≡ Category: Film, Most Popular | ≅ Comments
Where to watch free movies on the web? Here’s a list that will get you started. We’ve listed 25 sites that feature a wide range of films. Classics, international, film noir, documentaries, indies — they’re all here, waiting to be watched.
General Films/Movies
Internet Archive – Feature Films: When you’re looking for free movies online, the Internet [...]
≡ Category: Film, Science | ≅ Comments
Earlier this week, we highlighted Snagfilms.com in our collection “20 Places to Watch Free Movies Online.” When you dig into their collection, you will find some well known, recent films, including Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me and Naomi Wolf’s The End of America. And then you can also stumble upon some worthwhile educational documentaries. Above, we [...]
Nina Paley, a self-taught animator, released in 2008 an 82-minute animated film, Sita Sings the Blues, that mingles the classic Indian myth, The Ramayana, with contemporary autobiographical events, and it’s all set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. The film, which launched the San Francisco International Animation Festival, has won awards and gathered [...]
A nice tip from Lifehacker. Canada’s National Film Board makes 1000s of films (including documentaries, animated films, trailers and some Oscar winners) freely available via the web and now the iPhone. Visit the NFB collection here, and get the free iPhone app here.
via Lifehacker
≡ Category: Film, Music | ≅ Comments
In 2008, Martin Scorsese brought the Rolling Stones to film with “Shine a Light.” (Watch the trailer here.) But a good forty years before that, another giant of modern film had a similar idea. Jean-Luc Godard, one of the founders of New Wave French cinema, directed “Sympathy for the Devil” during the tumultuous summer [...]
Jason Kottke has unearthed a rare and lengthy interview with the great director, Alfred Hitchcock. The interview was conducted by Tom Snyder back in 1973, and he starts with a good question. “All of the pictures that you do scare people. What frightens you?” Watch Part 1 above, and get the remaining parts here: Part 2, [...]
Let’s take you back to the beginning of David Lynch’s career. Above, we’re back in 1968, and we’re featuring Lynch’s second short film. “The Alphabet,” which won an award by the American Film Institute, has been released on DVD along with five other early short films. Find them here.
I had to give this at least a mention. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) is now free to watch on YouTube. If you live in the US, you can watch the classic film starring Robert DeNiro, Jodie Foster, and Harvey Keitel here. If you live outside the US, you’re unfortunately out of luck, at least [...]
Mark Frauenfelder, over at BoingBoing, has flagged a nice film noir collection housed at Archive. org. All films are public domain and free. Among the 43 films you’ll find Beat the Devil (1953), a John Huston film starring Humphrey Bogart. (Watch it here.) Archive.org also hosts a good number of other films, and I’ve highlighted [...]
A little bit of breaking news coming out of Zurich, Switzerland. More coverage in The New York Times here.
≡ Category: Film, Literature | ≅ Comments
In 1999, Aleksandr Petrov won the Academy Award for Short Film (among other awards) for a film that follows the plot line of Ernest Hemingway’s classic novella, The Old Man and the Sea (1952). As noted here, Petrov’s technique involves painting pastels on glass, and he and his son painted a total of 29,000 [...]
≡ Category: Film, Life | ≅ Comments
A memorable scene from The Graduate (1967). But, as the New York Times tells us today, plastics is out; statistics is now in.
John Hughes films. The Who. Now you’ve got the backdrop for my teenage years. This is for me, and perhaps even for you… (Sorry to those who can’t relate. We’ll be back on track soon enough.)
What if The Godfather had been shot without Marlon Brando? (It almost happened.) Or without Al Pacino? (It almost happened too .) Or without Francis Ford Coppola? (Yup, even that almost happened as well.) Then, what if Robert De Niro had played the role of Sonny, which eventually went to James Caan? Here’s what it [...]
In a quick 59 seconds, David Lynch tells you the films and filmmakers that he likes best (see below). In equally succinct videos, though with a bit more salty language (read: language that’s not ideal for work), Lynch also gives you his thoughts on product placement and the whole concept of watching a movie on an iPhone.
≡ Category: Film, History | ≅ Comments
Robert McNamara, the architect of the failed Vietnam War, died earlier this week. He was a major force on the American political scene throughout the 1960s. Then, he re-emerged in 2004, when Errol Morris released The Fog of War, an Oscar-winning documentary that features McNamara looking back on his career and highlighting the lessons [...]
