Streaming Roulette: Monstrous Kaitlyn, Shifty William H, and Ubiquitous Sharon

After the jump you'll find a listing of everything that's new to streaming this month (October 2020). But first we pick two handfuls of titles and we just randomly freeze them with the scroll bar. Whatever comes up is what we share. Do these images make you want to see (or rewatch) the movie? 

[Church choir singing]

Dick Johnson is Dead (2020) on Netflix
Filmmaker Kirsten Johnson dramatizes her father's death in multiple ways to help them both prepare for it. Glenn reviewed this buzzy new documentary for us in his weekly column.

Nononononononono. That's not how we're going to talk to one another. I will not be that guy. You cannot put me in that category: the biological father I spend every other week with and I make polite conversation while he drives me places and buys me shit."

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Monty @ 100: "The Heiress"

by Camila Henriques

Montgomery Clift achieved greatness early in his career. Just one year into the Hollywood industry, he was tapped to co-star in a period drama by William Wyler, who was still riding the waves of the second of his three best directing Oscars, for 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives. It was the combination of a very particular brand of acting and heartthrob looks that made Clift a star, and that mix is undoubtedly present in The Heiress.

Cemented in Hollywood history as the film that garnered Olivia de Havilland a second well-deserved Oscar, The Heiress also arguably introduced Monty as the romantic (or not) lead...

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Horror Costuming: The Skin I Live In

In October, we'll be celebrating the excellence of costume design in horror cinema.

by Cláudio Alves

Pedro Almodóvar's 19th feature harkens back to a time two decades earlier when the Spanish director was one of European cinema's most shameless provocateurs, an enfant terrible willing to rub the face of polite society in utter tastelessness, jolly amorality, and lustful perversity. Adapted from a novel by Thierry Jonquet, The Skin I Live In is a sordid tale that mixes melodrama with horror, handsome mad scientists and beautiful Frankenstein monsters. More than anything, as its title suggests, this is a film about skin and the places people inhabit…

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In Defense of "The Bling Ring"

by Matt St Clair

After first making her mark as a director with her one-two punch of The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, for which she won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and became the third woman in history to be a Best Director nominee, Sofia Coppola’s work has been met with rather mixed reception. Thankfully, the response to her latest feature On the Rocks, which premiered at NYFF, has leaned positive. But this post is dedicated to what is a rather misunderstood masterpiece from the auteur and that is 2013’s The Bling Ring. A fictionalized account of a series of real-life burglaries, The Bling Ring  unexpectedly served as a prelude to our recent renaissance of “eat the rich” pictures...

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NYFF: the queer slow cinema of Tsai Ming-liang's "Days"

by Sean Donovan

Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang’s brand has reached a point where any objections to his style seem of limited use or value. At this point in his career, Tsai is going to do what Tsai is always wont to do- which is make films composed of far less shots overall than most filmmakers working today, some stretching as long as 10 minutes, studies in slow repetition and urbane melancholy, sometimes touching on queer themes but just grazing them (Tsai himself is gay). When a filmmaker’s brand is so immediately recognizable it’s sometimes met with impatience and boredom by audiences, as if wondering ‘when are they gonna just get over this already?’ ‘How many lengthy shots of people doing housework is too many?’ Matías Piñeiro’s latest entry in the New York Film Festival, Isabella, received notices of exactly this kind from many critics, wondering what the balance is between honing a brand vs. refusing to develop creatively (I reviewed the film here for TFE to a similarly lukewarm shrug). 

Yet with Tsai Ming-liang I find myself not caring whatsoever about any criteria of versatility or artistic variance in his work...

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