WLS’s Streaming Library May Beat Them All

WLS’s Streaming Library May Beat Them All: With all the movie theaters and performing arts centers closed, local organizations from The Bedford Playhouse to the Jacob Burns Film Center have been serving up a steady diet of online entertainment. From Zoom sessions to streaming libraries from independent movie distributor Magnolia Pictures, local new eContent is not just a way for the community to feel connected. Local organizations are providing some great custom content. Like the book chat with Sex In The City author Candace Bushnell, coming up on Tuesday, June 16 at Bedford’s Virtual Playhouse. They are also providing great streaming content that is hard to find on  commercial streaming options.

As your favorite place to shop for local what to do’s, we’ve been digging through the wreckage of this live entertainment lockdown we’re going through in the COVID-19 era. And we’ve been bringing you lists of streaming libraries from a variety of sources including the local theaters and the Greenwich International Film Festival. But the Kanopy streaming library, offered through the Westchester Library System and available to all library cardholders, may be the best we’ve found. Especially for lovers of foreign and independent films, documentaries and the headiest and most celebrated classic movies.

On Kanopy you can find everything from comedian Bo Burnham’s, debut feature Eight Grade, from 2018, that was a spotlight pick at the 2018 Greenwich Film Festival to Vittorio De Sica’s all-time classic Bicycle Thieves and Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon and The Seventh Samurai. The 2017 coming-of-age-comedy, Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s debut film that earned five Academy Award nominations, or Roman Rolanski’s 1974 neo-noir mystery, Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. There’s also Kanopy for Kids offering feature-length kids flicks like Mr. Hublot, the 2009 French animated film Eleanor’s Secret, and Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood from PBS Kids.

There are new film releases on Kanopy weekly. This week’s new movies include A Tuba To Cuba, that joins the Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s post-embargo trip to Cuba exploring the indigenous music that gave birth to New Orleans Jazz. The movie was an award-winner at the New Orleans, Tallgrass and Fairhope Film Festivals and a official selection at SXSW. Another new release this week is Goodbye Solo, about a Sengalese cab driver, that won the Best Picture Award at the 2008 Florence Film Festival. And The Panama Papers, an explosive documentary exposing illegal activities of offshore corporations gleaned from over 11 million documents, dating back to the 1970’s, that were “uncovered” and anonymously leaked to 376 journalists around the world. Some of the people mentioned in the original documents include King Salman of Saudi Arabia, Malcolm Turnbull and Benazir Bhutto, the former Prime Ministers of Australia and Pakistan and Petro Poroshenko the President of the Ukraine from 2014 to 2019.

So if you’re all caught up on Queer Eye, Breaking Bad and The Crown – browsing through Kanopy’s library is like it used to be on Netflix or before that – a trip to Blockbuster.

A library card from your local library, or a student ID from your college or university, can get you into the archives – right now.