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Last Chance: ‘The Brothers Bloom’ on Amazon Prime Video and Hulu
What to stream: ‘Maniac’ and ‘The Witch’ on Netflix, ‘The Conformist’ on Amazon Prime Video, ‘Citizen Kane’ on FilmStruck
‘From Paris With Love’ on Amazon Prime Video and Hulu
Warren Beatty and Julie Christie are ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’ on FilmStruck
‘The Witch’ – Puritan horrors on Netflix

Adrien Brody, Rachel Weisz, and Mark Ruffalo in Rian Johnson's charming fantasy of a con movie 'The Brothers Bloom.'

Last Chance: ‘The Brothers Bloom’ on Amazon Prime Video and Hulu

The Brothers Bloom (2008), the second feature from Star Wars: The Last Jedi writer/director Rian Johnson, is a con artist comedy as living theater. After the almost color-leached images of his high-school noir Brick (2005), Johnson puts more brightness in his palette and more spring his step for this fantasy about stories and storytelling. In a […]

John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the Euro-action film from producer Luc Besson and director Pierre Morel

‘From Paris With Love’ on Amazon Prime Video and Hulu

From Paris With Love (2009), starring John Travolta as a cowboy of an American agent and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as an ambitious but untrained low-level agent assigned to assist, is another of Luc Besson’s English language Euro-action films, the contemporary equivalent to the drive-in action movie of decades past. Besson has perfected the formula in […]

Anya Taylor-Joy in Robert Eggers' 'The Witch.'

‘The Witch’ – Puritan horrors on Netflix

The Witch (2015) is a primal horror film rooted in fear and superstition, and there is no shortage of either in early 17th century New England, where a devout Puritan father has taken his family to start a new life. Adding to the general hardship of British village folk carving a new colony out of […]

What to stream: ‘Maniac’ and ‘The Witch’ on Netflix, ‘The Conformist’ on Amazon Prime Video, ‘Citizen Kane’ on FilmStruck

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 … Emma Stone and Jonah Hill play traumatized test subjects in a pharmaceutical trial that promises to take away their pain in Maniac (2018), a Netflix Original limited series that combines science […]

Sean Penn stars in the Hulu series created by Beau Willimon

What to stream: Hulu claims ‘The First,’ Amazon Prime is ‘Forever,’ Netflix offers ‘The Land of Steady Habits’

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 … Sean Penn stars in the new Hulu Original drama The First as a grounded astronaut battling family crisis while guiding the first manned mission to Mars through the politics and funding and technological […]

What to stream: ‘Jack Ryan’ and ‘Disobedience’ on Amazon Prime, more ‘Ozark’ on Netflix, Cary Grant on FilmStruck

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 … John Krasinski is the fifth actor to play Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, the CIA analyst turned reluctant field agent, and Wendell Pierce his new boss in the debut season of the Prime […]

Ethan Hawke in the film by Paul Schrader

‘First Reformed’ on VOD and Blu-ray/DVD

Anyone who has followed the career of Paul Schrader could fall into the trap of simply cataloguing the ways in which First Reformed (2018) is a summation of his themes and inspirations. Imagine the promotional possibilities: “From the author of “Transcendental Cinema” and “Notes on Film Noir” and the screenwriter of Taxi Driver and The Last […]

Sebastian Stan, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans, Danai Gurira, and Chadwick Boseman in comic book epic from Marvel Studios

What to stream: ‘Avengers’ apocalypse, Matt Groening’s ‘Disenchantment’ on Netflix, ‘Minding the Gap’ on Hulu

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 … Avengers: Infinity War (2018, PG-13) is the biggest, most sprawling superhero epic yet, a comic book apocalypse that pits almost every character in the big screen Marvel Comics Universe—Iron Man, Captain […]

Nick Robinson in the gay coming-of-age romantic comedy from director Greg Berlanti

What to stream: ‘Set it Up’ and the end of ‘Portlandia’ on Netflix, ‘King of California’ on Prime Video, ‘Love, Simon’ on VOD

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 … Love, Simon (2018, PG-13) uses the familiar conventions of the coming-of-age teenage romantic comedy for the story of a gay high school boy (Nick Robinson) coming out to his friends and […]

