Cinemas remain closed or quiet until July, and studios have hit pause on releases, with Christopher Nolan's Tenet, opening on July 16, the first blockbuster release since the shutdown began.
In the meantime, we're spoilt for choice of streaming services: from Netflix, Stan, Foxtel Now and new streaming package Binge, to Amazon Prime Australia, Apple TV+ and Disney+, arthouse specialists MUBI, and free services like ABC iview, SBS On Demand and Tubi.
We've asked our regular film reviewers to comb through all these services and share recommendations, with a mix of subscriber-based and free. Expect new independent and arthouse, festival favourites, classics, and underrated films from the vault.
Best In Show (2000), A Mighty Wind (2003)
These highly quotable cult classics from Christopher Guest and his merry troupe of regulars are up there with predecessors This Is Spinal Tap and Waiting for Guffman in terms of oddball brilliance.
Long-time specialists in improvised, mostly affectionate parody, Guest and co. can be credited with popularising the mockumentary format. (That they seem to have lost some of their edge in the last decade — e.g. 2016's effort, Mascots — perhaps just reflects how quickly their distinctive style became a comedic standard.)
Aside from Eugene Levy, Parker Posey and Jane Lynch, Fred Willard must be mentioned here: the veteran actor's recent passing inspired many testimonials to his talent for stealing scenes with his blithely oblivious characters.
Between Best In Show, which tracks a handful of contestants at a prestigious national dog show, and A Mighty Wind (the gentler film of the two), which finds several folk groups reuniting for a concert, viewers should prepare to meet a host of eccentrics, all of them realised with an astonishing level of loopy detail by the players. KY
Watch on: Tubi
Jurassic Park (1993), The Lost World (1997), Jurassic Park III (2001)
The Jurassic Park series has long been torn between a spectacular sense of wonder and condemnation of mankind's commercial hubris, progressively cultivating the notion that humans might be the species better off extinct.
Steven Spielberg's original — one of American pop cinema's greatest-ever blockbusters — remains the perfect distillation of those impulses, a literal theme park ride whose high-tech simulacra would be nothing without its assured authorial voice, and the practical work of his collaborators. (See the 1984 short Prehistoric Beast for a glimpse at 'dinosaur supervisor' Phil Tippett's amazing, earlier stop-motion work.)
The Lost World, the unfairly maligned sequel, gives way to its director's darker, more juvenile — i.e. better — tendencies, to entertaining, B-movie effect: big game hunters get chomped, kids get to gymnastic-kick raptors, and a T-Rex cuts loose across San Diego in vintage Spielberg style.\
If Joe Johnston's workmanlike Jurassic Park III shows the franchise is starting to run thin on ideas and heavy with cargo pants and lacklustre CG, then its growing cynicism (and mutated super-saurs) sets the stage for the crass, fascinating Jurassic World a decade later. LG
Scarface (1987)
It's not hard to see why Al Pacino's Tony Montana, like Travis Bickle and Tyler Durden, inspires so much naive adulation in teenage boys and man-children. For a cocksure, trigger-happy psychopath, he's pretty damn charismatic.
And he's an underdog: a Cuban refugee in Miami, just out to secure his own piece of the American Dream. (In the 80s, that meant money, power and women.)
Written by Oliver Stone, scored by disco legend Giorgio Moroder, and featuring an icy, satin-swathed Michelle Pfeiffer in her breakout role, Brian De Palma's film charts Tony's rise to the position of underworld kingpin, and his swift, inevitable fall, in a torrent of blood, bullets and cocaine of positively operatic proportions.
"Don't get high on your own supply," is the advice given to Tony after his first big deal. Tony doesn't listen — and nor does De Palma; while the film is ultimately a cautionary tale, the director clearly revels in all the gory, gaudy excess as much as his legendary protagonist.
The teenage boy in you is gonna love it. KY
Watch on: Netflix from June 30
Women with Movie Cameras
While MUBI continue to deliver streaming premieres, (Ariane Labed's debut Olla, Sofia Bohdanowicz's festival fave MS Slavic 7), the boutique streaming service recently launched MUBI Library, an extensive film collection hosting everyone from Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas, and Chantal Akerman to a curated series by fashion designer Hedi Slimane and a pair of hallucinatory evangelical films from the 70s (Ron Ormond's The Burning Hell and The Believer's Heaven) that course with unintended magick.
