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 another light week on the new release front, but no worries: we’ve got a recent (and lovely) rom-com and a vintage slab of Ozploitation on the streamers, and a trio of forgotten but worthwhile catalogue titles making their Blu-ray debuts.

Continue reading The 5 Best Movies To Buy Or Stream This Week: ‘The Weekend,’ ‘Turkey Shoot,’ & More at The Playlist.

The story goes that Bill Murray and screenwriter Howard Franklin developed their adaptation of Jay Cronley’s novel “Quick Change” – released in theaters thirty years ago this week – with Jonathan Demme in mind to direct, but the filmmaker turned it down to make “The Silence of the Lambs.” (That abrupt transition mostly serves as a reminder of what a shift “Silence” was for Demme; “Quick Change” is much more in the mold of his earlier ‘80s films like “Married to the Mob” and “Something Wild.”) They asked Ron Howard, who turned it down because “he didn’t know who to root for.” (“He lost me at that moment,” Murray said.

Continue reading ‘Quick Change’ At 30: No One Directed Bill Murray Quite Like Bill Murray at The Playlist.