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‘Breathless’ to ‘La Strada’: 10 Hidden Gem Classic Films on HBO Max

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‘Breathless’ to ‘La Strada’: 10 Hidden Gem Classic Films on HBO Max

The ever-multiplying streaming platforms have brought with them a confusing tangle of rights issues for countless movies and shows. Tracking what’s streaming and what isn’t at any given time can be a daunting task. With studios pulling back the rights to their most famous properties to launch their own unique streaming platforms, outlets like Hulu and Netflix are prioritizing their premium original content more than ever before. Outlets like the Criterion Channel cater specifically to underseen classics, but these can be a bit harder to find on more mainstream platforms. HBO Max has the deep library of Warner Bros. to draw from, but it also has much more to offer. Some of the greatest movies ever made are available to stream right at your fingertips – if you know where to look.

To that end, here are ten classic movies now available on HBO Max.

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RELATED: 7 Essential Cult Classic Movies, Ranked

Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

The first of many of Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman‘s films to be set on the island of Fårö, Through a Glass Darkly follows the schizophrenic Karin (Harriet Andersson), and her relationship with her family. Taking place over the course of twenty-four hours, Karin arrives home with her doctor husband, Martin (Max Von Sydow), who gives her father, David (Gunnar Björnstrand), a grim prognosis of her condition. Meanwhile, Karin becomes fixated on her younger brother, to the point of teasing and then seducing him.

Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Persona, and The Seventh Seal are more famous, but this one is an underrated gem. Intimate and disturbing, Through a Glass Darkly examines the nature of perception and attachment, and ends on a hopeful note that Bergman did not often allow.


Solaris (1972)

Steven Soderbergh remade Solaris in 2002 with George Clooney, but the dream-like atmosphere of Russian genius Andrei Tarkovsky‘s original cannot be replicated. Psychiatrist Kris Kelvin journeys to a space station orbiting the remote planet, Solaris, which seems to be responding to the station’s probes with some of its own. Kelvin’s dead wife appears as an intelligent duplicate, lacking only her memories.

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The Soderbergh remake streamlines the story but ignores Tarkovsky’s deliberately slow, meditative style. A lot of backstory and side plots are missing from the remake, and with them, the extra texture that makes the original Solaris so immersive. Tarkovsky designed his films as experiences that are meant to take the viewer out of the stream of their lives and slow down enough to internalize the story in front of them. Both versions of Solaris examine the effects of grief, but the original sinks in much slower, taking its time, reflecting the way in which such heavy and complex emotions affect us in our daily lives.


Ikiru (1952)

The Japanese master Akira Kurosawa is famous for epics like Ran, The Seven Samurai, and Rashomon, but Ikiru (“to live”) is a very different kind of film. Ikiru focuses on Mr. Watanabe, who has been a bureaucrat in Tokyo City Hall for the past thirty years. He has barely lived a life at all, but when he learns he has cancer, he is finally inspired to have the life experiences he has spent years avoiding.

Ikiru‘s stakes are intensely personal. After a series of misadventures, Mr. Watanabe learns that a group of citizens keep getting the bureaucratic runaround as they simply try to seal up an open sewage cesspool and build a children’s playground. Mr. Watanabe takes up this mission. This is just a plot summary, and cannot replicate the profound experience of watching a man wake up from a long, waking slumber to look at, and come to adore, the life around him.


Breathless (1960)

The famous quote “all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun” is popularly attributed to French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, but he insisted the phrase wasn’t his. It still stuck, becoming shorthand both for what movies can offer, and what audiences expect. Godard simultaneously delivers and shreds these expectations with Breathless.

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A wandering small-time hood named Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) styles himself after Humphrey Bogart. After he steals a car and then shoots a police officer, he goes on the run and eventually hooks up with an American student, Patricia (Jean Seberg). Godard never tries to hide or improve the generic plot, instead, he uses techniques like jump cuts and fourth-wall-breaking to challenge the audience. When Michel talks directly to the camera, he suddenly makes the viewer complicit in his aimless crimes. Is Godard asking us why we’re even watching?