‘First Reformed’ on VOD and Blu-ray/DVD

Shih Chun in King Hu's 1967 wuxia pian classic from Taiwan

Blu-ray: ‘Dragon Inn’ / ‘Legend of the Mountain’ – King Hu on Criterion and Kino

Dragon Inn (Criterion, Blu-ray, DVD) Legend of the Mountain (Kino, Blu-ray, DVD) After the success of Come Drink With Me, the pioneering wuxia pian (“martial chivalry”) adventure that mixed martial arts, romance, comic action, and historical settings, Hong Kong director King Hu went to Taiwan for the opportunity to make films with greater freedom. Dragon […]

Marlene Dietrich in the 1932 classic by Josef von Sternberg

Criterion Blu-ray: Dietrich & Von Sternberg in Hollywood

Dietrich & Von Sternberg in Hollywood (Criterion, Blu-ray, DVD) At the dawn of the sound era, as German movie star Emil Jannings left Hollywood to return to Germany, the actor invited Austrian-born/American-raised director Josef von Sternberg (who directed Jannings in The Last Command, 1928) to Universum Film A.G. to direct him in that studio’s first […]

Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in the 1971 western by Robert Altman

Warren Beatty and Julie Christie are ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’ on FilmStruck

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Robert Altman’s third film since staking out his claim on 1970s cinema with M*A*S*H (1970), turns the western myth into a metaphor for the fantasy of the American Dream colliding with the power of big business. Warren Beatty is John McCabe, a drifting gambler who rides into the mining camp […]

Orson Welles is Harry Lime on Carol Reed's classic

Continental noir: ‘The Third Man’ on Netflix

Carol Reed’s continental film noir The Third Man (1949), written by Graham Greene and starring Joseph Cotten as a cynical American pulp novelist playing detective in the rubble-strewn underworld of post-war Vienna and Orson Welles as a charming but ruthless black marketeer, is one of the true classics. The film is directed by Reed but […]

Humphrey Bogart and Lizbeth Scott star in the 1947 film noir directed by John Cromwell

Humphrey Bogart in ‘Dead Reckoning’ on Amazon Prime Video

Any resemblance between Dead Reckoning (1947) and classic hard-boiled Humphrey Bogart classics The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep is anything but coincidental (“A guy’s buddy gets killed, he oughta do something about it,” Bogie explains in an line from the Sam Spade playbook) in this murder mystery of deception and double crosses. Narrating in […]

Ben Mendelsohn and Ryan Reynolds in 'Mississippi Grind,' directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

Ryan Reynolds works the ‘Mississippi Grind’ on Netflix

Mississippi Grind (2015) plays like a seventies character drama, a meandering road movie through the byways of American characters who populate the card rooms and dice tables and racetracks, and an oddball buddy movie built on a chance encounter and an instant kinship between two losers gambling their lives away. Ryan Reynolds is Curtis, a […]

Rosanna Arquette and Madonna in Susan Seidelman's 'Desperately Seeking Susan'

‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ on Amazon Prime Video

Desperately Seeking Susan (1982) is remembered for giving Madonna her first starring role; she’s the Susan of the title, a free spirit in thrift store chic fashions who connects up with her musician boyfriend through personal ads in the local weekly papers. This modern bohemian take on the classic screwball comedy (complete with amnesia, mistaken […]

Alexandra Norton directs the documentary on movie star and inventor Hedy Lamarr

‘Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story’ – Brains meet beauty on Netflix

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (2017) – Hedy Lamarr was one of the most glamorous movie stars of her day. The Czechoslovakian actress became notorious for nude scenes in the 1933 erotic European drama Ecstasy and fled Nazi Europe and a marriage to a munitions mogul to become a star in Hollywood famed for her […]

Last Chance: ‘The Brothers Bloom’ on Amazon Prime Video and Hulu

Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars in the high school neo-noir by Rian Johnson

‘Brick’- High school noir on Netflix

Brick (2005), the debut feature from Star Trek: The Last Jedi filmmaker Rian Johnson, puts the collected works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in a blender with a jigger of teenage melodrama and pours it into a high school mold. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays things so close to his chest that he’s almost unreadable as […]

