FYC: Robert Pattinson for Best Actor & Supporting Actor

by Cláudio Alves

Margot Robbie isn't the only actor with more than one performance in buzzy productions. 2019 has been a year full of actors with sterling bodies of work. There's also Scarlett Johansson, Laura Dern, Adam Driver, among many others. I'd like to shed light on the excellence of a star whose work is quite far from Oscar's presumed radar. I'm talking about a former heart-throb turned character actor who spent the year getting drunk with Willem Dafoe, facing the challenges of single-parenthood in outer space and casting aspersions at Timothée Chalamet's disproportionate genitalia.

That's right, we're here to sing the praises of the one and only Robert Pattinson. First, we have his adventures with a fuckbox, a mad scientist and a baby…

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Soundtracking FYC: 5 Original Song Outsiders Worth Nominating

by Chris Feil

This year’s longlist of eligible Original Song contenders should be arriving right on schedule in a month’s time, so what better time to shed some light on a few under-the-radar favorites than the present! Conventional wisdom at this stage in the race is falling as it typically does: to big pop stars and returning songwriting champions...

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Streaming Roulette, Oct: High Life/Noon and Handfuls of Dust.

As is our practice we've selected a handful plus of new-to-streaming titles and frozen them at utterly random moments without cheating (whatever comes up comes up!). After those selections we've listed all the movies from each of the streaming channels. What should you queue up for OCTOBER 2019 ? (★ means we definitely recommend catching them and bold titles are buzzy things we haven't yet seen) 

Let's get started...

[mood music]

HIGH LIFE (2019) on Amazon Prime
Funnily enough this empty shot is exactly as I recall High Life, so much atmosphere and isolation. Humanity is over. (Except for Juliette Binoche who is just living for her disturbing role.) We expect this will end up on some top ten lists at year's end...

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Watch at home: Strange things to tell the bees during the Peterloo massacre

Nathaniel R giving you the heads up on what's newly available to screen at home.

DVD/Blu-Ray/Rental
• High Life - In which Dr Juliette Binoche gets nasty with her patients and Robert Pattinson mopes around in outer space while caring for an infant.
• Tell It to the Bees - In which Dr Anna Paquin seduces her new friend Holliday Grainger (fine performance!) in a small homophobic British town in the 1950s. But it's actually a sentimental family movie of sorts. Watch out for the unintentionally hilarious killer bees! 

Also newish on blu-ray and/or DVD: Pet Sematary, The Best of Enemies, Little, After, Mojin: The Worm Valley, and Gotham (the complete series). 

iTunes 99¢ Deals
Titles you can rent on the cheap this week include the orgiastic French film Climax, 2016's Best Picture winner Moonlight, 2017's very best film Lady Bird, the new horror classic The VVitch, Bong Joon-ho's popular South Korean monster movie The Host, and the charming Eighth Grade.  They're also offering up Don Jon & Under the Skin in a stealth attempt to remind you of what a genre-hopping ridiculously talented and versatile actress Scarlett Johansson is. Be happy that she shakes off the Marvel shackles very soon (Black Widow is currently filming). Who knows what pleasures await when she can step out of that one genre and into all genres again!

Streaming this week

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New Podcast: High Life, Sauvage, and Mary Kay Place in Diane

by Murtada Elfadl and Nathaniel R

 

Index (50 minutes)
00:01 Claire Denis' High Life starring Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, and the Fuck Box
16:00 A gay hustler movie from France Sauvage/Wild
24:10 Mary Kay Place is Diane in Kent Jones' intimate narrative debut starring a slew of underutilized older actresses
34:50 What we've been seeing on Broadway as the Tony nominations approach
44:44 Coming Soon & miscellaneous silliness since Murtada wants to know if Cate Blanchett is in Avengers: Endgame)

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Sauvage Diane