Shoot the Piano Player (1960)

François Truffaut followed up his instant-classic debut, The 400 Blows, with this 1960 gangster film. He throws everything he loves about American genre pictures into Shoot the Piano Player: crime melodrama, slapstick, singalong musical numbers, and references to directors like Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without A Cause) and Samuel Fuller (The Big Red One).

He fuses these with French New Wave techniques like jump cuts and extended almost self-aware voiceovers. The plot (such as it is) follows Charlie, a down-and-out piano player on the run from his tragic past. Truffaut cared mostly about crafting an entertaining batch of scenes that, in terms of style, mark a 180-degree turn away from the gritty realism of The 400 Blows. Like Martin Scorsese (a major fan of the Frenchman), Truffaut embraces the artifice of film, finding power and an ironic earnestness even when he’s reminding viewers that we’re watching a movie.


Belle de Jour (1967)

Directed by Luis Buñuel, Belle de Jour stars Catherine Deneuve as Severine, a sexually repressed housewife who routinely retreats into elaborate fantasies to deal with her unfulfilling marriage. When she begins living a double life as a high-class prostitute, she is able to fulfill her sexual appetites. As the Belle de Jour (“woman of the day”) of the high-end brothel run by the demanding Madame Anais (Geneviève Page), Severine’s disconnect between her fantasy life and her home life seems to slowly recover.

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Violence erupts when both lives collide, and the ambiguous ending leaves the audience questioning what was real and what wasn’t. It wouldn’t be a Buñuel film without a touch of the surreal, but Belle de Jour’s ending challenges the audience to rethink their own relationships with daydreaming: Can you tell where life ends and a daydream begins?


La Strada (1954)

Before Federico Fellini‘s 8 1/2 made him a legend, La Strada merely lionized him as a master Italian director. Traveling circus strongman, Zampanó (Anthony Quinn), buys the apparently simple-minded Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) from her impoverished mother, and she joins him in his act. An abusive brute, Zampanó drags Gelsomina across the Italian countryside, finding an audience wherever they go. He’s the worst type of boss, but she is either too sweet or too simple to wander away for long.

With its episodic structure, La Strada inspired a particular sub-genre of episodic road movies. By the end, Zampanó and Gelsomina have formed a bond neither can fully acknowledge nor understand. The term “Felliniesque” refers to this kind of tragic lack of self-awareness in his characters: they reject what they could have in another person in pursuit of something unattainable in the larger world that they cannot articulate.


Orpheus (1950)

“A legend is entitled to be beyond time and space. Interpret it as you will…” Written and directed by the French poet, Jean Cocteau (a friend and collaborator of fellow Surrealists Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel), Orpheus transplants the Greek myth to 1950s Paris. A poet named Orphée (Jean Marais) gains passage into the underworld, where he unexpectedly ends up in a bizarre love triangle (or perhaps even quadrangle) between himself, his wife Eurydice (Marie Déa), and the Princess (María Casare), who reveals herself to be Death.

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Cocteau was also a musician, novelist, playwright, and visual artist, whose highly imaginative 1946 version of Beauty and the Beast remains one of the most influential versions of the fairy tale. His Orpheus features simple, convincing effects to track Orphée’s journeys to the underworld as the film explores the age-old dilemma of what an artist will sacrifice to see their work fully realized.


Black Narcissus (1947)

The directing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made some of the greatest films of all time and were at the peak of their powers with 1947’s Black Narcissus. A group of nuns led by Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) set up a convent high in the Himalayas, but find themselves tempted by the presence of the dashing Mr. Dean, the English agent for the general controlling the territory.

Black Narcissus slowly gathers into a powerful examination of desire, temptation, and loss. Modern audiences will rightfully take issue with whitewashed casting, such as Jean Simmons as the Indian girl, Kanchi. This was the norm during this era, unfortunately. Still, the performances stand out, especially Kerr as the tougher-than-she-seems Clodagh, as does Jack Cardiff’s vibrant, Oscar-winning cinematography.


