Westfront 1918 is likely the best movie you’ve never seen or perhaps never even heard of. Made at the same time as All Quiet on the Western Front, the pacifist German film was a world-wide success, opening in the U.S. in early 1931. Banned by the Nazis in January 1933 along with director G.W. Pabst’s other films, it did not resurface in Germany until 1970. It has since enjoyed renewed success in Europe and on home video outside the U.S. and is only now making its belated debut on an excellent new Criterion Blu-ray.

Westfront 1918 covers the same ground as All Quiet on the Western Front but is less sentimental. In All Quiet on the Western Front, the home-front is depicted as an oasis from the war. In Westfront 1918, life is just as soul-crushing in the towns where the soldiers come from as it is on the front lines with the impoverished population enduring widespread starvation.

Pabst, whose late silent films, Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, elevated him to the forefront of German directors, chose Westfront 1918 as his first talkie. The highly realistic combat scenes were filmed silently with sound and sound effects added after the fact, making the film pictorially way ahead of what Hollywood was able to do at the time. Dramatically, it is also somewhat stronger than All Quiet on the Western Front as it concentrates on four soldiers, three infantry grunts and their commanding officer. Three of the four are referred to only as The Bavarian, The Student, and The Lieutenant. Only one, whose name is Karl, is referred to by name. In the end, three of them will die cruel, unnecessary deaths with hopes and dreams unfulfilled and one will go stark raving mad.

The film’s most poignant scene is Karl’s leave where he comes home exhausted from the long trek, only to find his wife in bed with the butcher’s son in exchange for food. After threatening to kill the kid, he lets him go knowing that he has been drafted and must leave for the front in the morning. Although both his wife and his mother beg him to forgive the wife’s indiscretion, he treats her coldly to his later regret. Karl is played by Gustav Diessl, who played Jack the Ripper in Pabst’s Pandora’s Box.

At the time of the film’s release, Pabst was revered even more highly than his famous contemporaries, F.W. Murnau (Sunrise), Fritz Lang (M), and Ernst Lubitsch (Broken Lullaby). The film’s 2K restoration makes it easy to see why.

A standard DVD version from Criterion is also available.

One of the most eagerly anticipated films of 2017, Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying, was adapted from Darryl Ponicsan’s 2005 novel of the same name. Ponicsan’s first and most famous novel was 1970’s The Last Detail, turned into an Oscar-nominated film starring Jack Nicholson, Otis Young, and Randy Quaid in 1973.

Although the earlier film was about three sailors – a seasoned foul-mouthed white guy, his level-headed black partner, and the sad sack they are accompanying to prison. Although Last Flag Flying is about three former marines with different names, it was widely perceived that the three characters played by Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, and Steve Carell would be more-or-less the same guys as seen thirty years later. To an extent they are written that way in this compelling tale in which Carell asks Cranston and Fishburne’s help in escorting his fallen marine son’s casket home to New Hampshire for burial. Fishburne and Carell both give fine performances, but Cranston is an odd substitute for Nicholson. Whereas Nicholson could be vulgar and funny in his delivery at the same time, Cranston comes across as just vulgar. Still, the film does have some very fine set pieces, most notably a scene in which the men see Carell’s flag-draped casket for the first time, along with family members of other fallen marines. Almost as compelling is a scene near the end in which the three visit the mother of a buddy lost thirty years before. She’s played by the always wonderful Cicely Tyson. The ending of the film, in which Carell reads a letter from his son is one of the year’s most moving.

Last Flag Flying is available on Blue-ray and standard DVD.

Nominated for eleven British Independent Film Awards and winner of four, Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country has been called the British Brokeback Mountain, and while there are comparisons between the two films, this one can stand proudly on its own.

British Independent Film Award’s Best Actor Josh O’Connor is nominated for a BAFTA Rising Star award and the film is also among the nominees for Best British Film.

O’Connor plays a young Northern England farmer, living with his father (Ian Hart) who is recovering from a stroke, and his hard-working grandmother (Gemma Jones). His only recess from work is the pub in town where he gets drunk and has anonymous gay sex in the men’s room. It’s lambing season and his father has hired a temporary worker from Romania (Alec Secareanu) over his objections. It’s not exactly love at first sight, but the two do manage to fall in love in the midst of their harsh surroundings. There the comparisons to Brokeback Mountain end as both father and grandmother lend tacit acceptance to the relationship which has a few obstacles of its own to overcome before thee two can build a permanent life together.

The film also received high marks for its realistic handling of animals including a vivid skinning of a stillborn lamb sequence.

God’s Own Country is available on DVD only in the U.S. but is available on Blu-ray as a British import.

Another film that is only available on DVD in the U.S. is Ruben Ostlund’s The Square, winner of last year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and a current Oscar nominee (from Sweden) for Best Foreign Language Film.

A film about a day in the life of a modern art museum’s curator (Claes Bang), I sat through most of this 2-hour-22-minute film having no idea what I was watching. It’s a series of vignettes, some of them funny, some of them odd, all of them strange and ultimately pointless. The biggest names in the cast from the director of Force Majeure are Dominic West and Elisabeth Moss who speak English while mostly everyone else speaks Swedish, although the other actors do speak English when speaking to the two of them. The “comedy” runs the gamut from poking fun at the elite to a guy with Tourette’s Syndrome shouting “show us your boobs” and other vulgarities. If that’s your cup of tea, you may enjoy it more than I did.

This week’s new releases include A Bad Moms Christmas and Only the Brave.