November is a prime movie-watching month, both in theaters and at home. Critics and publicists are currently gearing up for awards season, but if you’re the type of person who can’t use that phrase without scare quotes (I get it, the discourse can be unbearable), then an abundance of repertory series and new restorations timed for the holiday-gift rush offers a variety of alternatives to keep your eyeballs occupied.

The through-line in this month’s diverse set of Shelf Life offerings is a sense of endless pursuit: the search for self-actualization, for creative freedom, for connection, for some sense of justice in a cynical and corrupt world. The finding, dear viewer, is up to you.

Dr. Caligari

On 4K UHD and Blu-ray pre-order now from Mondo Macabro.

Any independent video store worth its salt in the ’90s had a copy of Dr. Caligari on VHS. Stephen Sayadian’s 1989 erotic sci-fi mind-bender is ostensibly an unofficial pseudo-sequel to Robert Weine’s 1920 silent horror classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It follows the exploits of the mad doctor’s equally mad granddaughter (Madeleine Reynal) as she uses the patients at her private mental asylum as subjects for her diabolically horny experiments, but it shares more of its DNA with arch psychotronic fare like Forbidden Zone and Shock Treatment than it does any conventional perception of a “horror movie”, if you couldn’t tell from the use of the word ‘horny’ in the previous sentence.

That means, naturally, that it’s divisive on Letterboxd: “I will stand by this film as a nightmare genre piece unlike any other,” Brett writes, while Chris Browning quips, “Ever watched a Guy Maddin film and thought ‘needs more tits’? If so, this film is for you.” That was a one-star review, for the record. But some people do like that kind of thing, and those people are invited to visit the Mondo Macabro online store to pre-order a 4K UHD/Blu-ray of Dr. Caligari, sure to be a major step up from the long-out-of-print 2003 DVD. The “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse for adults” vibe will really shine through in the restoration, primed to enhance the cardboard and greasepaint of it all—in a good way, of course.

Paris, Texas

4K restoration in theaters November 25 from Janus Films.

Malcolm X

On 4K UHD and Blu-ray November 22 from The Criterion Collection.

Criterion’s new restoration of the film, which arrives as a 4K UHD/Blu-ray set in November. Malcolm X is dotted with intricately choreographed sequences that are sure to pop in 4K, from an early scene set in a Boston dance hall to Malcolm X’s pilgrimage to Mecca and ultimate assassination on stage.

It’s a dynamic film as well as a monumental one, as Jamelle Bouie writes: “Rather than try to avoid or work around the fact that lives—to say nothing of the life of Malcolm X—are big and complicated and impossible to contain, Spike Lee structures the film around that very fact… Within this picture, you’ll find the gangster movie, the race film, the prison drama, the Hollywood musical, the Western, and the desert epic. You’ll see Spike use the heightened and exaggerated style for which he’s known as well as documentary styles and even cinéma vérité. And all of it—every technique, every camera movement, every edit—tells the singular story of a man struggling, till the very end, for self-actualization.”

Cutter’s Way

On Blu-ray now from Fun City Editions through Vinegar Syndrome.

Flaming Ears

4K restoration in theaters November 18 from Kino Lorber.

If Dr. Caligari is somehow too mainstream for you, a queerer, kinkier alternative comes to theaters this month in the form of Flaming Ears. Originally shot in 8mm and restored in 2019 from a 16mm blow-up print, this avante-garde sci-fi film is set in the lesbian dystopia of Asche in the year 2700. But really, it takes viewers on a different sort of jaunt through time, back to the industrial nightclubs and underground sex dungeons of in the early ’90s—a setting that has all the fetish gear, nipple piercings, oversized wool coats and severe haircuts that an arty Sapphic pyromaniac like Volley (played by co-director Ursula Pürrer), one of the film’s three protagonists, could ever ask for.

Flaming Ears has an electrifying energy, a feeling that anything is possible as its trio of directors “form and mold their own language in order to express forms of queerness that hadn’t been given name yet,” as Mister All Sunday describes. Somewhere amid all the action-figure violence, close-ups of latex-clad crotches, and new genders being invented on screen, you might be tempted to ask yourself what it all means. In these moments, the words of Bem, who notes that this film is “so gender non-conforming, it forgot to conform to any structural principles.” You wouldn’t ask a majestic lioness to make you dinner, would you? Then don’t ask Flaming Ears to do something as boring as “make sense”.

The Company of Wolves

On 4K UHD and Blu-ray November 22 from Shout! Factory.

Based on the work of feminist writer Angela Carter (who also co-wrote the screenplay), the psychosexual atmosphere that surrounds Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves is thicker than the roiling clouds of white fog that perpetually hang around its characters’ ankles. This is a film where a tube of lipstick is never just a tube of lipstick, and fairy tales about wolves stand in for the dangers of sexuality as Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson), a young girl on the cusp of womanhood, learns for herself what her grandmother meant when she said, “they’re nice as pie until they’ve had their way with you. But once the bloom is gone… oh, the beast comes out.”

The late, great Angela Lansbury co-stars as Rosaleen’s apple-cheeked, irreverent grandma, who lays down some harsh truths about men while narrating the bloody takes on classic fairy tales that make up this anthology-ish folk-horror movie. The Company of Wolves has been out-of-print on NTSC DVD for a while now, and many Letterboxd reviewers say they wish they had seen the movie earlier. “Little upset I never saw this as a child,” SirBoboLatrine laments. Shout! Factory’s 4K UHD Blu-ray release corrects this oversight, so you can pay tribute to Angela and appreciate the film’s stunning, grotesque werewolf transformation sequences in 4K.

New Waves: Rediscovering Taiwanese Cinema of the 1980s

Retrospective series playing in theaters November 11–24 at Film Forum.

Major works sit alongside obscure discoveries and “milestones largely unseen outside of Taiwan”, as the theater puts it—many of which are being flown into NYC from Taipei for the fourteen-day retrospective. Titles in this fifteen-film series include Yang’s Taipei Story and A Brighter Summer Day (pictured above)—currently rated an impressive 4.0 and 4.4 out of five, respectively—Hou’s The Time to Live and The Time to Die and Dust in the Wind, Tsai Ming-Liang’s debut feature Rebels of the Neon God, Ang Lee’s directorial debut Pushing Hands, and the influential omnibus films The Sandwich Man and In Our Time.