Joey’s Home Movies For the Week of August 22nd – Starting to Get Into a Film Festival Frame of Mind

Welcome back to my Home Movies! Today, there really isn’t much hitting shelves, so I got a little unconventional with my top pick, looking to the film festival world of last year. This week also includes two Criterion releases, so read on for more…

Joey’s Top Pick

Well, I don’t have a specific top pick today. Instead, I’m looking back on the film festival circuit from last year to recommend some of my favorite flicks that I saw at New York, Sundance, Toronto, and Tribeca. Those include Belfast, CODA, Mass, Pleasure, The Power of the Dog, Red Rocket, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, Spencer, Titane, and The Worst Person in the World. There’s something for almost everyone there, so you really can’t go wrong, whatever you choose!

Also Available This Week

Ali & Ava

Chicago Fire: Season Ten (TV)

Mr. Malcolm’s List

My Hero Academia: World Heroes’ Mission (TV)

NCIS: Los Angeles – The Thirteenth Season (TV)

Criterion Corner

Buck and the Preacher

From The Criterion Collection: “With his rousingly entertaining directorial debut, Sidney Poitier, alongside actor-producer Harry Belafonte, helped rewrite the history of the western, bringing Black heroes to a genre in which they had always been sorely underrepresented. Combining boisterous buddy comedy with blistering, Black Power–era political fury, Poitier and a marvelously mischievous Belafonte star as a tough and taciturn wagon master and an unscrupulous, pistol-packing “preacher,” who join forces in order to take on the white bounty hunters threatening a westward-bound caravan of people recently emancipated from slavery. A superbly crafted revisionist landmark, Buck and the Preacher subverts Hollywood conventions at every turn and reclaims the western genre in the name of Black liberation.”

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Hôtel du Nord

From The Criterion Collection: “Anguished young lovers, fallen women, wanted criminals, and all manner of social castoffs: these are the disreputable denizens of the Hôtel du Nord, an atmospherically seedy boardinghouse on the bustling banks of the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris, whose lives collide in Marcel Carné’s bittersweet rhapsody of romance, betrayal, revelry, and violence. Featuring evocative production design by the famed Alexandre Trauner and a colorful ensemble cast of some of classical French cinema’s most illustrious stars—including Annabella, Louis Jouvet, and a divinely dissolute Arletty in one of her most iconic roles—Hôtel du Nord is a jewel of a film and a sublime exemplar of Carné’s celebrated poetics, imbuing working-class lives and dramas with a touching nobility.”

Stay tuned for more next week…