More International Contenders including a Student Academy Award Winner!

Since the last roundup the following countries have been added to the list of contenders for this year's Best International Feature Film race bringing our total to 77 contenders.

• Argentina -The Sleepwalkers
• Armenia - Songs of Solomon
• Bolivia - Chaco
• Egypt - When We're Born (a musical!) 
• Hungary - Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (Hungary & Oscar)
• India - Jallikattu (streaming on Prime)
• Ireland - Arracht
• Italy - Notturno (Reviewed | Italy & Oscar) 
• Lebanon - Broken Keys (more on this one below)
• Philippines - Mindanao
• Thailand - Happy Old Year (streaming on Netflix)

You can follow the list as it grows at our Oscar charts or on our Letterboxd list.  

Jimmy Keyrouz. Photographed by Christophe Meireis.

One of fun trivia items about this new batch is that Jimmy Keyrouz, the 32 year old behind Lebanon's Broken Keys actually has Oscar history. He won a Student Academy Award for his short Nocturne in Black four years ago. That short didn't end up getting Oscar-nominated, but he made the finalist list. Now his first feature, about a pianist struggling to repair his piano in a town where terrorists have banned music, is submitted by his home country. How about that? Congratulations! 

If you want to watch the submissions, 12 of the 77 titles are streaming.

 India's Jallikattu is on Amazon Prime, Guatemala's La Llorona is on Amazon, Indonesia's Impetigore is on Shudder or Roku, Lithuania's Nova Lituania is on MUBI, South Korea's Man Standing Next is on Amazon, YouTube, or iTunes, and Chile's The Mole Agent on Hulu. Netflix has the other six currently available titles: Austria's What We Wanted, Mexico's I'm No Longer Here, Spain's The Endless Trench, Taiwan's A Sun, Turkey's Miracle in Cell No 7, and Thailand's Happy Old Year. 

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Doc Corner: 'Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist'

By Glenn Dunks

We’re back with another film about the making of a classic movie (after last week's Television Event), this time a title that's streaming right now on Shudder. It is Alexandre O. Phillippe doing his thing; a horror behind-the-scenes-doc majestically titled Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist. Artistically speaking, it is probably his best movie yet. (But from me that’s faint praise indeed.)

The problem with a director like Phillippe is that he tends to take incredible works of art and then bleeds them dry. 78/52, his most well-known feature to date, somehow turned the shower sequence of Hitchcock’s Psycho into a routine film school dissertation. He takes iconic horror and performs a very practical (to the point of strict orderliness) dissection. The intellectual passion is there, but that doesn’t necessarily always make for the most scintillating of viewing.

It would have been easy to make a more traditional making-of documentary about The Exorcist. Hell, there’s enough of them out there to prove that. (I would recommend the Exorcist episode of Shudder’s Cursed Films if you want more of the making of style).  What makes Leap of Faith interesting is that Phillippe has done something of the opposite...

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Cláudio gives thanks, 2020

by Cláudio Alves

2020 has been a rollercoaster of a year, as full of dismay as of jubilation. I started it sick, feverish, and bone-tired, a fitting first chapter to an annus horribilis fated to forever be remembered for worldwide disease. As the months unfurled, much happened, including cinematic triumphs whose wonder I couldn't believe, universal despairs I hoped would always be enclosed in my nightmares, loss, and life. 

Thanksgiving isn't a holiday we have in Portugal, but I admire the idea of celebrating gratitude, of giving thanks to what makes our existence happy or at least tolerable. With that in mind, I'd like to express my gratitude for some wonders of cinema, TV, and pop culture, that made living through 2020 just a tiny bit easier…

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Showbiz History: Milk baths, hit singles, and Montalban's centennial

7 random things that happened on this day (Nov 25th) in showbiz history... 

1932 Claudette Colbert infamously bathes in milk in Cecil B DeMille's The Sign of the Cross, new in theaters.

1947 The Hollywood Blacklist begins, denying employment to those with perceived Communist ties or sympathies. This period has haunted self-reflecting Hollywood since as witnessed in Trumbo, The Way We Were, Guilty by Suspicion, Good Night and Good Luck, and numerous other movies...

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Daniel Gives Thanks, 2020

Somehow it’s November! Any retrospective look back at 2020 is surreal, particularly given that this feels like the 9th month of March and we're speeding into another lockdown here in New York City. But I suppose the year really is almost over! So here are some of the movie and TV-related things I’m thankful for this year.

• The opera-obsessed hotel clerk in The Whistlers

• Taco Chronicles on Netflix, which is addictive and charming, and which has turned me into a Lady Tacos de Canasta superfan

• This couch in Shirley:

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