their lives of heightened emotion and elevated vulnerability, where everything is just raw, and so the wounds are even deeper than they initially appeared. Every performance is a winner, and the closing passages are just gut-wrenching. <\/p>\n\n\n\n ON APPLE TV+:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Wolfs<\/em><\/strong><\/a>:<\/strong> A gun to my head, I couldn\u2019t explain why, in as many months, Apple Original Films has given barely-there theatrical releases to two different caper comedies<\/a> featuring stars of the Ocean\u2019s<\/em> franchise\u2014movies that would have made a mint at the box office a few short years ago. But I\u2019m no fancy CEO, I\u2019m merely a critic, and I\u2019m here to tell you that this George Clooney\/Brad Pitt vehicle (basically Michael Clayton x 2 \u00f7 Ocean\u2019s<\/em>) is the kind of good-if-not-great, solid B+ middlebrow star vehicle that we used to get a lot more of, and we were better for it. As a pair of fixers thrown together against their better judgment, they get a good dynamic going, with Clooney as the take-charge straight man and Pitt wryly deflating him at every turn. Writer\/director Jon Watts tries to pivot into serious crime drama towards the end, which doesn\u2019t quite land; this story, and these guys, work best in light comedy mode. At its best, Wolfs<\/em> is a slightly meta pleasure, allowing us to view both its characters and its actors as a pair of old pros, just doing what they do. (Streaming Friday.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n