Clive Owen and Clare-Hope Ashitey star in the science fiction drama directed by Alfonso Cuaron

‘Children of Men’ on Amazon Prime Video

Children of Men (2007), Alfonso Cuaron’s adaptation of by P.D. James’ dystopian thriller, is set in a bleak, impoverished near future where two decades of infertility have created a mood of hopelessness as devastating and destructive as a nuclear holocaust. Britain has thrown up walls around the borders and is actively deporting immigrants, becoming a […]

Dominique Sanda and Stefania Sandrelli in Bernardo Bertolucci's 'The Conformist' starring Jean-Louis Trintignant

Bernardo Bertolucci’s ‘The Conformist’ on Amazon Prime Video

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), his dense, visually intricate, and stylistically ornate adaptation of the revered novel by Alberto Moravio, tosses sex, desire, politics, and personal responsibility into the Fascist era before World War II. Marcello (an actively repressed Jean-Louis Trintignant), a petty bourgeois man in late 1930s Italy, joins the Italian Fascist party as […]

Alberto Sordi stars in Alberto Lattuada's brilliant satire from Italy

The paternal hand of the ‘Mafioso’ on FilmStruck

Mafioso (Italy, 1962), Alberto Lattuada’s brilliant satire of Sicily’s “paternal” mafia, became the cinematic rediscovery of 2006 when it was revived and shown at the New York Film Festival. Alberto Sordi plays the Sicilian son made good, a business professional in Milan who, bubbling over with sentimental zeal, brings his Milanese wife and two adorable […]

Margit Carstensen stars in the film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

RW Fassbinder’s ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant’ on FilmStruck

Rainer Werner Fassbinder adapted his own stage play for The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Germany, 1972), a modern twist on The Women, the great all-woman Hollywood classic of sex and social conventions in high society. Margit Carstensen is successful fashion designer Petra von Kant, who lives alone in her stark apartment with Marlene […]

Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman in Wes Anderson's 'Moonrise Kingdom,' starring Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, and more

‘Moonrise Kingdom’ – Wes Anderson’s endless summer on Hulu and Showtime

Wes Anderson has made a career exploring the childhood neuroses that keep adult characters in an arrested state of adolescence and stasis. It’s been a lively career with creatively energetic high points like Rushmore and The Royal Tennenbaums but an approach with diminishing returns. Until Fantastic Mr. Fox, a film that refracted his portraits of dysfunctional families […]

Oona Laurence and Oakes Fegley with a fuzzy, flying best friend in Disney's "Pete's Dragon."

‘Pete’s Dragon’ – A storybook wonder on VOD and Blu-ray/DVD

Pete’s Dragon (2016) is that rare breed of remake that outshines the original. The 1977 film, about an orphaned boy who runs away from his abusive adoptive parents with a magical dragon, was a live action film with a bright cartoon character taking the part of the dragon. The dragon is no less animated in […]

Myrna Loy and William Powell (with Asta) as Nick and Nora Charles in the great mystery series

‘The Thin Man’ collection on VOD and DVD

It’s cocktail hour on the mystery beat: William Powell and Myrna Loy are Nick and Nora Charles, the world’s most debonair detective team, in six delightful mysteries. It all begins with The Thin Man (1934), a sparkling adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel of a former working class sleuth gone high society and his game social […]

Luke Treadaway, Anna Chancellor, Bill Nighy and Morven Christie in the Agatha Christie miniseries

What to stream: ‘Ordeal by Innocence’ on Amazon Prime, the ‘Guernsey’ Society on Netflix, ‘Borg vs McEnroe’ on Hulu

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 … Ordeal by Innocence, a three-part murder mystery based on one of Agatha Christie’s favorite novels, stars Anna Chancellor as a wealthy philanthropist and murder victim and Bill Nighy, Matthew Goode, Alice […]

Yael Stone and Noah Taylor in the Australian crime drama 'Deep Water'

‘Deep Water’ on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Acorn TV

Noah Taylor is veteran police detective Nick Manning and Yael Stone (180 degrees from her Orange is the New Black Jersey girl Lorna) his young partner Tori Lustigman in the Australian crime drama miniseries Deep Water (2016). It’s set in Bondi Beach, a suburb of Sydney famous for its tourist beaches and nightclubs that was […]