Why not start with MUBI Library's Women with Movie Cameras, which offers a handful of classics by filmmakers like Ida Lupino and Marguerite Duras alongside a 21st-century-heavy selection of work — including the great debut by Eliza Hittman (Never Rarely Sometimes Always), It Felt Like Love (2013).
Nestled among the selection is the streaming premiere of Ena Sendijarevic's first feature Take Me Somewhere Nice (2019), a vibrant, pastel-hued coming-of-age road movie about a Dutch teenager's return to her father's hometown in Bosnia that dissolves, hypnotically, from cultural displacement into the existential abandon of youth. LG
Watch on: MUBI
The Holiday (2006), It's Complicated (2009)
No modern filmmaker understands the authenticity of artifice quite like Nancy Meyers, whose romantic comedies wrap the tangled emotions of relationships up in aspirational aesthetics, Golden Age of Hollywood reverence, lavender ice cream and luxury vanilla interiors (there's a reason the internet went into a mini-meltdown when she posted a quarantine picture of her kitchen on Instagram recently).
A high-gloss dispatch from some neo-Sirkian lifestyle catalogue, The Holiday (2006) is maximum Meyers, a movie in which a spontaneous Christmas house-swap sees a newly single Los Angelian (Cameron Diaz, in supreme screwball mode) curled up in a quaint, firelit Surrey cottage (and in the arms of a never-hotter Jude Law) while a lovelorn British journalist (Kate Winslet) splashes out in a creamy Hollywood Hills mansion.
It's Complicated (2009), meanwhile, wrestles with the vagaries of middle-age love against the lush homesteads of Santa Barbara, as fifty-something exes Alec Baldwin and Meryl Streep — both in delicious comedic form — find themselves in an unlikely affair with each other. "How very French of us," he insists; of course, Meyers ensures the film's style is all her own. LG
Watch on: Netflix from June 30
The Souvenir (2019)
Artists typically plumb autobiography in their first works, but it took writer-director Joanna Hogg 30 years and three (excellent) films before she was fully ready to wrestle with her own past and make this quiet, yet revelatory drama — casting Honor Swinton Byrne as the privileged naif Julie, a cipher for Hogg's youthful self, and Honor's real-life mother Tilda (who appeared in Hogg's student film in 1986).
Against the soundtrack of Thatcher's England — with snatches of The Fall and The Specials heard alongside off-screen political events, such as the IRA's bombing of Harrods — Julie stumbles her way through film school, and a relationship with an older man (Tom Burke) that becomes increasingly difficult, and whose consequences linger well past its expiry date.
As much a story about doomed romance as the often bruising work of self-discovery and personal upheaval, this elegantly crafted film-a-clef slips thoughtfully between art and life.
Luckily for us, The Souvenir: Part Two is on the way. ABB
Watch on: Amazon Prime from June 12
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014)
Before Spike Lee's latest Joint, Da 5 Bloods, premieres on Netflix on June 12, why not dig out some of his underseen efforts, whether his satirical masterpiece Bamboozled (2000) or this 2014 curio — a lurid, delightful mess.
Funded via Kickstarter and shot in just 16 days, it sees Lee audaciously tip his hat to history by reimagining Bill Gunn's independent classic Ganja and Hess (1973) — a hallucinatory fable about the wealthy anthropologist Dr Hess and his bride Ganja, who share a cursed taste for blood.
Gunn's was an experimental horror film that ingeniously transcended its Blacula sales pitch. Lee's enjoyably scattershot remake is perhaps even more ambitious. It seizes at metaphors of addiction, assimilation, bloodsucking parasites, and anything else it can grab its hands on, as Hess (Stephen Tyrone Williams) moves mournfully between distinct black and white worlds; from a Brooklyn Baptist church to his 40-acre Martha's Vineyard home (squired by goofy chauffeur Rami Malek). ABB
Watch on: Tubi
Freeway (1996), Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby (1999)
If a 50s teen exploitation drama huffed spray paint and woke up on an episode of The Jerry Springer Show directed by Harmony Korine, it might look something like Matthew Bright's twisted, tender tributes to the tearaway teens that fall through the cracks of America's juvenile detention system.
