This week’s home entertainment offerings include a new Adventure Time release that ties in with a recently released graphic novel, the current season of the BBC’s Sherlock, a collection of the first new Peanuts cartoons in a decade, plus a lower-priced edition of the popular post-apocalyptic anime Attack on Titan, and a couple of excellent art films, including the latest from Oldboy director Park Chan-wook.

TV on DVD

This week’s most interesting release is Adventure Time: Islands (Warner Bros., 88 min., $14.95), which contains the 4-episode “Islands” saga (airing on the Cartoon Network this winter) in which Finn meets other humans and an important member of his family for the first time.  The KaBOOM! graphic novel Adventure Time: Islands, which was published in November, serves as a prequel to this key four-episode saga.

Also of great interest is Sherlock: Season 4 (BBC, 270 min., $29.98, BD $44.98), Mark Gattis and Stephen Moffat’s re-imagining of Conan Doyle’s super sleuth for the modern era that stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in three new, feature-length adventures.  Extra features include 20-minute “making-of” shorts for each of the three episodes, along with a “The Writers Chat” feature with Moffat and Gatiss, and Gatiss’ video diary.

In addition to Adventure Time, animated TV releases include Peanuts By Schulz: Snoopy Tales (Warner Bros., 224 min., $14.98), which collects 32 shorts from the new Peanuts cable TV series that debuted on Boomerang in 2016, and which follows the original Charles Schulz Peanuts storylines very closely, along with Teen Titans Go!—Season 3, Part 2: Get In, Pig Out (Warner Bros., 300 min., $18.94), which contains the final 27-episodes of the anime-influenced Cartoon Network series that is currently in its fourth season.

Vintage TV releases include the 1980s Steven Bochco-produced comedy/drama cop series Hooperman: Season One (Olive Films, 528 min., $34.98), and the Daniel Boone—Season 3 Collector’s Edition (Shout Factory, 1200 min., $24.99), which stars the legendary Fess Parker.

Those who enjoy cyber thrillers should check out The Code (Acorn Media, 351 min., $39.99), an Australian show about a young computer hacker and his journalist brother who get in trouble for exposing corrupt elements in the Australian government, and then have to work with the authorities to bring down a drug and weapons merchant, who operates on the “dark Web.”  There Is plenty of suspense in this series, which has been called “Australia’s answer to Mr. Robot.”

Anime

This week’s top release is Garo: Crimson Moon (Funimation, 300 min., BD/DVD Combo $64.98), which collects the first 12 episodes of the second anime series from Mappa based on the Garo tokusatsu live-action franchise.  Unlike the contemporary settings of the live-action Garo, this anime series is set in the Heian Period (794-1185) and includes many Japanese historical characters in an action-packed fantasy adventure that features character designs by Maszkazu Katsura (DNA, Shadow Lady, Video Girl Ai).

But the most popular release of the week could be Attack on Titan: Season One (Funimation, 625 min., BD $59.98), which contains the entire 25-episode first season of the popular post-apocalyptic saga that has been called “Japan’s Walking Dead” that was originally released here in 2014 in 2 parts, each of which had an MSRP of $49.98.  So this anime, which is based on what has been the #1 manga here in the U.S. (see “More Than 2.5 Million Copies of Attack on Titan in Print in U.S.”), is now available on disc at a little more than half its original cost.

New to North America on disc this week is the subtitles-only Triage X (Sentai Filmworks, 250 min., Subtitles Only, $49.98, BD $59.98), which contains all ten episodes of the 2015 anime from Xebec that is based on Shoji Sato’s action manga about a vigilante group that is headquartered in a hospital and is bent on killing people that it considers “cancers” on society.  To make this fascistic premise work, you just have to make the villains nasty enough, and Triage X does a pretty good job of that.

This week’s only other release is a special Blu-ray box Limited Edition of Infinite Stratos 2 (Sentai Filmworks, 300 min., BD $219.98), which was released here on DVD back in 2014 (see “DVD Round-Up: Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Who, Family Guy, & Under the Dome”). 

Theatrical Movies

The most successful of this week’s releases at the box office was Inferno (Sony, “PG-13,” 121 min., $30.99, BD $34.99), the third (and mercifully, we hope, the last) film in the Robert Langdon series based on the novels by Dan Brown that portray the adventures of a professorial “symbologist” played by Tom Hanks, who uncovers the clues to all sorts of contemporary malfeasance in esoteric bits of medieval iconography.  Inferno could generate only a poor 19% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes and Ron Howard’s film failed at the North American box office where it earned a franchise low $34.3 million.

Those who don’t mind a little sentiment in their films should check out The Light Between Oceans (Disney, “PG-13,” $29.98, BD $34.98), which is based on the novel by M.L. Stedman.  Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Rachel Weisz are all excellent in this period drama.  Some may find the film’s plot too contrived and its overall thrust too sentimental, but real life is not without its anomalies (and certainly full of tragedies of all sorts).

Art movie lovers are in for a real treat with the U.S. release of Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (Sony, “Not Rated,” 145 min., $29.98), which is loosely based on Welsh writer Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith, but with the setting changed from Victorian England to Korea in the 1930s, which was then under Japanese occupation.  With its complicated narrative structure and shifting identities, The Handmaiden is another stylish exercise from the director of Oldboy, and it is no surprise that the movie was a film festival favorite and has a stellar 94% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 

The number of modestly-budgeted Christian-themed films has spiked in the past few years with mixed results, but I’m Not Ashamed (Universal, “PG,” 226 min., $24.98, BD $29.98), which uses the massacre at Columbine High School as the background for a biopic of Rachel Joy Scott, the first victim at the Colorado mass shooting, is far from the best effort in this growing genre.  The film earned just $2 million at the box office and has a lowly 25% positive rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.