William Zabka and Ralph Macchio in the streaming sequel to 'The Karate Kid'

What to stream: fictional crime ‘Safe’ and true crime ‘Evil Genius’ on Netflix and ‘Karate Kid’ sequel ‘Cobra Kai’ on YouTube Red

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 … Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues is a sequel that promotes Johnny (William Zabka), the bullying villain of the original film, on a redemptive journey more than 30 years later […]

Mutant X with Victoria Pratt (Shalimar Fox), Lauren Lee Smith (Emma DeLauro), Karen Cliche (Lexa Pierce), John Shea (Adam Kane), Victor Webster (Brennan Mulwray) and Forbes March (Jesse Kilmartin)

‘Mutant X: The Complete Series’ on Amazon Prime Video

Created by (then) Marvel Comics CEO Avi Arad, the syndicated Mutant X: Seasons 1 and 2 (2001-2003) was an early Marvel live-action series developed as a kind of a hip, low budget X-Men knock-off by way of the comic book spin-off The New Mutants, albeit with more attitude. The show kicks off in a two-part […]

The complete ‘Lost’ on Hulu

Lost: Complete Series (2004-2010) – The very definition of high-concept television, this addictive survival series turned metaphysical mystery is arguably the most successful and certainly the most richly and deeply woven show of its kind. What began as an exotic Gilligan’s Island through The Twilight Zone turned into a mind-bending show with supernatural echoes and […]

Aidan Turner, Russell Tovey, and Lenora Crichlow star in the BBC series

The original ‘Being Human: Season 1’ on Amazon Prime

A vampire, a werewolf and a ghost walk into a bar. No, it’s not a joke, it’s a scene in the BBC series Being Human, a supernatural drama about a trio of “monsters” sharing an apartment in Bristol and trying to live as humans despite the challenges to normal life. Mitchell (Aidan Turner), once the […]

‘Brick’- High school noir on Netflix

Donald Pleasence, Françoise Dorléac. Lionel Stander, and Jack MacGowran star in the 1966 film by Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski’s ‘Cul-De-Sac’ on Criterion Channel

Roman Polanski once cited Cul-De-Sac (1966), a sly little character piece set in an isolated medieval castle on the barren British coast, as his personal favorite of his films, and the closest he came to creating “pure cinema.” It’s Polanski’s third feature and his second English language film, and he wrote the original script with […]

Don Johnson stars in the film directed by L.Q. Jones from the Harlan Ellison novella

‘A Boy and His Dog’ on Amazon Prime and Shout! Factory TV

A Boy and His Dog (1976), the directorial debut of longtime character actor and Sam Peckinpah regular L.Q. Jones, is not the first post-apocalyptic vision of America but it does offer a different approach to the empty streets and ghostly cities that previously stood in for life after the end. Jones, adapting the novella by […]

Warren Beatty and Julie Christie are ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’ on FilmStruck

Continental noir: ‘The Third Man’ on Netflix

Bernardo Bertolucci’s ‘The Conformist’ on Amazon Prime Video

‘The Wrecking Crew!’ – the musicians behind the sixties hits on Hulu

The Wrecking Crew! (2008/2015) was the secret weapon of the Los Angeles recording studio culture of the sixties and seventies. Hal Blaine, Plas Johnson, Carol Kaye, Earl Palmer, Don Randi and Tommy Tedesco played on literally hundreds of pop songs and albums, working with everyone from Frank Sinatra to The Beach Boys, Herb Albert to The […]

‘Inside Deep Throat’ – Porn in the USA on Netflix

With its party rock soundtrack, colorful (and at times damaged) characters, and portrait of the pornography industry on the cusp of a cultural shift, Inside Deep Throat (2005) is something of a real life Boogie Nights. Documentary directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato offer the story of a grubby historical event: an explicit but otherwise […]

What to stream: Robin Williams on HBO Now, ‘ Lucky Them’ on Amazon Prime Video, ‘Disobedience’ on VOD, and more

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 … Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind (2018, TV-MA) is an affectionate portrait of the actor and groundbreaking comedian narrated by Williams himself (created from interview clips) and featuring testimony from family, friends, […]