If "Company" were a movie...

by Lynn Lee 

Company may be approaching its 50th birthday, but it’s never looked hipper – not that it ever really went out of fashion.  But between its prominent appearance in last year’s Marriage Story, a recent successful gender-switched revival in London that’s transferring to Broadway (previews just started!), Sondheim’s musical about a thirtysomething Manhattan bachelor and his various coupled friends is definitely having a(nother) moment. 

Which raises the inevitable question: why hasn’t anyone tried to make a movie out of it?  Could it even work as a movie?  I think it could...

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Posterized: Romanian Cinema

by Nathaniel R

Whistlers, the Romanian submissions for this past Oscar race opened in a few US cinemas this past week (we reviewed it in November). It's a blackly comic noir that's been compared to the work of the Coens and it comes from one of the most celebrated Romanian New Wave auteurs, Corneliu Porombiou.

Romanian cinema was largely neglected and underfunded until after the fall of Communism in 1989. Things began to pick up after that. In the mid-Aughts the country's cinema became a critical cause with prize-winning films emerging with great frequency. The country's most acclaimed cinema is often categorized by gallows humor and incisive or satiric socioeconomic and political commentary.

For the second episode of this new season of "Posterized" and  "Making Waves" a retrospective of Romanian cinema currently playing a US tour, we've selected the (arguably) 15 most famous and/or acclaimed films from the country over the past 30 years. How many of these  have you seen? Don't feel bad if your number is very low (we haven't seen the majority of them either) but do you see anything you've been meaning to catch up with or that now piques your interest? 

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Links

Tik Tok "Pull the lever, Kronk" - a genius bit of Emperor's New Groove lipsyncing
Hulu Lady in a Cage - don't forget to watch as we're discussing it on Monday night. And boy is there a lot to discuss!
Matt Reeves pics of the new Batmobile in The Batman (2021)
Coming Soon Superhero Christian Bale will now be a supervillain. He's facing off with Natalie Portman and Tessa Thompson in Thor: Love and Thunder (2021)...

More after the jump including Jacob Elordi, SXSW, The Eternals, Twenties, Chris Evans, and more...

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Horror Actressing: Haley Bennett in "Swallow"

by Jason Adams

Modern living breeds its own special brand of anxieties. It's a warm culture for bacteria. Walk around any big city these recent weeks and you'll see -- the face masks and the empty shelves where hand sanitizers once sat. We're internet ghosts, part people part machine, searching for apocalyptic keywords and wiping our screens down to curves where our fingers just fit. We're both exposed and isolated -- personal sized soap bubbles floating down every street; don't get too close lest you pop.

The ways this schism situates itself into our daily living, the way it expresses itself, varies-- personally I start to pluck hairs out of my beard if I stay still for too long. I know only too well the satisfactory sense of build and release, a manic arc unto itself, that such compulsions afford. There is a beginning and an end and then a beginning and an end -- a rollercoaster we control; a narrative of our making, our choosing, in days that feel anything but. 

In Swallow, out in theaters and on VOD today, Hunter (Haley Bennett) doesn't feel in control of her life, and so she does something about it...

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Would you rather?

We haven't looked at Instagram in ages. Let's play the game. Would you rather...

...go to the movies with Glen Powell?
...hike Topanga with Richard Madden?
...california dream' with Jennifer Tilly?
...get ready for summer with Beanie Feldstein?
...wrangle puppies with Olivia Newton-John?
...kiss a pig with Miles Heizer?
...get a headcast with Harry Shum Jr?
...read a new novel with Natalie Portman?
...or travel incognito with Octavia Spencer?

The photos are after the jump to help you decide...

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