Jacob Burns Virtual Screening Room

Jacob Burns Virtual Screening Room: We’ve been tracking the Bedford Playhouse’s library of films available to stream at home. Rental fees for those films are shared by the film distributor with the Bedford Playhouse. We like this as a good way to help local theaters. Jacob Burns also has a shared fee arrangement with independent film distributors. JBFC’s Virtual Screening Room offers films curated by their programmers that you can watch at home. And they have some interesting films that you can’t find with the Bedford Playhouse. Here are some highlights from their current streaming library.

Coming Soon

Tommaso

Tomasso: Abel Ferrara teams up with Willem Dafoe (for the fifth time) in his first dramatic feature since 2014’s Pasolini. The Hollywood Reporter lauded Dafoe’s performance as an American expat movie director and recovering addict living in Rome with his young wife and their daughter. Film at Lincoln Center wrote:  “Tommaso is easily Ferrara and Dafoe’s most personal and engrossing collaboration to date, a delicately surrealistic work of autofiction marked by the keen sensitivity of two consummate artists.”

Shirley: Elizabeth Moss stars as Shirley Jackson the gothic write of The Haunting of Hill House and the short story The Lottery, in this “fictional” bio-pic based on the author’s life. The movie unfolds like a Jackson novel, telling a tale of a young couple who move in with the depressive and agoraphobic Jackson and her philandering husband at Bennington College and become fodder for her next gothic novel. The film was the winner of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize for Auteur Filmmaking. Sixty judges gave Shirley a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Now Showing

Papicha

Papicha: This multiple award winner and debut film from Mounia Meddour, was nominated at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard category and was selected as the Algerian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards. The film follows Nedjma, an 18 year-old fashion design who bucks the events of the Algerian Civil War in her determination to have a normal life with her friend Wassila. As the political environment swings hard right, she  fights for her freedom by producing her own fashion show. Meddour’s film won the AMPAS Gold Fellowship Award for Women and took home two Césars for Best First Film and Best Female Newcomer for Khoudri’s performance.

Lucky Grandma: Sasie Sealey’s dark comedy, Lucky Grandma, about a chain-smoking 80 year old woman from NYC’s Chinatown debuted at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and received a 94% Critics Rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The story follows her auspicious reading at a fortune teller to her trip to a casino where she goes all in. Her fortunes turn when she gets caught up in a full-on gang war. Find out who’s the real bad-ass!

Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc: Bruno Dumont casts ten-year-old Lise Leplat Prudhomme in the role of the Joan of Arc, considered a French heroine for her role in the Siege of Orleans during the Hundred Years War between France and England in the 15th century. Inspired by divine revelation, she successfully inserted herself in the war effort resulting in a military reversal she had foreseen in the visions she described to the French Royal family of Charles VII. She was later captured and burned at the stake at the age of nineteen – then canonized by the Catholic Church.

Up From The Streets, a multi-award-winning documentary that profiles New Orleans culture through the lens of music – from the drumming in Congo Square to the city’s contemporary music scene

The Painter and the Thief

The Painter and the Thief: Desperate for answers about the theft of her 2 paintings, a Czech artist seeks out and befriends the career criminal who stole them. After inviting her thief to sit for a portrait, the two form an improbable relationship and an inextricable bond that will forever link these lonely souls. A Special Jury Award-winner for Creative Storytelling from the Sundance Institute, this 2020 documentary from Benjamin Ree received a 100% Critics Rating from 32 critics on Rotten Tomatoes.