Watching a car crash, train wreck, or other such accident triggers the human fight or flight instinct. It’s why we can’t look away from flashing lights on the highway as tow trucks and emergency vehicles drag away wreckage and tend to the wounded. Looking away goes against programmed behavior. Audiences tuning in to HBO’s four-part miniseries “Allen v. Farrow,” directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, won’t look away, either, but not because they’re watching a train wreck; that metaphor does a great disservice to the series’ nauseating effect.

Continue reading ‘Allen v. Farrow’: A Scathing Indictment Of Woody Allen Is Also Terribly Heavy-Handed & Undermining [Review] at The Playlist.

Every Tuesday, discriminating viewers are confronted with a flurry of choices: new releases on disc and on-demand, vintage, and original movies on any number of streaming platforms, catalog titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This weekly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching. 

It’s a lighter week than usual on the new release front – and that will probably hold from here on out, as the past couple of weeks have seen the disc arrival of the last few theatrical features of the year.

Continue reading The 5 Best Movies To Buy Or Stream This Week: ‘The Vast Of Night,’ ‘Jaws’ 4K & More at The Playlist.

Director Kirby Dick and producing partner/co-director Amy Ziering have spent the better part of the last decade deeply involved in exposing areas of American society where sexual assault runs rampant. They have the mechanics of the rape culture procedural doc down to a science, yet nothing in their films feels formulaic. Dick and Ziering’s latest foray into the field, “On the Record,” takes a more personal angle than their previous documentaries “The Invisible War” and “The Hunting Ground.” Rather than spotlighting individual stories as evidence of institutional failure, they follow one woman from the music industry and explore the cultural contexts undergirding her journey from survivor to warrior.

Continue reading ‘On The Record’ Is A Refreshingly Intersectional & Moving #MeToo Documentary [Review] at The Playlist.

Hollywood sure loves movies about movies, but when it comes to documentaries exposing their darkest secrets, the industry is much more reserved. Three years ago, Amy Berg directed “An Open Secret,” which explored the sexual abuse of teenage boys by major players in the movie business, and the documentary was barely released, landing in the hands a tiny distributor with limited reach. In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the producer Gabe Hoffman made the film available for free on Vimeo for a week.

Continue reading ‘The Invisible War’ & ‘The Hunting Ground’ Team Making Documentary About Sexual Abuse In Hollywood at The Playlist.