Streaming Roulette, April: The Blazing Perks of Molly's Xanadu

by Nathaniel R

If you're new to the site this is how we share new streaming offerings for the month. We select a handful or two of titles and just randomly hit a place on the scroll bar to see what the film looks like - no cheating.  Ready? Let's play...

VO: And since I heard that having a girlfriend makes you happy I tried hard to love her like I love Sam.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) on Netflix
Sweet movie. Remember Logan Lerman? We had such a good interview with him for this movie. Sad that he's trapped on a tv series with bad reviews at the moment (Hunters). 

Click to read more ...

Doc Corner: 'Tiger King' is a Disturbing Mess

By Glenn Dunks

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness is the undisputed king of the internet right now. A zeitgeist that has steamrolled over a society that has been stuck inside, isolated with little else to do but binge and over-indulge on anything that distracts the mind and the body. Scratch beneath the veneer of its sneering Christopher-Guest-goes-to-the-trailer-park milieu and Tiger King proves to be lazy at best, morally corrupt at worst. Expanded out to an over-confident seven episodes, directors Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin dig their series deeper into grimy, ethically dubious territory with little of that digging towards something substantial.

The story of Tiger King, though, is certainly interesting. How could it not be considering the ever-escalating crime saga of Joe Exotic, a private big cat zoo owner and operator whose life gravitates towards weird and weirder. He’s a true drama queen...

Click to read more ...

Toshiro Mifune @ 100: The Hidden Fortress

Team Experience is celebrating the Centennial of Japan's great movie star Toshiro Mifune for the next few days. Here's Nathaniel R...

Raised as an American child (through no fault of my own) in the era when the original Star Wars trilogy first captured the world's hearts, it's perhaps unsurprising that I knew Star Wars before any of its influences. Though my innate interest in cinema led me eventually to "Akira Kurosawa's greatest hits" somehow The Hidden Fortress (1958), always escaped my eyes. I knew of it mainly only as 'that movie that everyone says inspired George Lucas's space opera.' 

It would be foolish to pretend with snobbish cinephilia that the original Star Wars film doesn't improve on its then 19 year-old inspiration, but The Hidden Fortress deserves more than this footnote status; minor Kurosawa is still Kurosawa...

Click to read more ...

Review: The Hunt (2020)

by Tony Ruggio

Blumhouse’s much-ballyhooed American political satire has finally seen the light of day after postponement due to a mass shooting last August, only to meet an unprecedented global pandemic this spring. With multiplexes closed nationwide, it’s one of a few major motion pictures to release early on VOD. Eschewing anything resembling subtlety or a desire to make a cogent point, The Hunt is a glib quasi-horror romp designed to prod and provoke, but dips into irrelevance by trying too hard for that sweet spot of zeitgeist...

Click to read more ...

Five Reasons to Watch "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" Immediately

by Murtada Elfadl

A movie event of the highest order is a click away, at least for those of us in the US. 

#1 Portrait of a Lady on Fire is now streaming on Hulu. You can watch right this very second if you want.

#2 There’s a lot of choices on streaming but this gives you the chance to swoon as you watch. Gorgeously shot, Portrait is a romance between an artist (Noémie Merlant) and her subject (Adèle Haenel) set in late 18th century France, that smolders with heat and passion...

Click to read more ...