Best International Feature: France, Portugal, Spain

by Cláudio Alves

Europe is the most represented continent in the history of the Best International Feature Oscar. However, while some of its countries are regularly honored, others have been submitting for decades without luck. France, for instance, is the reigning champion of the category, having been nominated forty times. In contrast, Portugal - my country – holds the record for the most submissions without a single nod. For this chapter in our trip through world cinema, we arrive at these two nations' 2020 submissions as well as Spain's Netflix contender…

Click to read more ...

Gay Best Friend: Duncan in "Set It Up"

A series by Christopher James investigating the 'Gay Best Friend' trope in movies.

At 13 minutes into the movie, we meet Duncan (Pete Davidson). Very quickly after, we wish we hadn't met him.

I can admit this. Many of my choices for Gay Best Friend have been examples that I’ve loved. In the 90s and 00s, this was often one of the few ways we would see positive gay representation on the screen. Still, this trope can be negative when it leans on broad characterizations, the gay best friend as an empty accessory.

Netflix’s Set It Up (2018) was a breath of fresh air in some ways. Theatrical releases were reserved for either superhero movies or more “cinematic” prestige fare. The romantic comedy genre was being edged out, only to find its home on Netflix. Set It Up had all the makings of a Pillow Talk old-fashioned romantic comedy with the modern sheen of a How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Harper (Zoey Deutsch) and Charlie (Glen Powell) are overworked assistants who set their respective bosses up with each other (Taye Diggs and Lucy Lui) so they can have more work-life balance. Sparks fly between the bosses and assistants. 

Unfortunately, it features a “gay best friend” character that embodies everything that’s wrong with the stereotype and threatens to derail a perfectly fun movie...

Click to read more ...

Review: Vanessa Kirby is a tour de force in "Pieces of a Woman"

by Matt St Clair

British thespian Vanessa Kirby has been on a steady rise, having earned an Emmy nomination for playing Princess Margaret on The Crown while kicking action ass in both Mission Impossible: Fallout and Hobbs & Shaw. With Pieces of a Woman, Kirby is finally given a project where she takes center stage and she emerges as the shining star of a picture that’s drenched in darkness due to its distressing subject matter.

The first major sequence in Pieces of a Woman involving Martha's (Kirby) home birth will be a deal-breaker for some viewers...

Click to read more ...

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.

Click to read more ...

Review: The Midnight Sky

by Tony Ruggio

The Midnight Sky is a mild return to form for director George Cloonney. It’s simultaneously a greatest-hits album of science fiction filmmaking of the last ten years and a beautiful, melancholic story about regret. In the midst of a global pandemic, with more proof arriving every year of what danger might await us in our planet’s future (or even right now), we’re all more aware than ever of what terrible things are possible in this world. Somehow, decades of apocalyptic cinema did not prepare us.

Clooney is Augustine Lofthouse, a scientist who has spent his life finding habitable planets at the expense of his personal life, pushing away those closest to him to devote his life to saving our future...

Click to read more ...