Watch at Home: Dumplin', Searching, and Leave No Trace

What's newly available for home viewing these past few weeks? We've neglected to keep you updated of late in the rush to awards season  but this is important since there are several awards contenders that are newly available.

DVD/Blu-Ray
[links to to reviews]
• The Little Stranger - Lenny Abrahamson (Room) returns with a ghost story costume drama.
• Lizzie - Kristen Stewart and Chloe Sevigny star in this lesbian drama about the infamous ax wielding Lizzie Borden
• McQueen - the acclaimed documentary about the fashion designer - it's eligible for the Oscars.
• Mission: Impossible - Fallout - the latest installment in Tom Cruise's evergreen franchise with death defying stunts, double crossing, and (this time) Henry Cavill's moustache and muscles.
• Searching - John Cho is nominated for Best Actor at the Spirit Awards for this sleeper hit about a man searching for clues online when his daughter goes missing

ALSO NEWISH: Peppermint, Smallfoot, The Equalizer 2, The Nun, The Happytime Murders, and Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days.

Great rental deals and streaming options after the jump...

Click to read more ...

This week in unfortunate headlines...

Since we were just talking about Ben is Back...

Thanks to Jazz (from Awards Daily) for sharing this with us. It's from the Post Journal of Jamestown. Do you think someone got fired? 

Doc Corner: The Thrilling 'United Skates'

By Glenn Dunks

Dyana Winkler and Tina Brown’s utterly divine United Skates begins with a tangle of bodies that zig, zag and spin across a roller rink floor in choreographed fashion. Close-ups of sweat-damp skin and excited faces. Neon signs, fluorescent clothes and a thumping beat. In just these brief opening moments before the title crashes on screen, I was hypnotised by the way the camera was capturing these people and embedding itself on the floor, swooping and swinging with as much vigour as the people its watching. The way it captures their passion, their movement and, without even saying a word, their unbridled joy and the memories of days gone by.

It’s my favourite opening of the year; nothing has quite approached the very simple act of hooking me so immediately and in such a way that I bolted upright, eager to see where I was going to be taken. Luckily, United Skates isn’t just about the roller skates and the booty shorts and the basslines. It’s about so much more, smartly using a nostalgic touchstone of African American culture as a means to dissect contemporary issues around race.

Click to read more ...

Learning iMovie and Making Lists with Chris

Chris here with some more listy goodness that Nathaniel wanted me to pass along: my own! This year rather than going the normal listicle route for my Best Of, I tought myself iMovie to make a video montage as both a love letter to the cinematic year and present my Top 20. Consider this a Soundtracking side quest, because I lean hard into my song choices. One thing I learned from teaching myself something new (aside from the technological mishaps - but hey, staring at films you love sure does ease all frustrations), is how to find similar narrative threads in the movies that move us, which I was able to do through song choices shared over multiple films.

Consider this a small peek into my ballot (which is in full here) for next month's Team Experience Awards, or hopefully just a quick way to bask in the past movie year as it comes to a close. We all love a montage, but I hope you love this one too! (NSFW for language)

2018 Film Year in Review from Chris Feil on Vimeo.

Soundtracking: 2018 Grammy Nominees at the Movies!

by Chris Feil

The Oscars aren’t the only big movie music prize on the horizon. Last week we got this year’s Grammy nominees and the Grammy voting committee has clearly been spending a lot of time at the movies this year! Aside from the film categories (more on that in a minute...) soundtracks showed up in major categories in a big way thanks to behemoths Black Panther and A Star is Born.

“All the Stars” from Panther and “Shallow” from Star both made it into the Record and Song of the Year categories, in addition to both getting nominated in the genre performance categories. But the biggest movie moment among the nominees has to be Kendrick Lamar’s nomination in Album of the Year for Black Panther’s soundtrack...

Click to read more ...