Welcome to The Penny-Pinching Cinephile, a weekly spotlight of the best free flicks on the web. ‘Cuz sometimes you gotta eat.
1.) A Woman Under the Influence
Even if you didn’t catch Criterion’s free weekend of films on Hulu, you can still check out John Cassavetes’ masterpiece, A Woman Under the Influence. Featuring stunning performances from Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands, the film is a realist masterpiece about one woman’s struggle with mental illness and how it affects her family and everyone around her. This is one of those films where you forget the actors are actually acting–everything is so vivid, so alive and immediate, you never feel like you’re watching a playacted version of real life; it’s more real than real life.
2.) Ivan’s Childhood
Only Andrei Tarvoksky’s first feature film, Ivan’s Childhood already shows the hallmarks of a master filmmaker and serious artist. Set in the Soviet Union during WWII, orphan Ivan runs reconnaissance for the Soviet troops and feeds them information on the encroaching German forces. Filled with poetic imagery, frequent dream sequences and flashbacks, this film influenced generations of filmmakers like Krzysztof Kieślowski and even Ingmar Bergman (to whom Tarkovsky is especially indebted). Tragic and beautiful, Ivan’s Childhood remains a classic of Soviet cinema and a good starting point for those who want to tackle Tarvosky’s filmography. Make sure you enable the closed captioning for English subtitles.
3.) Christine
A young teenage girl carries a bag of groceries to her flat in suburban London. Inside her apartment, she cracks open a coke and opens a cracker tin for a snack. She pulls out a needle from the tin and begins to shoot heroin. Thus begins Christine, a 1987 made-for-TV movie from British director Alan Clarke that feels like a documentary-style punch in the gut. This film takes no prisoners. It is a realistic, heartbreaking movie all the more for its matter-of-factness in depicting how normal and everyday heavy drug use is to these British kids. The film itself is ultra rare, not on TV and this version on YouTube looks ripped from a well-worn VHS copy. Despite the poor visual quality, Christine is a must-see, not only for the unflinching kitchen sink subject matter, but for Clarke’s inventive use of steady cam shots.
This documentary chronicles the legendary NY fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, whose on-the-fly photographs of Big Apple street fashion have appeared in magazines and newspapers for the past fifty years. Centering around his work at The New York Times, the film delineates in passionate detail the life of a man whose life is his work. What emerges is a portrait of a man who devotes himself to nothing but his art; Cunningham’s tiny apartment has no closet, no kitchen and no bathroom. He can be spotted all day long riding his bicycle up and down the street snapping photos and running after visions of beauty only he can see. The film’s title is apt: it’s both a portrait of an artist and a city.
5.) Layer Cake
Behold, the film that got Daniel Craig the job as Bond. Here he plays a cocaine dealer involved in the very ugly, complex underworld of the British crime syndicate. Craig plans to cash in his chips and retire until he’s hired to find the daughter of a big shot coke supplier and everything goes haywire. Featuring stellar performances and a super cool gangster vibe, Layer Cake ends on a crackerjack twist I never saw coming. Co-starring Sienna Miller, Michael Gambon and a young Ben Whishaw, Layer Cake marked the feature debut of director Matthew Vaughn, who’d later go on to make Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class. Fans of Craig’s Bond should flock to watch this flick, which is up there with Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels in badass British gangster pictures.
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