Ah, January: the month that sparkles with revived possibility and unspoiled options. Unless, of course, you're a Netflix subscriber. Groggy revellers browsing the streaming service in search of hangover entertainment from New Year's Day onward will have found the selection somewhat smaller: owing to licensing expirations and financial constraints, nearly 500 titles, ranging from Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps to Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, had vanished from the virtual shelves by 5 January.
The addition of 80-odd new titles, many of them disposable, doesn't exactly cushion the blow. Still, there are some welcome new arrivals, among them Andrea Arnold's stunning formalist revision of Wuthering Heights, Lee Daniels's lovably lurid potboiler The Paperboy and this week's clear streaming highlight: Ridley Scott's The Duellists. An inspired, literate Joseph Conrad adaptation, detailing the long-term feud between two French officers against a lustrous illustration of Napoleonic Europe, Scott's 1977 debut retains both its gung-ho dazzle and needly politics. Seek it out, lest it be nixed in the next Netflix purge.
If the Netflix news hasn't left them feeling sufficiently smug, stubborn DVD nostalgists have a fair amount to choose from this week, as a surfeit of smaller releases emerges after the Christmas blockbuster rush. Grandest among them is Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty (Artificial Eye, 15), a stuffed-to-the-gills Roman Valentine that was a fixture on year-end 10 best lists and is currently chasing Oscar glory. Frequently described in shorthand as a Fellini homage, it addresses a far larger wedge of Italian popular and political culture, at once skewering and celebrating the dolce vita in which our protagonist, impassive journalist Jep (a regal Toni Servillo) is embedded. Awash with gleaming imagery and sound, it's a bold, purposeful beast that left me entirely cold at Cannes last year; I found it no more seductive on a smaller screen.
Easier to love is Museum Hours (Soda, 12). An unassuming but deep-feeling entry in the underpopulated genre of the platonic romance, and a bracing twist on the Viennese postcard movie, Jem Cohen's film studies the deceptively casual friendship that blossoms between a rumpled museum guard and a Canadian visitor. It crumples the heart a little more subtly than Any Day Now (Peccadillo, 15), a custody drama centred on a gay couple (a pleasingly matched Garret Dillahunt and Alan Cumming) in early 80s California that is both affecting in its still pertinent advocacy of alternative families and sappily one-sided in its dramatic development.
Arriving on DVD a surprising nine months after its unceremonious cinema release, Gus Van Sant's earnest environmental drama Promised Land (Universal, 15) remains an agreeable non-event. Starring Matt Damon as a natural gas salesman encountering heartland resistance to his company's fracking ambitions, it lives up to the over-obvious moral connotations of its title, but isn't without soul or intelligence, chiefly in John Krasinski's performance as an opposing activist. On the mainstream front, the Vin Diesel sci-fi sequel Riddick (Entertainment One, 15) is a disappointment, initially promising a return to the conceptual simplicity of David Twohy's franchise-starter Pitch Black – Diesel's eponymous space growler is left to fend for himself on a desolate planet – before a dull bounty-hunter invasion sends everything south. Superior pulp pleasure is to be found in You're Next (Lionsgate, 18), an unapologetically repulsive but genuinely rattling horror film in which an extended American family is methodically tormented by masked assailants: it brings few fresh ideas to the home-invasion chiller, but has some of the bloody-minded commitment of early Tobe Hooper.
Finally, the holiday hiatus prevented me from recommending two DVD releases from recent weeks that count among 2013's finest: Mamoru Hosoda's moody, intricately imagined anime fairytale Wolf Children (Manga, 15) and Shane Carruth's ingenious lo-fi-sci-fi romance Upstream Color (Metrodome, 18) deserve quiet but extensive new year consideration.
