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.
BlackBerry (Matt Johnson)
In BlackBerry, the rise of a blue-chip tech company sets the stage for the dissolution of a longstanding friendship. Sound familiar? Just wait ‘til you hear the score. Directed by Matt Johnson, it tells the true story of Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin, software engineers who founded the company Rim in the mid-80s and later invented a cellphone that could handle email. The film begins on the day when they meet Jim Basillie (Glenn Howerton), a Rottweiler who, alongside Lazaridis’ genius, turned Rim’s invention (only later christened BlackBerry) into the world’s most ubiquitous mobile device––at least for a time. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Hole in the Fence (Joaquín del Paso...
BlackBerry (Matt Johnson)
In BlackBerry, the rise of a blue-chip tech company sets the stage for the dissolution of a longstanding friendship. Sound familiar? Just wait ‘til you hear the score. Directed by Matt Johnson, it tells the true story of Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin, software engineers who founded the company Rim in the mid-80s and later invented a cellphone that could handle email. The film begins on the day when they meet Jim Basillie (Glenn Howerton), a Rottweiler who, alongside Lazaridis’ genius, turned Rim’s invention (only later christened BlackBerry) into the world’s most ubiquitous mobile device––at least for a time. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Hole in the Fence (Joaquín del Paso...
- 6/2/2023
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
This is probably an odd thing to say, but whenever watching a modern potboiler I find myself asking, “What would Bertrand Tavernier think?” The kind of French cineaste that found themselves most at home in the company of the disposable American crime film, the esteemed director could wax poetic on the most disreputable of pictures. If you squint during Hypnotic––a collaboration between Robert Rodriguez and Ben Affleck that’s likely been cooking since they first met at a 1997 Miramax holiday party––you can see faint traces of a classic noir like Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool, or something of such ilk.
Though pitched as somewhat of a Christopher Nolan-like mind-bender, this is a throwback of another stripe: to 2010, not 1948. Stripped of the comfortable Hollywood budget that would’ve greeted that pairing during their respective heydays, this initially seems like the pilot for a slightly more high-concept detective show before accounting...
Though pitched as somewhat of a Christopher Nolan-like mind-bender, this is a throwback of another stripe: to 2010, not 1948. Stripped of the comfortable Hollywood budget that would’ve greeted that pairing during their respective heydays, this initially seems like the pilot for a slightly more high-concept detective show before accounting...
- 5/12/2023
- by Ethan Vestby
- The Film Stage
We're back with another edition of Horror Highlights! In today's installment, watch the short film The Mother of Beauty, check out the new red band trailer for Becky, and find out what's coming to the Arrow Video Channel:
The Mother Of Beauty Short Film: "In ‘The Mother of Beauty’ a single mother-to-be lives in isolation on the edge of the wilderness. She makes a living through her work with vulture culture: using the remains of dead animals to create art and memorialize the lives that once were. As she attempts to overcome the struggles of parenthood, the forces of life and death pull her in opposing directions, and she must find a way to reconcile the two before they tear her apart."
Director: Nick Meunier
Producer: J.W. Cole
Co-producer & Writer: Lonnie Nadler
Starring: Tristan Risk
Director Of Photography: Steven Hayes
Production Design: Rob Warren
Editor: Adam MacKay
---------
Becky Red Band Trailer: "Spunky and rebellious,...
The Mother Of Beauty Short Film: "In ‘The Mother of Beauty’ a single mother-to-be lives in isolation on the edge of the wilderness. She makes a living through her work with vulture culture: using the remains of dead animals to create art and memorialize the lives that once were. As she attempts to overcome the struggles of parenthood, the forces of life and death pull her in opposing directions, and she must find a way to reconcile the two before they tear her apart."
Director: Nick Meunier
Producer: J.W. Cole
Co-producer & Writer: Lonnie Nadler
Starring: Tristan Risk
Director Of Photography: Steven Hayes
Production Design: Rob Warren
Editor: Adam MacKay
---------
Becky Red Band Trailer: "Spunky and rebellious,...
