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, catalogue titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This biweekly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.

This week’s disc and streaming debuts include the latest from an Oscar-winning international filmmaker, the latest from a Film Twitter favorite, a pair of great 2020 documentaries, and two classics getting the 4K Criterion treatment.

Continue reading The Best Movies To Buy Or Stream This Week: ‘Last Night in Soho,’ ‘A Hero,’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ & More at The Playlist.

We’re not even there yet, but The Criterion Collection is planning on ringing in 2022 with a bang and doing so by celebrating some amazingly inventive women filmmakers. The crown jewel of their just-released January announcements is Jane Campion‘s masterpiece from 1993 “The Piano,” which was nominated for eight Oscars that year, including Best Picture, winning three for Best Screenplay (Campion), Best Actress (Holly Hunter), and Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Anna Paquin; the youngest winner ever at the time).

Continue reading Criterion Adds Jane Campion’s ‘The Piano,’ Thomas Vinterberg’s ‘The Celebration & More For January at The Playlist.

In yet another sign the Television Academy may need to seriously reconsider some of its categories, Claire Foy won her second Emmy Award for playing Queen Elizabeth II in “The Crown.” This win, however, came in the Guest Actress in a Drama Series category and for a less than 5 minute appearance in the fifth season of the series. A season in which another Emmy nominee from the series, Olivia Colman, will likely lose her Lead Actress category for playing the same character (although a few decades older).

Continue reading Claire Foy, RuPaul & Bo Burnham Rule 2021 Creative Arts Emmys Night Two at The Playlist.

February is now the month for guild award nominations announcements. And while the SAG Awards will be the first big ball to drop on Thursday, the Producers Guild of America began the rollout of their yearly honors with the documentary category. There were a number of familiar nominees including Oscar contenders “Time,” “Dick Johnson is Dead” and “The Truffle Hunters.”

READ MORE: “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” “Minari” & “I May Destroy You” lead 2021 Independent Spirit Awards Nominations

In what has become a very competitive Oscar race there were a number of surprising omissions, however, including “Collective,” “Boy State,” “All In The Fight For Democracy,” “Welcome to Chechnya,” “City Hall,” “Crip Camp,” “MLK/FBI,” “Totally Under Control,” “On the Record” and “The Dissident.”

This year’s nominees are:

“David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet”
“Dick Johnson Is Dead”
“My Octopus Teacher”
“Softie”
“A Thousand Cuts”
“Time”
“The Truffle Hunters”

Nominees in the Sports, Children’s and Short Form Television Programs will be announced on Friday, February 26.

Continue reading ‘Time,’ ‘Dick Johnson Is Dead’ Among 2021 PGA Awards Documentary Nominees at The Playlist.

Call this feature “overlooked films” if you liked, and if you saw them, and yes, there’s some crossover with some of our other Best of 2020 features, like the 25 Best Films Of 2020, the 20 Best Performances Of 2020, etc. but that’s ok!

READ MORE: The Best Cinematography Of 2020

2020 was a year where movie-lovers learned how to watch movies in an entirely different way. Since theaters were shut down across much of America for most of the year and many of the year’s more anticipated offerings were either shuffled off the annual slate until 2021, or relegated to streaming services a la “Wonder Woman 1984,” our regular routine of watching, analyzing, and obsessing over films was more or less completely upended.

Continue reading The 25 Best Films Of 2020 You Didn’t See at The Playlist.

“If only I had time,” I remember sighing at some point in late 2019, probably in a pub or a restaurant among a cluster of friends separated by <1 ft of space, lipstick doubtless boozily smeared across my maskless face. “If only I somehow had the time to do nothing but stay in and catch up on all the non-fiction releases I’ve missed through the year!” Little did I know that at that exact moment, the Ministry of Be Careful What You Wish For was listening in.

Continue reading The 20 Best Documentaries Of 2020 at The Playlist.

Greetings, fellow exhausteds, and welcome to The Best Films of 2020, a year that, despite being less than 365 days old, has aged so rapidly that Gary Oldman is circling the biopic. Some, uh, unusual stuff happened this year – I don’t know if you noticed – and it made compiling this collective list even more interesting than usual. A record-breaking 34 regular Playlist contributors submitted top tens (you can find the complete list of those to blame/praise for this ranking at the end of the feature).

Continue reading The 25 Best Films Of 2020 at The Playlist.

We have, it’s safe to say, had a whole lot less to look at this year when it comes to the world of cinema. So many parts of our traditional filmgoing experience have been snatched away, for now, while so many of us wait at home for the whole thing to be done. This has meant a lot of things on a lot of levels, but crucially, for this exercise, it means we’ve been staring at the same four walls of our home for quite some time now.

Continue reading The Best Film Posters Of 2020 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 biweekly 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 busy week on the new release front, with a handful of hits getting the 4K treatment, hidden gems and certified classics hitting Blu-ray, and one of the year’s very best movies making its Netflix bow.

Continue reading The 12 Best Movies To Buy Or Stream This Week: ‘Dick Johnson Is Dead,’ ‘The Elephant Man’ & More at The Playlist.

Festival season continues to ebb and flow with the AFI Festival hitting in just a few weeks, making for the discourse around film to stray from the persistent doom and gloom of all of the rescheduling and push backs of previously scheduled releases for theaters.

READ MORE: Cineworld CEO Blames NY Governor’s “Inflexibility” For Causing Company To Shut Down US & UK Theaters Again

Theaters are in a precarious position right now, evidenced by a letter written to congress from filmmakers urging them to save cinemas, as well as the news that Cineworld is shutting down its theaters in the US and UK once again due to lack of business.

Continue reading 10 Movies To See In October: ‘On The Rocks,’ ‘Possessor,’ Chicago 7′ & More at The Playlist.

“Dick Johnson is Dead” is not the typical documentary. In fact, one could argue that it’s more of a therapeutic exercise than a film. Though, with director Kirsten Johnson (best known for her doc “Cameraperson“) behind the camera, no matter its intention, you know you’re in good hands.

READ MORE: ‘Dick Johnson Is Dead’: Director Kirsten Johnson Returns With A Witty, Bright-Eyed Doc [Sundance Review]

As seen in the trailer for “Dick Johnson is Dead,” Kirsten Johnson’s new documentary follows the story of losing her father.

Continue reading ‘Dick Johnson Is Dead’ Trailer: Kirsten Johnson Prepares To Lose Her Dad In The Award-Winning Netflix Doc at The Playlist.

During 2019’s Best of the Decade listicle blitzkrieg, amid all the rancorous wrangling over rankings, a few truths emerged: Paul Thomas Anderson needs to clone himself; a depressing number of people are willing to die on the “the new decade begins in 2021” hill; and Kirsten Johnson’s “Cameraperson” is absolutely one of the pinnacles of the recent and ongoing “Golden Age of Documentary” (it’s a top 10 title on our own Best Documentaries of the Decade list).

Continue reading ‘Dick Johnson Is Dead’: Director Kirsten Johnson Returns With A Witty, Bright-Eyed Doc [Sundance Review] at The Playlist.

Academy snubs be damned, 2019 was a spectacular end to a decade of outstanding films directed by women. Joanna Hogg reinvented visual memoir with “The Souvenir,” Lulu Wang challenged American conceptions of family and death in “The Farewell,” and Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” adaptation upended one of the most iconic American novels by and about a woman.

Continue reading 52 Films Directed By Women To Watch In 2020 at The Playlist.