Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.
Afire (Christian Petzold)
Writing recently about the introduction of video umpires in baseball, of all things, Zach Helfand was skeptical: “accuracy is not the same as enjoyment,” he wrote, “baseball is meant to kill time, not maximize it.” The best films of German director Christian Petzold do both, though you sense his heart might belong to the latter. Petzold’s latest, Afire, unfurls with all the page-turning seduction of a gripping novella. It stars Thomas Schubert as a struggling writer who travels with a friend to a secluded house near the Baltic Sea. Their car breaks down. They encounter a beautiful woman. Somewhere in the distance, a forest fire rages. Soon, inevitably, another burns inside. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream:...
Afire (Christian Petzold)
Writing recently about the introduction of video umpires in baseball, of all things, Zach Helfand was skeptical: “accuracy is not the same as enjoyment,” he wrote, “baseball is meant to kill time, not maximize it.” The best films of German director Christian Petzold do both, though you sense his heart might belong to the latter. Petzold’s latest, Afire, unfurls with all the page-turning seduction of a gripping novella. It stars Thomas Schubert as a struggling writer who travels with a friend to a secluded house near the Baltic Sea. Their car breaks down. They encounter a beautiful woman. Somewhere in the distance, a forest fire rages. Soon, inevitably, another burns inside. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream:...
- 10/20/2023
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
When singled-out within a purely visual medium, sound becomes intrinsically linked to the theme of obsession: a mystery the eyes can’t see that the protagonist needs to solve. From John Travolta’s Jack Terry unwittingly stumbling into a murder conspiracy when recording foley effects for a slasher flick in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out to Tilda Swinton’s Jessica trying to find the source for the “rumble” that haunts her every waking moment in Memoria, the inability to define a sound’s origin becomes a gripping enigma within a medium that thrives on showing, not telling. Much like De Palma’s film, the latest from visual artist Ann Oren takes as its starting point a recording studio––albeit a makeshift one, set up solely to record the sound effects for a bizarre TV commercial––but follows a much less conventional path to untangle an artist’s growing fixation...
- 8/22/2023
- by Alistair Ryder
- The Film Stage
Blow Out
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital HD
Criterion
1981 / 2.39 : 1 / 108 Min.
Starring John Travolta, Nancy Allen
Written by Brian De Palma
Directed by Brian De Palma
In 1978’s The Films in My Life, Francois Truffaut wrote that all movies should express “the joy of making cinema.” The typical Brian De Palma film delivers that pleasure in spades, but any joy experienced by his characters is usually short-lived, undercut by De Palma’s macabre and merciless humor. The paradigm for that unsparing world view is 1981’s Blow Out, a feature-length sick joke with a devastating punchline.
Blow Out is set in Philadelphia when the leaves are turning and the mood is jubilant—the city is celebrating its founding with a procession of parades, fireworks, and endless speeches, all leading to a self-congratulatory finale called “Liberty Day.” So the town is more raucous than usual—a bad break for Jack Terry whose...
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital HD
Criterion
1981 / 2.39 : 1 / 108 Min.
Starring John Travolta, Nancy Allen
Written by Brian De Palma
Directed by Brian De Palma
In 1978’s The Films in My Life, Francois Truffaut wrote that all movies should express “the joy of making cinema.” The typical Brian De Palma film delivers that pleasure in spades, but any joy experienced by his characters is usually short-lived, undercut by De Palma’s macabre and merciless humor. The paradigm for that unsparing world view is 1981’s Blow Out, a feature-length sick joke with a devastating punchline.
Blow Out is set in Philadelphia when the leaves are turning and the mood is jubilant—the city is celebrating its founding with a procession of parades, fireworks, and endless speeches, all leading to a self-congratulatory finale called “Liberty Day.” So the town is more raucous than usual—a bad break for Jack Terry whose...
- 10/4/2022
- by Charlie Largent
- Trailers from Hell
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