Review: Judas and the Black Messiah

by Lynn Lee

The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.  That isn’t Fred Hampton’s epitaph, but it could well be.  Only in his case, it wasn’t even half – more like a quarter.  At the age of 21, Hampton was already one of the brightest lights in the Black Panther Party when he was assassinated in his own home by the Chicago police, with help from the FBI, in 1969.  The most tragic aspect of his premature demise wasn’t that he was just getting started; it was that he had accomplished so much in such a short time and gave every indication he could have done so much more had he lived.  The second most tragic aspect was the identity of his betrayer: an African American FBI informant who had embedded himself in Hampton’s inner circle.

Both of these aspects get their due in Judas and the Black Messiah, the first non-documentary film to focus on Hampton and the man (and Man) who brought him down...

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Streaming 20:20 (Finale) - Soul, Let Them All Talk, and more...

ICYMI Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

Since it's crunch time to complete viewing before all the awards shows hit we've been surveying the films of 2020 that are already streaming for free (provided you have the services of courses), whether they're great, terrible or anywhere inbetween. Maybe you're looking to get caught up? We've been freezing films at the 20th minute and 20th second just for gimmicky time-stamped streaming roulette kicks. How many of these twenty 2020 pictures have you seen? 

Next up one of my favourites, soul number 102,2010,121,415

SOUL (Pete Docter & Kemp Powers, US)
Disney/Pixar. Original release date: December 25th. Streaming on Disney+

Didn't you love the design of the "Jerries" in Pixar's latest? It's so distinct visually. If only they had taken the genderlessness further and applied it to not just the names but the linework.

There's an implant. They put it in your shit. It's like... okay, It'll come back. It's fine, Lou. It's like 40 grand... 80 grand, whatever.

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How Had I Never Seen... "Monsoon Wedding"?

by Cláudio Alves

Last year, Chloé Zhao won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Nomadland. Unlike Cannes, which only awarded one woman (Jane Campion for The Piano) with the Palme d'Or in its history, Venice has named five female directors as the grand victors of its main competition. One of them, Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding, I hadn't seen.  Since the Criterion Channel has just added Mira Nair's 2001 Venice-winner, it seems like a good time to correct this lacuna. Without further ado, let's delve into the rainy festivities of this Monsoon Wedding…

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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.

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Mae West on Criterion

by Cláudio Alves

When she's good, she's very good. When she's bad, she's better. 

Mae West was one of the great stars of the Pre-Code era, though her reign as one of Hollywood's most popular queens was short-lived and curtailed by the advent of the Hays Code. Like Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz after her, West was a target of William Randolph Hearst's ire. According to legend, the millionaire wanted revenge on West after she had made insulting remarks concerning the acting abilities of Marion Davies, his mistress. Such conspiracies are fun and it's easy to paint Hearst as Old Hollywood's perennial villain, but they're rarely 100% true. Mae West's fall from grace is more complicated than a vendetta from a mogul and a bunch of outraged Catholics. She was one of a kind, a symbol of licentiousness and indecency, a provocateur whose triumph was as amazing as it was temporary... 

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