In the Netflix original comedy mini-series Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp (2015), creators David Wain and Michael Showalter reunite almost the entire original cast from their 2001 movie, a spoof of summer camp movies with a cast of performers decades past their teenage years. The movie played out on the last day […]
“Scrotal Recall” is a terrible title for a genuinely sweet British sitcom, a romantic comedy built around one man’s odyssey to contact former partners after he’s diagnosed with VD. Johnny Flynn’s hapless single is an old-fashioned romantic in a modern soul, shaggy but personable, witty, and smart. A doctor’s visit confirms that he has chlamydia, […]
Pay-Per-View / Video-On-Demand “It Follows,” both the title and the premise of this simple but intelligent low-budget horror, was originally slated to debut on cable and web VOD a couple of weeks after its March theatrical release, but it’s instant success shifted release plans and the VOD was pushed off to this week. A tonic […]
Pay-Per-View / Video-On-Demand Helen Mirren stars in “Woman in Gold,” inspired by a true story of a Jewish woman who took the Austrian government to court to recover a painting looted from her family by the Nazis. The landmark case is simplified into an underdog drama with underdog good guys (Ryan Reynolds is her novice […]
Pay-Per-View / Video-On-Demand “Danny Collins” is a nice little character piece for Al Pacino, a low-key redemption story about a rock legend who is jolted out of his numbed-out lifestyle and tries to reconnect with the son he’s never met. Pacino makes the most of the role and Annette Benning, Bobby Cannavale, Jennifer Garner, and […]
Netflix doesn’t release anything like Nielson ratings of its shows but it’s safe to say that documentaries have been doing well for the service. based on how much they have devoted to bringing non-fiction to the catalog, and how competitive they’ve become with theatrical distributors. Netflix produced the award-winning documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?” which […]
What’s new for home viewing on video-on-demand and Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services. “A Most Wanted Man,” the final film completed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is a complex thriller of politics and intelligence in the post-9/11 world featuring one of the actor’s finest performances. He’s the head of a covert German intelligence team […]
It’s summertime and livin’ is easy, and but for a few shows, it is effectively the off-season for network TV. Netflix has you covered with a new season of one of its trademark shows. Return to Litchfield Correction Facility with Piper, Red, Taystee, Poussey, Nicky, Crazy Eyes, and the whole crazy gang in “Orange Is […]
Netflix continues their foray into splashy, ambitious original series with “Sense8,” a sprawling science fiction thriller created by Andy and Lana Wachowski (“The Matrix” films) with “Babylon 5” creator J. Michael Straczynski. Daryl Hannah, Naveen Andrews, Freema Agyeman, and Doona Bae (of the Wachowskis’s “Cloud Atlas”) star in a story of eight strangers from around […]
“The Boxtrolls,” which was one of the five nominees for animated feature in this year’s Oscar race, is a delightfully oddball stop-motion fantasy about mischievous trolls who scavenge discarded objects from the streets of a storybook town. It’s a junkyard fantasy, whimsical and inventive and crammed full of playful details and visual gags, and while […]
