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.
Ahead of the Curve
In 1990, a 23-year-old named Frances “Franco” Stevens applied for multiple credit cards. When she was approved, she withdrew as much cash as she could from them, and used the money to launch Deneuve, one of the first lesbian magazines in the United States. In a fiction feature-length film, this moment would arrive halfway through the running time, the percussion in the score would tense as we saw an actor convey the fear and hopefulness of someone attempting something bold and risky. A mellow piano would probably announce that this is “the” make or break moment for our heroine. – Jose S. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Bad Tales (D’Innocenzo Brothers)
Amid the litany of horrors the biting little film Bad Tales presents,...
Ahead of the Curve
In 1990, a 23-year-old named Frances “Franco” Stevens applied for multiple credit cards. When she was approved, she withdrew as much cash as she could from them, and used the money to launch Deneuve, one of the first lesbian magazines in the United States. In a fiction feature-length film, this moment would arrive halfway through the running time, the percussion in the score would tense as we saw an actor convey the fear and hopefulness of someone attempting something bold and risky. A mellow piano would probably announce that this is “the” make or break moment for our heroine. – Jose S. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Bad Tales (D’Innocenzo Brothers)
Amid the litany of horrors the biting little film Bad Tales presents,...
- 6/4/2021
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Amid the litany of horrors the biting little film Bad Tales presents, there might be a pinnacle: reading out your middle-school report card to a dining table of your parents’ closest friends. Although young Dennis (Tommaso Di Cola) and Alessia Placido (Giulietta Rebeggiani) have a stack of straight A+’s to unveil, they go through their paces with a haunted, almost inhuman stillness. The camera holds the shot in near-real time, tracking each excruciating second as the kids slowly leave the table, and return, gifted-level grades in trembling hands. But are the film’s writer-directors, twin brothers Fabio and Damiano D’Innocenzo, after our approval in an equally desperate fashion?
Bad Tales is contemporary Italian realism left to corrode and mangle out in the broiling Roman sun. The color palette is tweaked sickly yellow, and the camerawork stays at an austere distance, hovering but never pouncing like the continual buzz of...
Bad Tales is contemporary Italian realism left to corrode and mangle out in the broiling Roman sun. The color palette is tweaked sickly yellow, and the camerawork stays at an austere distance, hovering but never pouncing like the continual buzz of...
- 6/3/2021
- by David Katz
- The Film Stage
The sense of foreboding is unpalatable in the D’Innocenzos brothers Bad Tales. The wait for why there is such a festering malaise in this unnamed suburb of Rome that the film is set in is intoxicating but eventually becomes quite frustrating, as the film draws near to its 98 minute close.
We are witness to unsavoury events throughout that flag why a lot of the child characters are non-vocal around the adults, but we are also left starved of further depth as to why things continue to happen the way they do. In overplaying the subtle, unspoken card, the D’Innocenzos miss delivering some crucial conclusions and leave other sub plots dangling without consequence. On the other hand, it could be argued that what is left to the imagination is more potent than anything depicted on screen, which is why reviewing Bad Tales feels like a troubling conundrum too – it is subjective in the extreme.
We are witness to unsavoury events throughout that flag why a lot of the child characters are non-vocal around the adults, but we are also left starved of further depth as to why things continue to happen the way they do. In overplaying the subtle, unspoken card, the D’Innocenzos miss delivering some crucial conclusions and leave other sub plots dangling without consequence. On the other hand, it could be argued that what is left to the imagination is more potent than anything depicted on screen, which is why reviewing Bad Tales feels like a troubling conundrum too – it is subjective in the extreme.
- 10/15/2020
- by Lisa Giles-Keddie
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
At a surprise party for his daughter, a randy Italian homeowner studies a neighbor’s wife through the sliding glass door and describes all the ways he’d like to violate her. In the bathroom, his 14-year-old son sits with his best friend, studying the hardcore porn sites listed in the browsing history of Dad’s cellphone. A few days earlier and a couple doors down, a pregnant teen senses the prepubescent kid’s sexual curiosity and taunts him with a series of increasingly provocative acts. For example, when he offers her a cookie, she exposes a breast and gives a whole new meaning to “Got milk?”
Innocence is not a concept to be found in the D’Innocenzo Brothers’ cinematic oeuvre, which consists of two films so far: “Boys Cry” and “Bad Tales,” both of which forgo the notion of childhood as a state of uncorrupted naivete. Rather, in the Italian siblings’ deeply cynically,...
Innocence is not a concept to be found in the D’Innocenzo Brothers’ cinematic oeuvre, which consists of two films so far: “Boys Cry” and “Bad Tales,” both of which forgo the notion of childhood as a state of uncorrupted naivete. Rather, in the Italian siblings’ deeply cynically,...
- 2/25/2020
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
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