Our streaming video collections got even better this month with a few additions we want to share with you – including a rotating collection that’s only up for a limited time. Firstly, we have two big new titles available to stream. When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee’s documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is […]
Continue readingEven reviews of media for women are more hostile
Gender-targeted abuse and harassment have long made comment sections on the internet borderline unreadable, but those same nasty attitudes have been poisoning the digital well for years in subtler ways. As a recent exposé from FiveThirtyEight shows, online reviews for television shows geared towards women have been artificially lowered by axe-grinding men. By analyzing a […]
Continue readingFandor spotlights twenty acclaimed films by women
Fandor has established itself as the premier digital film service for cinema buffs: in addition to their streaming library, they run Keyframe, a daily film essay and video blog. If you haven’t followed them already and like film, you probably should. For one of their videos (embedded above), Keyframe polled fifty film critics about their […]
Continue readingWhat’s it like to be a woman in cinematography?
via Variety Much has been made about the unfortunately small pool of women directing in Hollywood and lack of the opportunities they are given. Things are even more dire for women in cinematography. According to Vulture, only 2% of cinematographers for major films are women, and none have ever been nominated for an Oscar in […]
Continue readingWho run the world? Ghostbusters. It’s Women in Film Week on the blog
Haters be warned: the new Ghostbusters movie comes out this Friday, and we are extremely excited. It looks like a whole load of fun, and we’re glad to see a big-budgeted action comedy in theaters. But it’s impossible to talk about Ghostbusters in a vacuum, because the discussion around the movie has been dominated by […]
Continue readingMeet the Media Services guide collection
When we buy new items for the collection, sometimes they come with bonus guides full of interviews, essays, and commentary. These are super useful for anyone researching film or wanting to learn more about film history. We keep these guides stashed on shelves in the back corner of Media Services, and we realized that we […]
Continue readingRIP Abbas Kiarostami, defining voice of Iranian cinema
Over the weekend, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami died at age 76. Kiarostami was perhaps the greatest and most renowned Iranian filmmaker; he is the only to win a Palme d’Or, had an outsized influence on world cinema, and brought international attention to the Iranian film industry. His admirers include Martin Scorsese and Jean-Luc Godard, who […]
Continue readingNew Acquisitions – July 2016
This month, we’ve added some of the most critically movies of 2015 to our collection, including The Revenant, Creed, and Concussion. But we want to focus on a particular fascinating movie that probably passed under your radar. The Tribe is a Ukrainian crime movie filmed entirely in Ukrainian sign language. There are no translations or […]
Continue readingMedia Services at the Movies: The Purge: Election Year
The summer blockbuster season is here! “Media Services at the Movies” will look at what big movie is coming out this week, then offer a few movies like it from our collection. To be honest, we dismissed The Purge at first as more thinly plotted horror about people breaking into your house. Maybe it was. […]
Continue readingThe five years in Chicago when movies were forbidden
from Exhibitors Herald,via Wikimedia Commons Today, we learned about a truly bizarre moment in film history that we want to share. For as often as you hear people (usually wrongly) claiming censorship of media, you’ve never lived through anything like the reign of Major M.L.C. Funkhouser, film censor of the city of Chicago. As The […]
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