IFC.com (the web site of the Independent Film Channel) has worked up a list of the all-time best movie trailers — or, as they put it, the films that promote the actual films. The list cuts across different eras and features many older classics (Psycho, Citizen Kane, Dr. Strangelove, etc.) as well as more recent films. [...]
On Friday, we brought you Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s multimedia presentation at the TED conference. Now we bring you his new film, Home, which you can watch until the end of the day on YouTube. The trailer is above, the complete film is here. When you’re done, you won’t look at our planet in the same way. (You [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Film | ≅ Comments
Here we have Yann Arthus-Bertrand talking at the TED Conference and displaying his recent photographic and cinematographic work that focuses on humanity and our habitat. The work is as visually stunning as the story it tells is disheartening. Definitely worth giving this one some time. We’ll be following up later today with some more media from Arthus-Bertrand. Stay tuned [...]
≡ Category: Film, Literature, Theater | ≅ Comments
Thanks to PBS, you can watch online Ian McKellen starring in King Lear, one of Shakesepeare’s finest tragedies. McKellen performed the play first in England (2007), then on a worldwide tour, before filming the production for public television. You can watch it all right here, and if you want to follow the original text, you [...]
≡ Category: Books, Film | ≅ Comments
From the Freakonomics blog:
We’ve written before about the occasional hyper-critical comments on certain blogs, but such comments are like valentines compared to what some Amazon.com customers heap upon The Rolling Stones, The Godfather, The Diary of Anne Frank, and other standards. The Cynical-C blog lists the most caustic of these every day.
From Berlin, two initiatives from the Deutsche Kinemathek/Museum for Film and Television.
The first is a collection of private photos and home movies of the Berlin Wall, its eventual collapse, and the reunification that followed. It’s a timely collection, especially given that the 20th anniversary of the Wall’s fall is coming in November. Not only do the images [...]
≡ Category: Film, Music | ≅ Comments
Out in remix culture, one is never sure what one will find. Take this video for example. If you watched American TV during the 1980s, you’re likely to remember Diff’rent Strokes, a sitcom that had a kind of far-fetched premise: a rich white widower adopts two African-American children from Harlem, and they live happily together [...]
≡ Category: Film, Television | ≅ Comments
The Australian National Film and Sound Archive provides free and worldwide access to over 1,000 film and television titles – a treasury of down-under video 100 years in the making. In a partnership with the major networks and other learning organizations, the Archive has commissioned expert curators to annotate the holdings, which provides for a rich [...]
Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary, Super Size Me, is available on YouTube for all to watch. Spend 30 days eating nothing but McDonald’s fast food and what happens? It’s not pretty. But you’ll get the picture in an entertaining 100 minutes. Super Size Me was nominated for an Academy Award, and won prizes at Sundance and [...]
≡ Category: Books, Film, Literature | ≅ Comments
J.G. Ballard, the author of Crash and Empire died at 78 this weekend. Here we have a short interview from 1986 where he talks about how violent sensations now lubricate our modern world. It’s this line of thinking that finds its way into Crash, a controversial book that David Cronenberg brought to the big screen in [...]
Eggman913 on YouTube has a pretty neat schtick. He takes artistic images, then morphs them together in pretty creative ways. The piece above plays with images of famous actresses from different moments in American film history. Eggman913 has also created a montage called Women in Art, which we’ve featured here before. (It has only 9.2 million views on YouTube.) [...]
On the Oscar Channel on YouTube, you can flip through some classic prize-winning moments. Above, we feature Roberto Benigni’s speech upon receiving The Academy Award for best actor (Life is Beautiful) in 1998. You can also see vintage speeches by Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, Federico Fellini, and others. Perhaps a questionable call, The Oscar Channel has been added [...]
≡ Category: Film, Television | ≅ Comments
Above, you can watch Orson Welles’ last interview and public appearance. The clip brings you back to October 10, 1985, when the great filmmaker, then 70 years old, appeared on the Merv Griffin show and talked a good deal about aging and his aging generation. Just two hours later, Welles would die of a heart [...]
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