- 6/3/2020
- by Jonathan James
- DailyDead
The Notebook is the North American home for Locarno Film Festival Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian's blog. Chatrian has been writing thoughtful blog entries in Italian on Locarno's website since he took over as Director in late 2012, and now you can find the English translations here on the Notebook as they're published. The Locarno Film Festival will be taking place August 2 - 12. We can begin with one of those anecdotes that are the stuff of Hollywood, marking the birth of a star and mapping out a whole career. Gene Tierney had already caught the eye of Anatole Litvak when aged only 17 and, after a happy period of study abroad (right here in Switzerland, in Lausanne), had been invited by a cousin to visit a Hollywood film set. But she took her father’s advice and turned down an offer from Warner Bros in favor of starting on the stage, on Broadway.
- 1/9/2017
- MUBI
Coleen Gray actress ca. 1950. Coleen Gray: Actress in early Stanley Kubrick film noir, destroyer of men in cult horror 'classic' Actress Coleen Gray, best known as the leading lady in Stanley Kubrick's film noir The Killing and – as far as B horror movie aficionados are concerned – for playing the title role in The Leech Woman, died at age 92 in Aug. 2015. This two-part article, which focuses on Gray's film career, is a revised and expanded version of the original post published at the time of her death. Born Doris Bernice Jensen on Oct. 23, 1922, in Staplehurst, Nebraska, at a young age she moved with her parents, strict Lutheran Danish farmers, to Minnesota. After getting a degree from St. Paul's Hamline University, she relocated to Southern California to be with her then fiancé, an army private. At first, she eked out a living as a waitress at a La Jolla hotel...
- 10/14/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Coleen Gray actress ca. 1950. Coleen Gray: Actress in early Stanley Kubrick film noir, destroyer of men in cult horror 'classic' Actress Coleen Gray, best known as the leading lady in Stanley Kubrick's film noir The Killing and – as far as B horror movie aficionados are concerned – for playing the title role in The Leech Woman, died at age 92 in Aug. 2015. This two-part article, which focuses on Gray's film career, is a revised and expanded version of the original post published at the time of her death. Born Doris Bernice Jensen on Oct. 23, 1922, in Staplehurst, Nebraska, at a young age she moved with her parents, strict Lutheran Danish farmers, to Minnesota. After getting a degree from St. Paul's Hamline University, she relocated to Southern California to be with her then fiancé, an army private. At first, she eked out a living as a waitress at a La Jolla hotel...
- 10/14/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
★★★★★ Alongside Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, and John Huston, Otto Preminger was one of the most influential film noir directors in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. This new collection by the BFI gives us three of his finest works, namely Fallen Angel (1945), Whirlpool (1949) and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950). The collection itself is handsomely, if a little sparsely, presented with a small but informative booklet, and trailers and commentaries for each film.
- 9/29/2015
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
Night and the City
Written by Jo Eisinger
Directed by Jules Dassin
UK, 1950
Harry Fabian is probably the best at what he does, even if he is never very successful. Richard Widmark’s character in Night and the City, out now on a gorgeous new Criterion Collection Blu-ray, is a low-level con who works wherever he can, however he can, doing whatever he can to make a buck. He enters Jules Dassin’s 1950 film noir classic on the run; he will always be on the run: always hustling, always running. Sincere though his half-baked plans may be, he is perpetually—pathetically—down on his luck. He has the ambition, there’s no doubt about that, and as he shrewdly stumbles past one obstacle after another, it becomes almost humorous in the way he manages to charm his way through life, always just by the skin of his teeth. He cooks...
Written by Jo Eisinger
Directed by Jules Dassin
UK, 1950
Harry Fabian is probably the best at what he does, even if he is never very successful. Richard Widmark’s character in Night and the City, out now on a gorgeous new Criterion Collection Blu-ray, is a low-level con who works wherever he can, however he can, doing whatever he can to make a buck. He enters Jules Dassin’s 1950 film noir classic on the run; he will always be on the run: always hustling, always running. Sincere though his half-baked plans may be, he is perpetually—pathetically—down on his luck. He has the ambition, there’s no doubt about that, and as he shrewdly stumbles past one obstacle after another, it becomes almost humorous in the way he manages to charm his way through life, always just by the skin of his teeth. He cooks...
