By ANGELA DAWSON

Front Row Features

Movies

Gun and a Hotel Bible

Freestyle Digital Media will release “Gun and a Hotel Bible” on Digital Tuesday Jan. 5.

Based on an award-winning play, “Gun and a Hotel Bible” tells the story of Pete (Bradley Gosnell), a desperate man on the verge of a violent act and his encounter with Gideon (Daniel Floren), a personified hotel bible. As Pete and Gideon spar over ideas about morality, the Bible and God, they are forced to deal with their inadequacies. With the clock ticking, can Gideon sway Pete from pulling the trigger?

Co-directors Raja Gosnell (“Home Alone,” “Mrs. Doubtfire”) and Alicia Joy LeBlanc (“The Convergence: Mission”) elicit sharply-honed performances by stars Bradley Gosnell (“The Smurfs”) and Daniel Floren (“The Influencers”).

“Gun and a Hotel Bible” will be available on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, DirecTV, On Demand, YouTube Movies, Vudu, Xbox and FandangoNOW.

Love and Monsters

“Love and Monsters” arrives on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD Tuesday Jan. 5, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Seven years after the Monsterpocalypse, Joel Dawson (Dylan O’Brien), along with the rest of humanity, has been living underground ever since giant creatures took control of the land. After reconnecting over radio with his high school girlfriend Aimee (Jessica Henwick), who is now 80 miles away at a coastal colony, Joel begins to fall for her again. As Joel realizes that there’s nothing left for him underground, he decides to venture out to Aimee, despite all the dangerous monsters that stand in his way. The fun-filled and action-packed adventure also stars Dan Ewing, Michael Rooker and Ariana Greenblatt. The film is directed by Michael Matthews from a screenplay by Brian Duffield and Matthew Robinson.

The two-disc Blu-ray set includes deleted scenes, a featurette called “Bottom of the Food Chain: The Cast of ‘Love and Monsters,’” and the featurette “It’s a Monster’s World: Creating a Post-Apocalyptic Landscape.” It also is available now on Digital.

Three Films by Luis Buñuel

A three-film collection of works by Luis Buñuel arrive on Blu-ray, from Criterion Collection.

More than four decades after he took a razorblade to an eyeball and shocked the world with “Un chien andalou,” the arch-iconoclast capped his astonishing career with three final provocations— “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” “The Phantom of Liberty” and “That Obscure Object of Desire”—in which his renegade, free-associating surrealism reached its audacious, self-detonating endgame.

Working with such key collaborators as screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and his own frequent onscreen alter ego Fernando Rey, Buñuel laced his scathing attacks on religion, class pretension and moral hypocrisy with savage violence to create a trio of subversive, brutally funny masterpieces that explore the absurd randomness of existence. Among the director’s most radical works as well as some of his greatest international triumphs, these films cemented his legacy as cinema’s most incendiary revolutionary.

“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” is a deliciously satiric masterpiece in which an upper-class sextet sits down to a dinner that is continually delayed. Their attempts to eat are thwarted by vaudevillian events both actual and imagined, including terrorist attacks, military maneuvers and ghostly apparitions. Stringing together a discontinuous, digressive series of absurdist set pieces, Buñuel and his screenwriting partner Carrière send a cast of European-film greats—including Rey, Stéphane Audran, Delphine Seyrig, and Jean-Pierre Cassel—through a maze of desire deferred, frustrated and interrupted. The Oscar-winning pinnacle of Buñuel’s late-career ascent as a feted maestro of the international art house, the 1972 film also is one of his most gleefully radical assaults on the values of the ruling class.

In 1974’s “The Phantom of Liberty,” the inherent absurdity of human social rituals reaches its taboo-annihilating extreme in what may be Buñuel’s most morally subversive and formally audacious work. Zigzagging across time and space, from the Napoleonic era to the present day, the film unfolds as a picaresque—its main character traveling between tableaux in a series of Dadaist non-sequiturs. Unbound by the laws of narrative logic, Buñuel lets his surrealist’s id run riot in an exuberant revolt against bourgeois rationality that seems telegraphed directly from his unconscious to the screen.

In his final film, 1977’s “That Obscure Object of Desire,” Buñuel brings full circle the director’s lifelong preoccupation with the darker side of desire. Rey plays Mathieu, an urbane widower, tortured by his lust for the elusive Conchita. With subversive flair, Buñuel uses two different actors in the latter role—Carole Bouquet, a sophisticated French beauty, and Ángela Molina, a Spanish coquette. Drawn from the surrealist favorite Pierre Louÿs’s classic erotic novel “La femme et le pantin” (“The Woman and the Puppet,” 1898), “That Obscure Object of Desire” is a dizzying game of sexual politics punctuated by a terror that harks back to Buñuel’s avant-garde beginnings.

The three-disc Blu-ray box set is loaded with bonus features and will be available for a suggested retail price (SRP) of $99.95.

12 Hour Shift

Arriving on Blu-ray, DVD and On Demand Tuesday Jan. 5 is Magnolia Home Entertainment’s the thriller “12 Hour Shift,” available from its Magnet label.

It’s 1999 and over the course of one night at an Arkansas hospital, a drug-addicted nurse (Angela Bettis, “Carrie”), her scheming cousin (Chloe Farnworth, “Departure”), an injured convict (David Arquette, “Scream”), and a group of black market organ-trading criminals get caught up in a heist gone wrong.

“12 Hour Shift” will be available on Blu-ray for $29.98 (SRP) and on DVD for $26.98 (SRP).

Yellow Rose

The acclaimed indie drama “Yellow Rose” arrives on Blu-ray Tuesday Jan. 5, from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

A Filipina teen from a small Texas town fights to pursue her dreams as a country music performer while having to decide between staying with her family or leaving the only home she has ever known.

The music-filled drama, directed by Diane Paragas, stars Grammy-winner and two-time Tony nominee Eva Noblezada (Broadway’s “Hadestown” and “Miss Saigon”) in her feature film debut, award-winning country music artist Dale Watson, Princess Punzalan (Mula sa puso) and Tony winner and Grammy-nominee Lea Salonga (“Mulan,” “Aladdin”).

“Yellow Rose” also is available now On Demand and on Digital.