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What’s new to VOD and streaming this weekend: May 14-16
Including reviews of The Underground Railroad, The Killing Of Two Lovers, In The Earth and more By Norman Wilner and Radheyan Simonpillai
May 14, 2021
OW critics pick what’s new to streaming and VOD for the weekend of May 14. Plus: Everything new to VOD and streaming platforms.
The Killing Of Two Lovers
(Robert Machoian)
Machoian’s solo debut as a writer/director after more than a decade of collaborations and documentaries is a spare, aching and almost unbearably sad drama about thirtysomething David (Clayne Crawford), a husband and father in rural Utah mired in a domestic crisis. He’s separated from his wife Nikki (Sepideh Moafi) and their children. Nikki appears to be moving on. David has a gun. He badly wants to use it. But The Killing Of Two Lovers isn’t that simple. Machoian immediately complicates his story by showing us who David is when he’s not blinded by rage, and then complicates things fur
Barry Jenkins vividly recalls the moment he first heard about the Underground Railroad.
“I was around 5 or 6, and when I first heard those words, it wasn’t even imagined I
saw Black people on trains that were underground,” he recalled. “My grandfather was a longshoreman, and he would go to work with his hard hat and tool belt. I imagined someone like him building the Underground Railroad. The feeling was beautiful because it was purely about Black people, this idea of building things.”
The youngster would eventually learn that “Underground Railroad” was actually a colorful term for a network of safe houses and routes utilized by slaves to escape their oppressive masters in the antebellum South. But the image stayed with him into adulthood as his films, including the Oscar-winning “Moonlight” and the romantic drama “If Beale Street Could Talk,” made him one of Hollywood’s most respected filmmakers.
How Joel Edgertonâs cruellest role turned into a blessing
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How Joel Edgertonâs cruellest role turned into a blessing
The 46-year-old actor was driven to play a ruthless slave catcher in the yearâs most anticipated TV series. It may be his defining moment.
May 12, 2021
Joel Edgerton asked to be considered for the role of slave catcher Arnold Ridgeway in The Underground Railroad.
Credit:Nic Walker
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Joel Edgerton knows how to find his way. Put the Australian actor behind the wheel of a car in a city for a few weeks and he gets âa blueprintâ of the streets in his head. Place him at the start of his career as a young Sydney drama school graduate and 25 years later Edgertonâs a leading Hollywood star and an accomplished writer and director. Whatever their form, the paths he forges are unique.