Loosely riffing on Little Red Riding Hood, Freeway stars pre-fame Reese Witherspoon as an illiterate, motel-dwelling teenager from hell who falls victim — or does she? — to Kiefer Sutherland's interstate-prowling serial killer. Outlandish and often filthy, it's no surprise that John Waters is a fan — he included it in his LGBT series "Movies That Will Corrupt You" in 2006.
Weirder, trashier, and altogether more troubled, the Hansel and Gretel-based Confessions of a Trickbaby features an even fouler-mouthed, big-haired Natasha Lyonne busting out of juvie with her murderous partner-girlfriend and headed for Mexico in search of Vincent Gallo's mystical, cross-dressing nun — a tabloid road paved by child abuse, eating disorders, and a healthy, forward-thinking dose of gender defiance. LG
Watch on: Tubi
Just Don't Think I'll Scream (2019)
A hot ticket at last year's Berlinale, this immensely watchable essay film sees cinephilia as both cage and sanctuary; addiction and cure.
The conceit is simple. Evoking Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988), it's composed entirely of excerpts — each just a few seconds long — pilfered from the 400-plus films that director Frank Beauvais watched over a six-month period in 2016, after splitting with his boyfriend. Grieving and isolated, he lived in a numb cycle of downloading and watching up to five films a day — an experience eerily akin to how some of us may have passed recent months.
The clips, a captivating hodgepodge of styles, eras and genres, are shorn of sound. Instead, the French filmmaker narrates in diaristic, confessional mode — about leaving Paris for rural Alsace, the death of his father, and political events that happen in a world that grows increasingly distant as he watches movies till dawn — while the exhausting flood of images beats on. ABB
Watch on: MUBI from June 25
Cemetery of Splendour (2015)
With the Sydney Film Festival forced to cancel this year's public event, a slender virtual program is running in its place. Alongside the slate of 33 new films, the festival has joined forces with SBS to present Sydney Film Festival Selects — a look back over their history, with 40 titles curated by SFF director Nashen Moodley.
Amongst the bunch lies Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's most recent feature, the near-perfect Cemetery of Splendour. It's also his most political yet, with allusions to ancient dead kings who trouble the living — namely the soldiers who suffer a mysterious sleeping sickness, housed in a sunlit old school that's been converted into a hospital and fitted out with glowing James Turrell-like tubes.
Set in his hometown of Khon Kaen, the unhurried and oddly peaceful film follows Apichatpong favourite Jen (Jenjira Pongpas Widner) as she tends to a snoozy soldier, befriends a psychic, and receives visits from princess spirits who take human form, while palms sway gently in the breeze. ABB
Watch on: SBS On Demand from June 10-July 10
Mikey and Nicky (1976)
One of many gems nestled in the treasure chest that is the newly unlocked MUBI Library, Elaine May's film is a gritty, bracing portrait of a friendship soured past the point of reparation, as seen unspooling in the course of a single, fateful night.
Sometimes collaborators (and real-life friends) John Cassavetes and Peter Falk give wildly compelling, nuanced performances as the titular pair of small-fry bookies: Nicky, played by Cassavetes, is ulcerous with anxiety after hearing that there's a hit out on him, and calls on Falk's Mikey, his oldest and perhaps only remaining pal, for assistance — not for the first time, it would seem.
A product of the creatively fecund but distinctly macho New Hollywood era, the film is unusual for having been written and directed by a woman.
May, now 88, has directed just four films (in addition to her accomplishments as an actress, writer, and comedian, I should say), all of them underappreciated upon release, but these days her name is often spoken in reverent tones by cinephiles.
Mikey and Nicky gives ample reason to chime in to the adoring chorus. KY
Watch on: MUBI
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMib2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTA2LTAyL2Jlc3QtZmlsbXMtanVuZS1zdHJlYW1pbmctd2hhdHMtb24tbmV0ZmxpeC1zdGFuLWFtYXpvbi1zYnMtdHViaS8xMjMwNTM1NtIBJ2h0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMjMwNTM1Ng?oc=5
2020-06-02 00:38:27Z
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