Notizie

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (Raven Jackson)

A film that feels uprooted from deep beneath the earth, Raven Jackson’s poetic, patient debut is a distillation of cinema to its purest form, a stunning patchwork of experience and memory. Tethered around the life of Mack, a Black woman from Mississippi, as we witness glimpses of her childhood, teenage years, and beyond, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt becomes a sensory experience unlike anything else this year. Shot in beautiful 35mm by Jomo Fray and edited by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s collaborator Lee Chatametikool, there’s a reverence for nature and joy for human connection that seems all too rarified in today’s landscape of American filmmaking. – Jordan R.

Where to Stream: VOD...

Catering directly to my interests, the Criterion Channel’s January lineup boasts two of my favorite things: James Gray and cats. In the former case it’s his first five features (itself a terrible reminder he only released five movies in 20 years); the latter shows felines the respect they deserve, from Kuroneko to The Long Goodbye, Tourneur’s Cat People and Mick Garris’ Sleepwalkers. Meanwhile, Ava Gardner, Bertrand Tavernier, Isabel Sandoval, Ken Russell, Juleen Compton, George Harrison’s HandMade Films, and the Sundance Film Festival get retrospectives.

Restorations of Soviet sci-fi trip Ikarie Xb 1, The Unknown, and The Music of Regret stream, as does the recent Plan 75. January’s Criterion Editions are Inside Llewyn Davis, Farewell Amor, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and (most intriguingly) the long-out-of-print The Man Who Fell to Earth, Blu-rays of which go for hundreds of dollars.

See the lineup below and learn more here.

Back By Popular Demand

The Graduate,...

Glenda Jackson, the two-time Oscar winner who walked away from a hugely successful acting career to spend nearly a quarter-century in the U.K. parliament, only to make a comeback on the stage, died Thursday. She was 87.

Jackson died peacefully after a brief illness at her home in Blackheath, London, and her family was at her side, her agent Lionel Larner said in a statement. “Today we lost one of the world’s greatest actresses, and I have lost a best friend of over 50 years,” he said.

She recently completed filming The Great Escaper opposite Michael Caine, Larner noted.

The British actress collected a slew of honors that included best actress Academy Awards for Women in Love (1969) and A Touch of Class (1973); two Emmys for her performance as Elizabeth I in the BBC miniseries Elizabeth R (a role she also played in the 1971 film Mary, Queen of Scots); and a...

Glenda Jackson: Actress and former Labour MP. Two-time Oscar winner and former Labour MP Glenda Jackson returns to acting Two-time Best Actress Academy Award winner Glenda Jackson set aside her acting career after becoming a Labour Party MP in 1992. Four years ago, Jackson, who represented the Greater London constituency of Hampstead and Highgate, announced that she would stand down the 2015 general election – which, somewhat controversially, was won by right-wing prime minister David Cameron's Conservative party.[1] The silver lining: following a two-decade-plus break, Glenda Jackson is returning to acting. Now, Jackson isn't – for the time being – returning to acting in front of the camera. The 79-year-old is to be featured in the Radio 4 series Emile Zola: Blood, Sex and Money, described on their website as a “mash-up” adaptation of 20 Emile Zola novels collectively known as "Les Rougon-Macquart."[2] Part 1 of the three-part Radio 4 series will be broadcast daily during an...

Naked wrestling, religious mania and The Who's Tommy: director Ken Russell transformed British cinema. His closest collaborators recall a fierce, funny and groundbreaking talent

Glenda Jackson

I worked with Ken on six films. Women in Love was the first time I'd worked with a director of that genius, and on a film of that size. What I remember most was the creative and productive atmosphere on set: he was open to ideas from everyone, from the clapperboard operator upwards. Like any great director, he knew what he didn't want – but was open to everything else.

As a director he never said anything very specific. He'd say, "It needs to be a bit more … urrrgh, or a bit less hmmm", and you knew exactly what he meant. I used to ask him why he never said "Cut", and he said, "Because it means you always do something different." They gave...

Kathleen Turner, Anthony Perkins, Crimes of Passion Provocative, Controversial Director Ken Russell Dead at 84: Women In Love, Tommy, The Devils Valentino (1977) was another much-talked about biopic. (Perhaps not too surprisingly, decades later Ken Russell would write a positive commentary on a horrendously sensationalistic Valentino biography.) Reviews for the film starring Rudolf Nureyev as silent-film idol Rudolph Valentino were mostly negative. Audiences, for their part, opted instead for Stars Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Three years later, Russell went Hollywood with Altered States, a bizarre, philosophical, hallucinogenic sci-fier starring William Hurt as a scientist who undergoes genetic regression. Written by Oscar winner Paddy Chayefsky, with whom Russell clashed on the set, the costly Warner Bros. release was a major box-office disappointment. Another Us-based effort, the Belle du Jour-like 1984 sex drama Crimes of Passion, earned Kathleen Turner a Best Actress Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association...

Amazon sellers are selling copies of Ken Russell's Salome's Last Dance on DVD for a minimum of $214.89. It's not on Netflix. However, if you're in the mood for the kind of bizarrely decadent films that only writer/director Ken Russell (Gothic, The Lair of the White Worm) can serve up, it's high time you headed over to this hard-to-find Oscar Wilde adaptation for free over at SlashControl.

In Salome's Last Dance, Russell plays around with Oscar Wilde's banned play Salome, adding a bit of meta-goodness to the whole shebang by making the film about Oscar Wilde (Nickolas Grace) and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas (Douglas Hodge) watching a performance of the famous play in a brothel. The actors are all employees or patrons. And it's no accident that this is also Guy Fawkes Day.

Alfred Taylor, the brothel-owner played by Stratford Johns, announces, "Guy Fawkes wanted to strike...