Review: Search Party (Season Four)

by Christopher James

Alia Shawkat returns as Dory Sief in the new fourth season of Search Party on HBO Max.Who doesn’t love a good quarantine binge? The minute HBO Max (finally) came on Roku, I began my binge of the first three seasons of Search Party. The beloved, niche TBS comedy about self-absorbed Brooklyn-ites became a strange, but satisfying watch during the day. Sure, the characters were unlikable enough to make the cast of Girls look like saints. Still, I couldn’t stop watching. Maybe that’s because there’s something satisfying about watching the character’s schemes and cover ups come unraveled. What began as a simple search party for a Facebook friend spirals into a murder trial three seasons later. The show continues to take big swings in season four that eventually pay off to be a highly memorable season of TV.

The fourth season, available on HBO Max today, takes us simultaneously further from and closer to that first season premise...

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Streaming Roulette, Jan: Gremlins, Fairy Tales, and Brothers from Another Planet

After the jump you'll find a listing of everything that's new to streaming this month (January 2021). But first we pick two handfuls of titles and 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?

[Voice offscreen]: All right, let's go.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN (1974) on HBOMax
People don't really talk about this in the days of the common false proclamation "everything is available online" but TV from previous decades is much harder to get a hold of than feature films (which have it bad enough). So it's always cool when a streaming service plays one. This telefilm was a big deal in the 1970s winning 9 Emmy awards including Best Actress for Cicely Tyson. In the UK it was released as a feature film and Tyson received a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress (losing to Joanne Woodward in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams)

These are the keys to perfect posture.

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'Tis the season to be Meryl

by Juan Carlos Ojano

As a Streeper myself, what a time to be alive!

Last week, two films starring 21-time Oscar nominee Meryl Streep debuted: the dramedy Let Them All Talk (Dec. 10 on HBO Max) and the musical The Prom (Dec. 11 on Netflix). A double feature in a year is nothing new to her; she just did that in the last two years. However, her films this year could not be anymore different in terms of subject matter and filmmaking style, but both show the wide range, skill, and adaptability that Streep has, proving that her “greatest living actress” title is nowhere near a product of baseless mythologizing...

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