Le Samouraï (1967)

French star Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a hired killer. In his fedora and trenchcoat, with his gun and cigarette, he is every inch the classic film noir anti-hero. Director Jean-Pierre Melville follows Costello as he sets up an alibi before killing a nightclub owner, then makes it through a police line-up only to be betrayed by his bosses. The plot of Le Samouraï is assembled from any number of genre pictures, but Melville examines Costello’s life in the type of cold, detached detail you might find in a David Cronenberg film.

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The title itself references a fictitious “Book of Bushido”, a collection of samurai codes that Melville made up for the film. Like Truffaut or Godard, Melville examines one of the most American of film genres through an almost impressionist lens. As Costello, Delon rarely betrays much in the way of emotion, even in the face of life-threatening events. Le Samourai becomes more than a crime thriller potboiler as it examines a life of solitude and danger.



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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

Hitting the three-quarter-century mark usually means a retirement home, a nursing facility, or if you’re lucky to be blessed with relatively good health and savings to match, living in a gated community in Arizona or Florida.

For Sylvester Stallone, however, it means something else entirely: starring in the first superhero-centered film of his decades-long career in the much-delayed Samaritan. Unfortunately for Stallone and the audience on the other side of the screen, the derivative, turgid, forgettable results won’t get mentioned in a career retrospective, let alone among the ever-expanding list of must-see entries in a genre already well past its peak.

For Stallone, however, it’s better late than never when it involves the superhero genre. Maybe in getting a taste of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) with his walk-on role in the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel several years ago, Stallone thought anything Marvel can do, I can do even better (or just as good in the nebulous definition of the word).

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The property Stallone and his team found for him, Samaritan, a little-known graphic novel released by a small, almost negligible, publisher, certainly takes advantage of Stallone’s brute-force physicality and his often underrated talent for near-monosyllabic brooding (e.g., the Rambo series), but too often gives him to little do or say as the lone super-powered survivor, the so-called “Samaritan” of the title, of a lifelong rivalry with his brother, “Nemesis.” Two brothers entered a fire-ravaged building and while both were presumed dead, one brother did survive (Stallone’s Joe Smith, a garbageman by day, an appliance repairman by night).

In the Granite City of screenwriter Bragi F. Schut (Escape Room, Season of the Witch), the United States, and presumably the rest of the world, teeters on economic and political collapse, with a recession spiraling into a depression, steady gigs difficult, if not impossible, to obtain, and the city’s neighborhoods rocked by crime and violence. No one’s safe, not even 13-year-old Sam (Javon Walker), Joe’s neighbor.

When he’s not dodging bullies connected to a gang, he’s falling under the undue influence of Cyrus (Pilou Asbæk), a low-rent gang leader with an outsized ego and the conviction that he and only he can take on Nemesis’s mantle and along with that mantle, a hammer “forged in hate,” to orchestrate a Bane-like plan to plunge the city into chaos and become a wealthy power-broker in the process.

Schut’s woefully underwritten script takes a clumsy, haphazard approach to world-building, relying on a two-minute animated sequence to open Samaritan while a naive, worshipful Sam narrates Samaritan and Nemesis’s supposedly tragic, Cain and Abel-inspired backstory. Schut and director Julius Avery (Overlord) clumsily attempt to contrast Sam’s childish belief in messiah-like, superheroic saviors stepping in to save humanity from itself and its own worst excesses, but following that path leads to authoritarianism and fascism (ideas better, more thoroughly explored in Watchmen and The Boys).

While Sam continues to think otherwise, Stallone’s superhero, 25 years past his last, fatal encounter with his presumably deceased brother, obviously believes superheroes are the problem and not the solution (a somewhat reasonable position), but as Samaritan tracks Joe and Sam’s friendship, Sam giving Joe the son he never had, Joe giving Sam the father he lost to street violence well before the film’s opening scene, it gets closer and closer to embracing, if not outright endorsing Sam’s power fantasies, right through a literally and figuratively explosive ending. Might, as always, wins regardless of how righteous or justified the underlying action.

