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.

We’ve got a lot of new disc and streaming releases to sort through, thanks in no small part to the inevitable holiday season gift possibilities, which include genuine classics, ‘80s favorites, and prestige box sets (more of those here); streaming audiences can also check out a new (and controversial!) romantic comedy and a beautifully bizarre new film from one of the best documentarians in the business.

Continue reading The 14 Best Movies To Buy Or Stream This Week: ‘Happiest Season,’ ‘My Psychedelic Love Story,’ ‘The Irishman,’ & More at The Playlist.

A wickedly industrious joke-machine intellect attached
to a pneumatic pair of eyebrows, John Belushi was the king of American
comedy in the mid-to-late 1970s. At the peak of his career, he could boast a
sinecure at “Saturday Night Live,” blockbuster movies, a hit band, and the
best Toshiro Mifune imitation ever to hit American TV. Nevertheless, as
related in R.J. Cutler’s tragic documentary “Belushi,” he
destroyed everything he had with the same abandon that John Landis wrecked
police cruisers in their movie “The Blues Brothers.”

Using heretofore-unheard interviews from an oral history project by Tanner Colby, “Belushi” can be seen as something of a riposte to Bob Woodward’s 1984 biography “Wired.” The book is seen by people in Belushi’s circle as a cold, scathing, and exploitative take on their friend’s drug-related death in 1982 that ignores his talent and warmth.

Continue reading ‘Belushi’: A Loving Look At The Comedy Legend’s Rush Toward Oblivion [Review] at The Playlist.

If you have to rank the legends of American comedy, no discussion can go forward without the great John Belushi at the top. A notorious wildman known for his SNL days, but also roles like “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” “The Blues Brothers” and more, Belushi’s life and comedy career were cut short in 1982 at the age of 33 due to a tragic drug and alcohol intoxication.

Continue reading ‘Belushi’ Trailer: Showtime Crafts A New Portrait Of A Beloved Comedy Legend 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. 

Two potentially major productions caught in the wheels of the lockdown hit disc and (reasonable) VOD this week, alongside a Sundance doc on Apple TV+,  a lovely new musical bio-doc, and the usual bushel of marvelous catalog titles from Criterion, Warner Archive, and Kino-Lorber.

Continue reading The 13 Best Movies To Buy Or Stream This Week: ‘The King of Staten Island,’ ‘The Burnt Orange Heresy’ & More at The Playlist.

When “The Blues Brothers” landed in theaters 40 years ago this week, it was something of a novelty – the first feature film based on characters from “Saturday Night Live,” which had, at that point, only been on the air for five years. And though it was a hit, no one would try again for 12 years, with “Wayne’s World,” after which the floodgates opened. There was one key difference between “Blues Brothers” and the bulk of the “SNL”-inspired films that followed: the show’s creator and longtime producer, Lorne Michaels, was not involved in any way.

Continue reading ‘The Blues Brothers’ At 40: Why It’s The Rare Successful ‘Saturday Night Live’ Movie at The Playlist.