News

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Black Is King (Beyoncé)

Four years ago, Beyoncé dropped the film version of Lemonade, which brought together directors Kahlil Joseph, Jonas Åkerlund, Mark Romanek, Melina Matsoukas, and more to deliver a visual album that, like many of her works, had an immense cultural impact. She is now returning with Black Is King, a film in production for an entire year that reimagines the tale of The Lion King through the perspective of the Black experience. Now available on Disney+, we imagine it’ll be the most-watched film of the weekend.

Where to Stream: Disney+

Bull (Annie Silverstein)

There’s not much to do around Kristyl’s (Amber Havard) hard...

Throughout his sixteen feature films, prolific Toronto-based, Egyptian-born filmmaker Atom Egoyan has explored obsession, modern technology, fragmented families, the unreliability of memory, and multicultural tensions embodied within Canada. His latest film, Guest of Honour, recalls his earlier films––including Family Viewing, Speaking Parts, The Adjuster, and Exotica––in a story featuring David Thewlis as a food inspector and Laysla De Oliveria as his adult child, wrongfully convicted of a crime she did not commit but agrees to serve the time for, in order to atone for other sins.

An intimate thriller told through the unreliable memories of its protagonist’s daughter, Guest of Honour is now available via Kino Marquee, supporting Virtual Cinemas. We spoke to Egoyan about the inspirations behind hiis latest film, launching at Venice and TIFF last year, and its place in his career spanning three and a half decades since his first feature, 1984’s Next of Kin.

As promised on Wednesday, a new trailer for Deadpool was released into the world this morning. Two trailers, in fact — one that Fox dubbed “naughty” and the other, seen here, “nice.” Bodies, cars and F-bombs fly with equal abandon on both. Depending on the depth of your immersion in warm and fuzzy Christmas cheer, neither version is Safe For Family Viewing, but there it is. Directed by Tim Miller and written by Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, Deadpool stars Reynolds (who…...

Fittingly, it took a shower to clean up primetime. Or at least to try. Forty years ago this month, The Family Viewing Hour was introduced to restore purity to television, and the effort was as mocked as it was cheered. Litigated, too. But everyone who was there agrees: The Family Viewing Hour did clean up primetime (whatever that meant). And it changed the course of television history. As the 2015-2016 season begins, with both choices and content getting (let’s go with) bolder and the definition of television itself changing, now is a particularly good time to look back at an era.

Cannes -- It's hard to know where to start when analyzing what went wrong with a film as preposterous and phony as Atom Egoyan's "The Captive," a kidnapping drama that kicked off the first Friday of this year's Cannes Film Festival. Egoyan is a frustrating filmmaker these days. In the early part of his career, his work was distinguished by a chilly, clinical style and a fascination with perspective. "Next Of Kin," "Family Viewing," and "Speaking Parts" all displayed enormous promise, and he hit his stride with films like "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter." Lately, though, his films feel half-baked, increasingly distanced from any recognizable human behavior, and with "Devil's Knot," his dramatic take on the story of the West Memphis Three, it felt to me like he'd gone completely off the rails as a storyteller. I couldn't even figure out what point he thought he was making with...

Thanks to the release of Oz: The Great and Powerful, Disney is seeing green this morning, or, more accurately, emerald. Oz earned a robust $80.3 million from 3,912 theaters in its first three days, which gave the 3-D adventure a tremendous $20,251 per theater average — not to mention bragging rights as the highest debut since The Hobbit’s $85.8 million bow in December. A solid 53 percent of Oz’s gross came from 3-D showings, while 10 percent ($8.2 million) came from 307 IMAX screens.

Oz’s daily grosses suggest it played very well with families. After a $24.1 million Friday, Oz ticked up 37 percent to $33 million on Saturday (for comparison,...

"Les Miserables" Director Tom Hooper and composer Mychael Danna will be honored at the 24th annual Palm Springs International Film Festival. Hooper is set to get the Sonny Bono Visionary Award while Danna will receive the Frederick Loewe Award for Film Composing. Both will join previous announced honorees -- the cast of Argo, Richard Gere, Sally Field, Helen Hunt, Helen Mirren, Naomi Watts and Robert Zemeckis. The Festival runs January 3-14.

(Watch my fun interview with Tom Hooper for "Les Miserables" right here, "Les Miserables" movie review)

Here's the complete press release:

Palm Springs, CA (December 18, 2012) . The 24th annual Palm Springs International Film Festival (Psiff) will present Academy Award®-winning director Tom Hooper with the Sonny Bono Visionary Award and Mychael Danna with the Frederick Loewe Award for Film Composing. Presented by Cartier, the Awards Gala will be held Saturday, January 5, at the Palm Springs Convention Center. Hosted by Mary Hart,...

