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January 18
Movie: Mrs. Miniver
[TRAILER] English middle-class family, The Minivers, experience life in the first months of World War II. [more inside]
Movie: The Last Emperor
[TRAILER] A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic. [more inside]
Movie: Midnight Cowboy
[TRAILER] Convinced of his irresistible appeal to women, Texas dishwasher Joe Buck (Jon Voight) quits his job and heads for New York City, thinking he'll latch on to some rich dowager. New York, however, is not as hospitable as he imagined, and Joe soon finds himself living in an abandoned building with a Dickensian layabout named Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). The two form a rough alliance, and together they kick-start Joe's hustling career just as Ratso's health begins to deteriorate. [more inside]
Movie: The Greatest Show on Earth
[TRAILER] To ensure a full profitable season, circus manager Brad Braden engages The Great Sebastian, though this moves his girlfriend Holly from her hard-won center trapeze spot. Holly and Sebastian begin a dangerous one-upmanship duel in the ring, while he pursues her on the ground. [more inside]
Movie: Driving Miss Daisy
[TRAILER] Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy), an elderly Jewish widow living in Atlanta, is determined to maintain her independence. However, when she crashes her car, her son, Boolie (Dan Aykroyd), arranges for her to have a chauffeur, an African-American driver named Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman). Daisy and Hoke's relationship gets off to a rocky start, but they gradually form a close friendship over the years, one that transcends racial prejudices and social conventions. [more inside]
Book: The Measure
What would you do if everybody on the planet woke up one morning with the ability to know how long they will live? Would you even want to know? In "The Measure," that happens, and the book follows eight NYC residents as they grapple with the ramifications of that knowledge. Along the way, the book addressees some truly interesting questions, such as if you are 30 and know you will die at 42, is it selfish to marry and have children? If you are 30 can you marry somebody you know will die at 42? It also dives into the government response, and it's just as bad as you expect. I read this book in 3 nights, staying up late each night before forcing myself to put it down and go to sleep.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch: Faster Season 2, Episode 4
Now this is podracing!
January 17
Leverage: Redemption: The Museum Makeover Job Season 2, Episode 12
When a Leverage International team’s museum heist goes awry, our crew goes in to finish the job, ultimately realizing they’ve been lured into a trap by a treacherous old friend. [more inside]
Book: Women Talking
"The Canadian writer Miriam Toews opens her astonishing eighth novel, Women Talking, with a matter-of-fact Author's Note. Between 2005 and 2009, she explains, eight men in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia raped many of the girls and women in their community, first rendering them unconscious with cow anesthetic. Women Talking is "both a reaction through fiction to these true-life events, and an act of female imagination." It is also a work of deep moral intelligence, a master class in ethics beautifully dressed as a novel. And, surprisingly given the title, Women Talking is narrated by a man." [more inside]
The Three-Body Problem: Chinese Version Season 1 (Full Season)
This is for discussion of the Chinese adaptation of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem (FanFare Books discussion here). It is available on Tencent/WeTV, Tencent's YouTube channel, and Viki, under the title Three-Body. Trailer. MyDramaList. A nanomaterials expert sees a mysterious countdown superimposed in his field of vision and finds himself under military investigation. To unravel the mystery, he enters the VR game "Three-Body" developed by a secret organization ETO and discovers the truth behind the deaths of dozens of scientists and a tragedy from the days of the Cultural Revolution.
Movie: Vengeance
A journalist and podcaster from New York City travels to West Texas in order to report on the death of a girl he was hooking up with.
Written, directed by, and starring B.J. Novak
January 16
Book: Chapterhouse: Dune
The 6th book in the Dune series, the novel chronicles the continued struggles of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood against the violent Honored Matres, who are succeeding in their bid to seize control of the universe and destroy the factions and planets that oppose them. [more inside]
Movie: American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally
The true story of American woman Mildred Gillars (Meadow Williams), dubbed "Axis Sally" for broadcasting Nazi propaganda to American troops, and her trial for treason against the United States after the war. Al Pacino plays her lawyer. [more inside]
Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches: The Witching Hour Books Included Season 1, Episode 1
Neurosurgeon Rowan Fielding has a problem - when she gets mad, she kills with her mind. Her search for answers sends her toward her secretive biological family. In New Orleans, Deirdre Mayfair is desperate to escape from her aunt's oppressive house. [more inside]
The Last of Us: When You're Lost in the Darkness Show Only Season 1, Episode 1
Twenty years after a fungal outbreak ravages the planet, survivors Joel and Tess are tasked with a mission that could change everything.
