Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, FilmStruck, video-on-demand, and other streaming services … Pay-Per-View / Video-On-Demand It is a big week for VOD debuts big and small, and few are bigger than The Fate of the Furious, the eighth film in the car caper franchise with […]
Un Carnet du Bal (1937), the story of Christine (Marie Bell), a recently widowed heiress who tracks down the young men who courted her 20 years ago at her first society ball, is one Julien of Duvivier’s most celebrated and beloved films, a melancholy meditation on memory and loss and disappointment. The title translates to […]
Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, Showtime Anytime, FilmStruck, video-on-demand, and other streaming services … Amazon Prime Walter Hill’s The Assignment (2017), starring Michelle Rodriguez as a hitman who undergoes involuntary sexual reassignment surgery by a vengeful doctor (Sigourney Weaver), barely received a theatrical release thanks […]
Poil de Carotte (1932), which translates to “Carrot Top,” is Julien Duvivier’s remake of his 1925 silent success, a mix of comedy and near-tragedy in the story of a sweet, spirited kid (Robert Lynen, superb) bullied by his mother, who favors the boy’s teenage brother and sister, and ignored by his disconnected father, who has […]
The Netflix original comedy GLOW: Season 1 stars Alison Brie as a frustrated actress in 1980s Los Angeles who answers a casting call for “unconventional women” and finds herself cast in a women’s wrestling cable series. The series was real: “GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling” played on cable for years. This series, created by Nurse […]
Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours (France, 2008) plays like a miniature, a small film of small dramas in the scope of large lives. Mortally once again hangs over the story of a family estate and the rich treasures of art history that goes with it. Family matriarch Helene (Edith Scob) has preserved the country home of […]
Julien Duvivier was once a giant of French cinema with a string of popular and critical hits in the thirties and a successful foray into Hollywood in the forties. He’s been largely forgotten as filmmaker even with though one of his biggest hits, Pépé le Moko (1937), remains a revered (and oft-revived) classic of gangster […]
Season four of Orange Is the New Black, the best to date of Netflix’s most popular original show, ended on a cliffhanger: a protest against the dehumanizing conditions of the for-profit prison that turned into a riot. Season five opens with women of the minimum security prison taking hostages and stays in lockdown, at least […]
The original Cat People (1942) was made on a low budget for RKO’s B-movie unit, the first in an amazing series of B-horror films from producer Val Lewton that transcended its origins. It’s a masterpiece of mood and psychological ambiguity masquerading as a cheap exploitation knock-off. Cheap it is, but Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur […]
Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation won the Academy Award for Foreign Language Film in 2012, making him the first Iranian filmmaker to win an Oscar. He won his second Oscar for The Salesman (2016), a provocative story of violence, trauma, and vengeance would around a stage production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” Shahab Hosseini […]