Dark Blue dramatizes a procedural tale of corruption and social unrest set explicitly (though diffusely) against the backdrop of a decade prior, the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Part of what's intriguing here is how the film announces this setting immediately. Opening credits begin to roll, then the title card. Next: video footage, with a computer font typing out the location (“Los Angeles, California, 12:47 A.M. March 3, 1991”) in the lower right hand of the screen. Certain other markers give us stray bits of information: the Paxton St. exit, the speed of pursuit. The footage sets up the 1991 Rodney King beating—the acquittal of those Lapd cops in 1992 lighting the fuse for the South Central unrest which frames a lot of the action late in Dark Blue.

The videotaped image is murky, shaky, although the much-replayed footage of the beating itself (taped by George Holliday) is only shown for a few seconds.

Although Canada was long ignored as a film producing country, it has produced the English-speaking world’s two greatest filmmakers after 1990. If one of these is David Cronenberg, the other is Atom Egoyan, who, like David Lynch, is an artist whose work is compelling but also bewildering. If Lynch’s films attain their effects partly through Angelo Badalamenti’s music, Egoyan has had an equally important collaboration with composer Mychael Danna. The difference is perhaps that while much of Lynch’s cinema is surreal in some sense, many of Egoyan’s films – the earlier ones – are dominated by the absurd. If the ‘surreal’ is more striking, flamboyant and/or wildly comic, the ‘absurd’ is wrier. Both strive for truths that go beyond the ‘real’ but while the ‘surreal’ seeks out metaphysical and/or social truths the ‘absurd’ attempts to find truths of a personal and/or psychological nature.

Although Egoyan...

Directors must ask themselves, on occasion; is it really worth being part of an omnibus film? Little if anything links the trio of short films featured in the anthology E.S.F. beyond the fact each director is an up-and-coming Taiwanese. Nothing wrong with that per se, but the three are so wildly disparate in tone, length and arguably quality, getting them as a package deal is surely set to sour the effect for some potential viewers.

The opening film comes from director Chang Rong-Ji, who previously helmed the 2006 documentary My Football Summer, about a junior high sports team and their performance in Taiwan's National High School Games. At thirty-seven minutes At the End of the Tunnel is the longest of the three shorts, the story of a blind music student (musician Huang Yu-Hsiang) and a dancer (Taiwanese star Sandrine Pinna, Yang Yang, Miao Miao, Do Over) who inadvertently meet in high school,...

Three days ago, my friend Dalton Ross at Entertainment Weekly sent me an email and kindly offered me the opportunity to promote my new show Live for the Moment airing tonight at 8 p.m. on CBS and I said, "Absolutely!" What I thought I would do with this open-ended opportunity from EW.Com is use it as my own very public focus group. If you watch the show, I'd love for you to then respond to this column and tell me if you liked it or not. Tell me if you'd like to see more episodes, the kinds of people...

The latest, definitely Nsfw trailer for Atom Egoyan's Chloe comes from France where they're reputedly a lot happier about nudity and 'sensuality' than in the Us. You can see for yourself after the break. It will probably leave you with the impression that the French are quite happy about women kissing each other too. I wonder if they'll be happy with this remake of one of their local hits, Nathalie... which starred Emanuelle Beart, Gerard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant in the Amanda Seyfried, Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore roles respectively. I'm a longtime fan of Egoyan's, since Family Viewing knocked me upside the head half a lifetime ago. He's an ace with tense and unnerving thrillers about fraught relationship tangles, so I expect to find that he absolutely nailed this one to the post. Via Hollywood Elsewhere...

Back in the distant past…when the Earth was still cooling and there wasn’t any cable television, the three TV networks could produce series that didn’t have to violently compete for that much attention, confident in the knowledge that their audience had little in the way of alternatives.

Unfortunately for the industry, the current entertainment scene is far more predatory. Shows such as My Mother The Car or The Double Life Of Henry Phyfe would have barely enjoyed even the tenuous hold they managed 40 years ago. Survival these days requires something in the way of an edge.

Eastwick could use a close arrangement with a whetstone—or, as the episode “Fleas and Casserole” demonstrates, writers and directors who are comfortable with a genre project. The series is in danger of becoming a property without an anchor. Rather than being offered a much-needed element of the “Dreaded Unknown,” viewers...

Before the one-two punch of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter in 1995 and 1997 brought him wider recognition, Canada-based director Atom Egoyan was the premier chronicler of life in the video age, eking out small, hypnotic films (Family Viewing, Speaking Parts) about technology’s role in altering human relationships. The Sweet Hereafter was his first adapted screenplay, and it signaled a broader agenda in the subsequent decade, including another literary adaptation (Felicia’s Journey), a deeply personal, prismatic look at Armenian genocide (Ararat), and an awkward Martin & Lewis shadow history (Where The Truth Lies). Though this later period has its ...