It’s what superhero audiences want, apparently, and what Samaritan uncritically delivers via a woefully under-rendered finale involving not just unconvincing CGI fire effects, but a videogame cut-scene quality Stallone in a late-film flashback sequence that’s meant to be subversively revelatory, but will instead lead to unintentional laughter for anyone who’s managed to sit the entirety of Samaritan’s one-hour and 40-minute running time.

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Samaritan is now streaming worldwide on Prime Video.

Samaritan

Cast
  • Sylvester Stallone
  • Javon ‘Wanna’ Walton
  • Pilou Asbæk

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Matt Shakman Is In Talks To Direct ‘Fantastic Four’

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According to a new report, Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct the upcoming MCU project, Fantastic Four. Marvel Studios has been very hush-hush regarding Fantastic Four to the point where no official announcements have been made other than the film’s release date. No casting news or literally anything other than rumors has been released regarding the project. We know that Fantastic Four is slated for release on November 8th, 2024, and will be a part of Marvel’s Phase 6. There are also rumors that the cast of the new Fantastic Four will be announced at the D23 Expo on September 9th.

Fantastic Four is still over two years from release, and we assume we will hear more news about the project in the coming months. However, the idea of the Fantastic Four has already been introduced into the MCU. John Krasinski played Reed Richards aka Mr. Fantastic in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The cameo was a huge deal for fans who have been waiting a long time for the Fantastic Four to enter the MCU. When Disney acquired Twenty Century Fox in 2019 we assumed that the Fox Marvel characters would eventually make their way into the MCU. It’s been 3 years and we already have had an X-Men and Fantastic Four cameo – even if they were from another universe.

Deadline is reporting that Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct Fantastic Four. Shakman served as the director for Wandavision and has had an extensive career. He directed two episodes of Game of Thrones and an episode of The Boys, and he had a long stint on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There is nothing official yet, but Deadline’s sources say that Shakman is currently in talks for the job and things are headed in the right direction.

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To be honest, I was a bit more excited when Jon Watts was set to direct. I’m sure Shakman is a good director, but Watts proved he could handle a tentpole superhero film with Spider-Man: Homecoming. Wandavision was good, but Watts’ style would have been perfect for Fantastic Four. The film is probably one of the most anticipated films in Marvel’s upcoming slate films and they need to find the best person they can to direct. Is that Matt Shakman? It could be, but whoever takes the job must realize that Marvel has a lot riding on this movie. The other Fantastic Four films were awful and fans deserve better. Hopefully, Marvel knocks it out of the park as they usually do. You can see for yourself when Fantastic Four hits theaters on November 8th, 2024.

Film Synopsis: One of Marvel’s most iconic families makes it to the big screen: the Fantastic Four.

Source: Deadline

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Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase Star in ‘Zombie Town’ Mystery Teen Romancer (Exclusive)

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Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase have entered Zombie Town, a mystery teen romancer based on author R.L. Stine’s book of the same name.

The indie, now shooting in Ontario, also stars Henry Czerny and co-teen leads Marlon Kazadi and Madi Monroe. The ensemble cast includes Scott Thompson and Bruce McCulloch of the Canadian comedy show Kids in the Hall.

Canadian animator Peter Lepeniotis will direct Zombie Town. Stine’s kid’s book sees a quiet town upended when 12-year-old Mike and his friend, Karen, see a horror movie called Zombie Town and unexpectedly see the title characters leap off the screen and chase them through the theater.

Zombie Town will premiere in U.S. theaters before streaming on Hulu and then ABC Australia in 2023.

“We are delighted to bring the pages of R.L. Stine’s Zombie Town to the screen and equally thrilled to be working with such an exceptional cast and crew on this production. A three-time Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award winner with book sales of over $500 million, R.L. Stine has a phenomenal track record of crafting stories that engage and entertain audiences,” John Gillespie, Trimuse Entertainment founder and executive producer, said in a statement.

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Executive producers are Trimuse Entertainment, Toonz Media Group, Lookout Entertainment, Viva Pictures and Sons of Anarchy actor Kim Coates.  

Paco Alvarez and Mark Holdom of Trimuse negotiated the deal to acquire the rights to Stine’s Zombie Town book.

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