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

Click to read more ...

Chita Rivera Awards, Cher, and Film Choreography.

by Nathaniel R

Isnt It Romantic?

Did you know that Oscar once had a category for dance? Well, "Dance Direction" to be particular. Which is not quite choreography but close. The category was held for three years and discontinued after the 1937 Academy Awards. Despite the first three to four decades of Oscar ceremonies arriving in a time when movie musicals were plentiful, the Academy Awards never instituted a choreography category. The sole example, apart from Dance Direction was a special Oscar for Jerome Robbins for West Side Story (1961), a redundant trophy in a way since he also shared the Best Director Oscar win due to his choreography and dance direction on that immortal classic (currently being remade). 

At any rate, the Chita Rivera Awards, which sprung back to life three years ago (they were once called the Fred and Adele Astaire Awards)  DO give awards to movies for their dance sequences in two separate categories, in addition to their primary focus which is honoring Broadway and Off Broadway achievements...

Click to read more ...

Watch at Home: Into the Poppins-Verse and Triple Shoplifting Frontiers

Here's what's new for home viewing this past week or so.

New Blu-Rays/DVDS
• Mary Poppins Returns We here at TFE, despite being a musicals-inclined site, gave this one really short shrift this past season. It was not intentional but it was just that dang Christmas release date when everything is happening all at once. If you'd still like to discuss it let us know in the comments and perhaps we'll do a belated write-up
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse so fun... though we worry it'll spur a million sequels which will, by the very nature of the novelty of this one, be inferior.

More DVDs and new to streaming titles after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Soundtracking: 2018's Original Song nominees

by Chris Feil

Best Original Song always gets its fair share of side-eye among Oscar snobs and agnostics alike. Granted, some recent nominees have made a decent enough case for their argument - Alone Yet Not Alone, you are lost but not forgotten (or... alone in terms of being a bad nomination). But does this year's crop of tracks continue the category's uptrending in quality? I would argue it does and then some.

While our most expected nominee ("Shallow" obviously) provides the lineup a genuine hit song, we also have idiosyncratic picks as well as musicals and major artists nominated. This leaves the telecast with no rational choice but to allow all numbers to perform on the show, as they have been hesitant to do with lesser known nominees. So in addition to ranking the nominees, I have some suggestions on how to present all of them...

Click to read more ...

Blueprints: "Mary Poppins Returns"

This week, Jorge explores how a movie reintroduces iconic characters to a new generation.

When a new Mary Poppins movie was greenlit, many sighed a sigh of relief when it was announced that it wouldn’t be a remake of the 1964 classic, but rather a sequel. This new story would bring Mary Poppins back to the Banks children, who are adults now, and would look after their own kids now. Perhaps she would straighten the mess in their lives once again. 

The writers of this continuation faced the challenge of not only finding a new take inside the rest of author P.L. Travers’ series, but also reintroducing a character that has become a staple of cinema. A character who, because of the 60-year gap between movies, would be a completely different person. It turns out their answer was to treat it as if Mary Poppins had never left at all…

Click to read more ...