The Last of Us: When You're Lost in the Darkness Books Included Season 1, Episode 1
We meet Joel (Pedro Pascal) and his daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) just as the world begins to end. Twenty years later, Joel and his companion Tess (Anna Torv) are in Boston, making ends meet through legit jobs and on the thriving post-apocalyptic black market, trying to make their way to find Joel's brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) when they are roped into a smuggling operation, transporting Ellie (Bella Ramsey) to a rebel Firefly outpost near Boston. [more inside]
January 15
The Traitors: US Version Season 1 (Full Season)
Alan Cumming is the host of the US version of The Traitors (UK version previously on Metafilter). NYT (archive): A blend of “Survivor” and the party game Mafia, “The Traitors” is set in and around a castle in Scotland. Contestants work together through a series of grueling challenges to win money that is added to a final prize fund. Participants are divided into “Traitors,” whose identities remain secret and who choose a player each day to “murder,” and “Faithfuls,” who try to uncover the Traitors’ identities throughout the show. All episodes streaming on Peacock in the US, or on BBC iPlayer.
January 14
Abbott Elementary: Fight Season 2, Episode 12
Gregory's dad comes to visit the school. [more inside]
The Rig: The Rig Season 1 (Full Season)
A group of workers on a remote Scottish oil rig are due to return to the mainland when a mysterious fog enshrouds them and supernatural forces take hold. [more inside]
Book: My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me / Jennifer Teege
An international bestseller—the extraordinary memoir of a German-Nigerian woman who learns that her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the brutal Nazi commandant depicted in Schindler’s List. [more inside]
Book: The Great Wide Sea / M. H. Herlong
After their mother dies, Ben, Dylan, and Gerry want nothing more than for their lives to get back to normal as quickly as possible. Instead their father sells their house, buys a boat, and tells them that they're going to spend the next year sailing around the world. The boys hate the idea and also hate the experience--then they wake up one morning to find that their father is gone, they're lost at sea, and there's a storm approaching.
January 13
Movie: Broker
A baby is left at a safe haven church for reasons unknown, but finds its way into the hands of low-level "brokers" (Song Kang-Ho and Gang Dong-Won), who offer the ambivalent mother (Ji-eun Lee) a cut of the money to place the child outside of the formal Korean adoption system. The ragtag group is followed on the road by human-trafficking detectives and other pursuers. [more inside]
Movie: The Hustler (1961)
An up-and-coming pool player plays a long-time champion in a single high-stakes match. [more inside]
Movie: Dogs in Space
"Richard Lowenstein’s 1986 masterpiece Dogs in Space was and remains controversial, divisive, compelling and inspirational. Made less than a decade after the events it is based on, using many of the people involved in those events as actors, the film explored Melbourne’s ‘postpunk’ counterculture of share houses, drugs and decadence. Amongst its ensemble cast was Michael Hutchence, one of the biggest music stars of the period, in his acting debut." [more inside]
Movie: Skinamarink
Two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing, and all the windows and doors in their home have vanished.
Movie: Silence
Two 17th-century Portuguese missionaries, Father Sebastian Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Father Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver), embark on a perilous journey to Japan to find their missing mentor (Liam Neeson). While there, the two men minister to the Christian villagers who worship in secret. If caught by feudal lords or ruling samurai, they must renounce their faith or face a prolonged and agonizing death.t. [more inside]
Movie: The Color of Money
Former pool hustler "Fast Eddie" Felson (Paul Newman) decides he wants to return to the game by taking a pupil. He meets talented but green Vincent Lauria (Tom Cruise) and proposes a partnership. As they tour pool halls, Eddie teaches Vincent the tricks of scamming, but he eventually grows frustrated with Vincent's showboat antics, leading to an argument and a falling-out. Eddie takes up playing again and soon crosses paths with Vincent as an opponent. [more inside]
Movie: Gangs of New York
Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a young Irish immigrant released from prison. He returns to the Five Points seeking revenge against his father's killer, William Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis), a powerful anti-immigrant gang leader. He knows that revenge can only be attained by infiltrating Cutting's inner circle. Amsterdam's journey becomes a fight for personal survival and to find a place for the Irish people in 1860's New York. [more inside]
Movie: The Last Temptation of Christ
Jesus (Willem Dafoe), a humble Judean carpenter beginning to see that he is the son of God, is drawn into revolutionary action against the Roman occupiers by Judas (Harvey Keitel) -- despite his protestations that love, not violence, is the path to salvation. The burden of being the savior of mankind torments Jesus throughout his life, leading him to doubt. As he is put to death on the cross, Jesus is tempted by visions of an ordinary life married to Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey). [more inside]
