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. 

This week is another busy one: Two gigantic winter hits, two of 2019’s top-shelf indies, a quick Kelly Reichardt refresher, two must-have new Criterions, a 4K upgrade for a classic dad movie, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Netflix original.

Continue reading The 9 Best Movies To Buy Or Stream This Week: ‘Knives Out,’ ‘Frozen II,’ ‘Synonyms’ at The Playlist.

With today’s never-ending sea of content production, we all inevitably miss out on seeing at least a few films on our radar. Catching up the movies somehow passed us by is often how many cinema lovers spend the early months of the new calendar year. Unless you’ve been a-hankering for all the groundbreaking achievements that studios love to drop in January (buy your opening night tickets for “Dr. Dolittle” yet?), most trips to the multiplex will find your average film buff checking out the awards players and festival darlings which friends have been buzzing about for months that passed them by.

Continue reading The 25 Best Films Of 2019 You Didn’t See at The Playlist.

With the Hollywood Foreign Press Association handing out its picks for best films of 2019 last night at the Golden Globes, it’s time to look at another foreign press outlet and see what they think are the best films of the last year. And perhaps unsurprisingly, Cahiers du Cinéma has very different opinions than the HFPA.

Right off the bat, it’s important to know that Cahiers is looking at films that were released in France during the 2019 calendar year, which is why films such as “The Image Book” (the outlet’s #1 film) and “The Mule” (#9) made the cut.

Continue reading Cahiers du Cinéma’s Top 10 Of 2019 Features ‘Synonyms,’ ‘Bacurau’ & Other Surprises at The Playlist.

In his third feature, “Synonyms,” Israeli writer-director Nadav Lapid proves he has a fascination with people who take things too far, whether extremists, romantics, or some inextricable mesh of the two. His first film, “Policeman” follows anti-terrorist agents and the young radicals they clash with. His second, “The Kindergarten Teacher”—remade in English with Maggie Gyllenhaal in the titular role—traces the life of a poetry-obsessed elementary school teacher who finds deranged hope in an unlikely prodigy.

Continue reading ‘Synonyms’: Nadav Lapid Makes A Sensational Statement About Identity & Nationality With Furious & Chaotic Energy [NYFF Review] at The Playlist.