- 8/12/2015
- by Jeremy Carr
- SoundOnSight
Jean‑Luc Godard's masterpiece remains a startling example of the French new wave and marked the arrival of one of cinema's most influential directors
Two trailers bookend my half-a-century of writing professionally about the cinema and bracket the career of the man who is arguably the most influential moviemaker of my lifetime. Fifty years ago this month I dropped into an Oslo cinema while waiting for a midnight train and saw an unforgettable trailer for a French picture. It cut abruptly between a handsome, broken-nosed actor I'd never come across before, giant posters of Humphrey Bogart, and the familiar features of Jean Seberg, whom I knew to be an idol of French cinéastes as the protegee of Otto Preminger. Shot in high contrast monochrome, rapidly edited, interspersed with puzzling statements in white-on-black and black-on-white lettering, it was like no other trailer I'd seen, and I was captivated. Not until my...
Two trailers bookend my half-a-century of writing professionally about the cinema and bracket the career of the man who is arguably the most influential moviemaker of my lifetime. Fifty years ago this month I dropped into an Oslo cinema while waiting for a midnight train and saw an unforgettable trailer for a French picture. It cut abruptly between a handsome, broken-nosed actor I'd never come across before, giant posters of Humphrey Bogart, and the familiar features of Jean Seberg, whom I knew to be an idol of French cinéastes as the protegee of Otto Preminger. Shot in high contrast monochrome, rapidly edited, interspersed with puzzling statements in white-on-black and black-on-white lettering, it was like no other trailer I'd seen, and I was captivated. Not until my...
- 6/9/2010
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Every Hollywood studio had its distinctive style, partly brought about by artists it had under contract. This quartet of classic 20th Century-Fox thrillers features three films directed by Otto Preminger (Fallen Angel, 1945; Whirlpool, 1949; Where the Sidewalk Ends, 1950). The fourth film is the greatest noir movie made in Britain, Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950), the first film I saw being made. As an impressionable 15-year-old, I (and my parents) stumbled across a shoot in a Soho alley featuring Fox's new heavy Richard Widmark and femme fatale Googie Withers. Gene Tierney (the eponymous Laura in Preminger's first venture into noir) is in three of the movies, her Laura co-star Dana Andrews in two of them. Indicative of the way the genre reflected disturbing social undercurrents is that in all these films there were people – actors, writers and a director (Jules Dassin) – who became blacklisted McCarthy victims.
DVD and video reviewsPhilip French
guardian.
DVD and video reviewsPhilip French
guardian.
- 12/20/2009
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
BFI, retail
Night and the City is the stand-out title here, a top-quality example of the genre with the unusual feature that the mean streets through which smalltime hustler Richard Widmark plies his trade are the still-familiar ones of postwar London.
Like his lead character, Jules Dassin, whose direction is exhilarating, was on the run – from the McCarthy witchhunt in Hollywood. He's best-known for Rififi , but this is every bit as good, weaving an elaborate plot around its club owners and gangsters. Widmark, slippery but soulful, rises to the challenge amid an excellent cast and this deserves to be much better known. Backing it up are a trio of Fox films made by Otto Preminger, Fallen Angel, Whirlpool and When the Sidewalk Ends. Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney are prominent in satisfyingly shadowy dramas and the BFI gives it lots of useful back-up material in an attractive package.
DVD and video reviewsThrillerRob Mackie
guardian.
Night and the City is the stand-out title here, a top-quality example of the genre with the unusual feature that the mean streets through which smalltime hustler Richard Widmark plies his trade are the still-familiar ones of postwar London.
Like his lead character, Jules Dassin, whose direction is exhilarating, was on the run – from the McCarthy witchhunt in Hollywood. He's best-known for Rififi , but this is every bit as good, weaving an elaborate plot around its club owners and gangsters. Widmark, slippery but soulful, rises to the challenge amid an excellent cast and this deserves to be much better known. Backing it up are a trio of Fox films made by Otto Preminger, Fallen Angel, Whirlpool and When the Sidewalk Ends. Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney are prominent in satisfyingly shadowy dramas and the BFI gives it lots of useful back-up material in an attractive package.
DVD and video reviewsThrillerRob Mackie
guardian.
- 11/27/2009
- by Rob Mackie
- The Guardian - Film News
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.