Movie: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
After her husband dies, Alice (Ellen Burstyn) and her son, Tommy, leave their small New Mexico town for California, where Alice hopes to make it as a singer. Money problems force them to settle in Arizona instead, where Alice takes a job as waitress in a small diner. She intends to stay in Arizona just long enough to make the money needed to head back out on the road, but her plans change when she begins to fall for a rancher named David (Kris Kristofferson). [more inside]
Movie: Raging Bull
The story of middleweight boxer Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro) as he rises through ranks to earn his first shot at the middleweight crown. He falls in love with Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) a gorgeous girl from the Bronx. The inability to express his feelings enters into the ring and eventually takes over his life. He eventually is sent into a downward spiral that costs him everything. [more inside]
Movie: Bringing Out the Dead
After a disheartening and haunting career wears him down, New York City paramedic Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) begins to collapse under the strain of saving lives and witnessing deaths. Through the course of a few nights, three co-workers (John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Tom Sizemore) accompany Pierce as he grasps for sanity and pushes to be fired. Before Pierce falls off the edge, he still has a hope when he forms a friendship with a victim's daughter (Patricia Arquette). [more inside]
Movie: Boxcar Bertha
Martin Scorsese's second feature loosely adapts the autobiography of "Boxcar" Bertha Thompson, portraying the adventures of the Depression-era criminal following the death of her father. Bertha (Barbara Hershey) joins union organizer "Big" Bill Shelly (David Carradine) in fighting anti-union forces after an unexpected murder drives them to a life of robbing trains. The atmospheric tale depicts their life on the lam, doing whatever is necessary to survive. [more inside]
Movie: Women Talking
A group of women in an isolated Mennonite community grapple with reconciling their reality with their faith after a string of sexual violations. [more inside]
Podcast: The Besties: The Hundred Million Jokes of High on Life
This week, we're joined by GameSpot's Lucy James as we discuss Squanch Games' joke-packed first-person shooter High on Life. How many full-belly chuckles did we experience during our time alien bounty hunting? Also, can J.B. Smoove do voices in every game? Also discussed: Disco Elysium, 100 Ft. Robot Golf, Towerfall, Overcooked, Portal 2, The Stanley Parable, Prey, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, The Past Within, Outpath: First Journey, Dragon Quest IX [more inside]
January 12
Movie: Plane
A pilot (Gerard Butler) finds himself caught in a war zone with little help but a man wanted for murder (Mike Colter) after he's forced to land his commercial aircraft during a terrible storm. [more inside]
Book: Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
"Strangers to Ourselves poses fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Rachel Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are" (Macmillan). [more inside]
National Treasure: Edge of History: Graceland Gambit Season 1, Episode 3
The heroes take a roadtrip to Graceland in search for a clue that will help them figure out the location of the next puzzle box, while Billie and her team take a trip to Mexico with disastrous consequences. No Elvises were harmed in the filming of this episode. [more inside]
Movie: 48 Hrs.
Renegade cop Jack Cates (Nick Nolte) pulls bank robber Reggie Hammond (Eddie Murphy) from a federal prison on a 48-hour leave to help him capture Hammond's old partner, Albert Ganz (James Remar). Having escaped from a prison work crew, Ganz is on a killing spree around San Francisco, on the trail of half a million dollars that went missing after one of his robberies. The cocky Reggie knows where the money is, but spars with the hotheaded Jack as he enjoys his temporary freedom. [more inside]
Movie: Tetsuo: The Iron Man
A “metal fetishist,” driven mad by the maggots wriggling in the wound he’s made to embed metal into his flesh, runs out into the night and is accidentally run down by a Japanese businessman and his girlfriend. The pair dispose of the corpse in hopes of quietly moving on with their lives. However, the businessman soon finds that he is now plagued by a vicious curse that transforms his flesh into iron. [more inside]
Movie: Soul Power
Soul Power is a 2008 documentary film about the Zaire 74 music festival in Kinshasa, featuring James Brown, B.B. King, Celia Cruz, Miriam Makeba, and Bill Withers (and more, including many Zairean artists) which accompanied the Rumble in the Jungle heavyweight boxing championship match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in October 1974. The film was made from archival footage; other footage shot at the time focusing on the fight was edited to form the film When We Were Kings. [more inside]
Book: The Devil and the Dark Water
A murder on the high seas.
A remarkable detective duo.
A demon who may or may not exist.
