With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.
Ak vs Ak (Vikramaditya Motwane)
Over the 21st century, Bollywood cinema has entered into a completely different era of filmmaking and storytelling than was being made in the decades prior. Actors and directors who started their careers in the ‘80s and ‘90s have experienced such a drastic shift from their beginnings to what they are doing now that their older works seem almost archaic and unrecognizable. This has led, expectedly, to many of Bollywood’s artists making self-reflexive work that also reflects on the industry in general––Fan, Sanju, The Dirty Picture, Luck By Chance, and Shamitabh are just a few examples. Vikramaditya Motwane’s Ak vs Ak is...
Ak vs Ak (Vikramaditya Motwane)
Over the 21st century, Bollywood cinema has entered into a completely different era of filmmaking and storytelling than was being made in the decades prior. Actors and directors who started their careers in the ‘80s and ‘90s have experienced such a drastic shift from their beginnings to what they are doing now that their older works seem almost archaic and unrecognizable. This has led, expectedly, to many of Bollywood’s artists making self-reflexive work that also reflects on the industry in general––Fan, Sanju, The Dirty Picture, Luck By Chance, and Shamitabh are just a few examples. Vikramaditya Motwane’s Ak vs Ak is...
- 1/1/2021
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Closing out a year in which we’ve needed The Criterion Channel more than ever, they’ve now announced their impressive December lineup. Topping the highlights is a trio of Terrence Malick films––Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The New World––along with interviews featuring actors Richard Gere, Sissy Spacek, and Martin Sheen; production designer Jack Fisk; costume designer Jacqueline West; cinematographers Haskell Wexler and John Bailey; and more.
Also in the lineup is an Afrofuturism series, featuring an introduction by programmer Ashley Clark, with work by Lizzie Borden, Shirley Clarke, Souleymane Cissé, John Akomfrah, Terence Nance, and more. There’s also Mariano Llinás’s 14-hour epic La flor, Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time, Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning, plus retrospectives dedicated to Mae West, Cary Grant, Barbra Streisand, and more.
Check out the lineup below and return every Friday for our weekly streaming picks.
Also in the lineup is an Afrofuturism series, featuring an introduction by programmer Ashley Clark, with work by Lizzie Borden, Shirley Clarke, Souleymane Cissé, John Akomfrah, Terence Nance, and more. There’s also Mariano Llinás’s 14-hour epic La flor, Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time, Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning, plus retrospectives dedicated to Mae West, Cary Grant, Barbra Streisand, and more.
Check out the lineup below and return every Friday for our weekly streaming picks.
- 11/24/2020
- by Leonard Pearce
- The Film Stage
The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.It was often said that women wanted to be with Cary Grant and men wanted to be Cary Grant, but perhaps no one was more consumed by the perception of Cary Grant—the handsome, unremittingly suave and stylish movie star—than Grant himself. “Even I want to be Cary Grant,” the actor once mused. Indeed, Grant’s public and on-screen persona was a carefully crafted, meticulously honed, and ultimately triumphant development, as much to suit the needs of his ascending celebrity as it was to shroud an unhappy childhood, a series of romantic passions and disappointments, and a latent dark side fostered by uncertainty and doubt. It was, however, and in any and all cases, resoundingly successful. Grant was the epitome of the movie star, a Hollywood icon and one of its most entertaining,...
- 10/22/2020
- MUBI
Thanks to our current situation, there aren’t many new movies being released at the moment. And while that’s a sad state of affairs for cinephiles, it does at least provide a good opportunity to look back and check out some golden oldies that might have so far slipped under your radar.
Luckily, the good old Beeb has you covered. Streaming service BBC iPlayer has acquired a bunch of big-screen masterpieces for your lockdown delectation, all produced by the legendary Rko Pictures – one of the “big five” studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
From powerhouse dramas to technicolour marvels, toe-tapping musicals to weird and wonderful B-movies, Rko produced some of Tinseltown’s all-time classic movies, and boasted some of the period’s biggest star signings – including Orson Welles, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Joan Fontaine and Robert Mitchum.
BBC iPlayer currently has 26 “silver screen classics” available to stream or download,...
Luckily, the good old Beeb has you covered. Streaming service BBC iPlayer has acquired a bunch of big-screen masterpieces for your lockdown delectation, all produced by the legendary Rko Pictures – one of the “big five” studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
From powerhouse dramas to technicolour marvels, toe-tapping musicals to weird and wonderful B-movies, Rko produced some of Tinseltown’s all-time classic movies, and boasted some of the period’s biggest star signings – including Orson Welles, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Joan Fontaine and Robert Mitchum.
BBC iPlayer currently has 26 “silver screen classics” available to stream or download,...