It's 1634 and Samuel Pipps, the world's greatest detective, is being transported to Amsterdam to be executed for a crime he may, or may not, have committed. Travelling with him is his loyal bodyguard, Arent Hayes, who is determined to prove his friend innocent. [more inside]
Movie: Resident Evil
When a virus leaks from a top-secret facility, turning all resident researchers into ravenous zombies and their lab animals into mutated hounds from hell, the government sends in an elite military task force to contain the outbreak. Alice (Milla Jovovich) and Rain (Michelle Rodriguez) are charged with leading the mission. But they only have three hours before the pathogen becomes airborne and infects the world. [more inside]
Movie: M3gan
Brilliant toy-company roboticist Gemma (Get Out's Allison Williams) suddenly becomes the caretaker of her orphaned 8-year-old niece, Cady (Violet McGraw, The Haunting of Hill House). Unsure and unprepared to be a parent, and under intense pressure at work, Gemma decides to pair M3GAN, her new AI-powered doll/companion prototype with Cady in an attempt to resolve both problems--a decision that will have unimaginable consequences. [more inside]
January 11
Leverage: Redemption: The Belly of the Beast Job Season 2, Episode 11
"The team reluctantly enlists the help of a naïve but ambitious assistant to take down a predatory music producer, in an episode told entirely from the POV of a regular person."
Movie: The Pale Blue Eye
A world-weary detective is hired to investigate the murder of a West Point cadet. Stymied by the cadets' code of silence, he enlists one of their own to help unravel the case - a young man the world would come to know as Edgar Allan Poe.
Willow: Children of the Wyrm Season 1, Episode 8
Finale time! AV Club review here.
Book: Tales from the Cafe
From the author of the international bestseller Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this book follows four new customers who hope to travel back in time in a little Japanese cafe. [more inside]
Movie: The Strings
In the dead of winter, a musician travels to a remote cottage to work on new material, but soon finds herself under attack from a mysterious dark presence. [more inside]
Movie: Scratch
A feature-length documentary film about hip-hop DJing, otherwise known as turntablism. From the South Bronx in the 1970s to San Francisco now (or circa 2001, anyway), the world's best scratchers, beat-diggers, party-rockers, and producers wax poetic on beats, breaks, battles, and the infinite possibilities of vinyl. [more inside]
All Elite Wrestling: Dynamite: Dynamite 1/11 and Rampage 1/13 Season 4, Episode 15
The Elite and Death Triangle enter the final match to determine the Trios titles, Saraya & Toni take on the Killer and the Pillar, also HOOK! Plus there’s always a chance that Mercedes Moné (fka Sasha Banks) will show up, who the heck knows anymore? 2023 is 11 days old but it’s been intense for pro-wrestling so far. [more inside]
Star Wars: The Bad Batch: The Solitary Clone Season 2, Episode 3
Crosshair is sent on a mission to rescue an Imperial governer being held hostage.
Movie: Wattstax
Documentary covering a Stax Records-sponsored all-day concert at the 1972 Watts Summer Festival with performances by Stax Records artists such as Isaac Hayes, Rufus Thomas, The Staples Singers, and more. [more inside]
Movie: Class of 1984
Andy (Perry King) is a new teacher at an inner city high school that is unlike any he has seen before. There are metal detectors at the front door and the place is basically run by a tough kid named Peter Stegman. Soon, Andy and Stegman become enemies and Stegman will stop at nothing to protect his turf and drug dealing business. [more inside]
Movie: Fern Brady: Power & Chaos
Stand-up comedian Fern Brady brings her unique take on contemporary culture and the state of the UK to a packed crowd in Glasgow.
Rick and Morty: Ricktional Mortpoon's Rickmas Mortcation Season 6, Episode 10
What starts as a merry Christmas in the Smith household takes an ugly turn when Morty uncovers a betrayal, thanks to a gift from a galaxy far, far away. [more inside]
Movie: Madonna: Truth or Dare
Documentary following singer Madonna on her controversial Blond Ambition tour in 1990. [more inside]
Movie: 1991: The Year Punk Broke
David Markey's documentary of life on the road with Sonic Youth and Nirvana during their tour of Europe in late 1991. Also featuring live performances by Dinosaur Jr, Babes In Toyland, The Ramones, and Gumball. [more inside]
Movie: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains
Corinne Burns (Diane Lane) is a typical frustrated teenager living in a nowhere town until she catches punk band the Looters. Bewitched by the whole punk scene, she and her fledgling band, the Stains, join the tour, and in no time at all become media magnets. The band forms a rabid following of young girls, while Corrine begins a relationship with Looters singer Billy (Ray Winstone). As the Stains get bigger and bigger, however, Corinne's ambition gets the better of her. [more inside]
Movie: SLC Punk!
Two former geeks become 1980s punks, then party and go to concerts while deciding what to do with their lives. [more inside]
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