- 5/22/2020
- by Louisa Mellor
- Den of Geek
In 1975 Pauline Kael wrote an essay about Cary Grant for the New Yorker called “The Man from Dream City.” (The piece is still available to read in full on the magazine’s website.) In the year of Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nashville and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, an actor like Grant must have cut a musty figure, his name a reminder of a different time. The New Hollywood films that Kael championed at the magazine, from Bonnie and Clyde (1967) onwards, took a mean pleasure in defiling the sort of genteel, meticulously fine-tuned comedies with which Grant is synonymous—and yet, no-one can have seized better than Kael the quiddity of Grant, the essence of his stardom. In essence, “The Man from Dream City” reclaims Grant as a singular figure in cinema, proposing him as a revolutionary leading man. As we’ll see, Kael gets...
- 12/18/2018
- MUBI
In the new documentary Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, subject Scotty Bowers is referred to as the “pimp to the stars” during Hollywood’s Golden Age — and he more than lives up to the description. In an exclusive first look at Matt Tyrnauer’s film, Bowers makes some bold claims about sexual escapades with actors Cary Grant and Randolph Scott.
The documentary follows Bower, a former sex worker, as he describes his wild life running a brothel out of a gas station and divulges the many alleged secrets from his time acting as an escort to closeted gay celebrities.
The documentary follows Bower, a former sex worker, as he describes his wild life running a brothel out of a gas station and divulges the many alleged secrets from his time acting as an escort to closeted gay celebrities.
- 7/25/2018
- by Georgia Slater
- PEOPLE.com
Director Robert Wise, who won two Academy Awards for directing two of the most successful movie musicals of all time, West Side Story and The Sound of Music, died of heart failure yesterday; he was 91. Wise, who had just celebrated his birthday on Saturday, was rushed to the UCLA Medical Center after suddenly falling ill. Recently, the filmmaker had reportedly been in good health, and his wife, Millicent, was out of the country at the San Sebastian Film Festival, participating in a retrospective of her husband's work. An extremely versatile director whose films ranged from drama to horror to sci-fi to musicals, Wise got his start at RKO Studios as an assistant editor, a job he got thanks to his brother, who was in the studio's accounting department. Working his way up the ladder to full editor, Wise edited such films as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and My Favorite Wife before nabbing an Academy Award nomination for editing the legendary Citizen Kane. He also worked with filmmaker Orson Welles on The Magnificent Ambersons, and was involved in that movie's drastic re-editing, which was requested by RKO while Welles was out of the country; the missing footage from Ambersons, and Wise's falling-out with Welles over the final product, later became the stuff of legend. Two years after Ambersons, Wise was given his first job directing The Curse of the Cat People, which he co-directed with Gunther von Fritsch. Working on B pictures for RKO through the 40s, including the Boris Karloff vehicle The Body Snatcher, Wise came to the attention of critics with his prizefighter film The Set-Up (1949), which took place in real time. His films in the 50s were notably more high profile, starting with the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still; he also helmed So Big, Somebody Up There Likes Me, and I Want to Live, which won him his first Oscar nomination and a Best Actress award for Susan Hayward. In 1961, Wise attempted his first musical, an adaptation of the Broadway hit West Side Story, on which he worked (and reportedly clashed) with choreographer and co-director Jerome Robbins. The film, starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer (neither of whom did their own singing), was a massive hit and won ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture and directing honors for Wise and Robbins - neither thanked the other in their acceptance speeches. After making the creepily effective black-and-white thriller The Haunting (1963), Wise went back to musical territory with The Sound of Music (1965), the small story of a governess (Julie Andrews) in Austria that turned into a very, very big hit. Critically lambasted but a fervent, almost rabid favorite with audiences, it went on to become the highest-grossing movie ever released at that time, saved 20th Century Fox from imminent bankruptcy in the wake of Cleopatra, and won Wise his second Oscar in addition to Best Picture. Wise's output after The Sound of Music was scattershot in quality, and as he grew older he worked less frequently, but he helmed a number of notable pictures in the 60s and 70s: The Sand Pebbles, his last Best Picture nominee; the ill-fated Julie Andrews vehicle Star!; modernistic sci-fi thriller The Andromeda Strain; possession horror flick Audrey Rose; and the first Star Trek movie, appropriately titled Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The director's last feature film was Rooftops (1989), an attempt at a contemporary urban musical. Wise went on to become the president of both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Directors Guild of America, and found a devoted fan in filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who was said to be instrumental in getting Wise the American Film Institute's lifetime achievement award in 1998. Wise is survived by his wife, Millicent, and a son from a previous marriage. --Prepared by IMDb staff...
- 9/15/2005
- IMDb News
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