What s New to Watch on Blu-ray: Dreamland, Max Cloud, A Serbian Film & more
January 22, 2021 by:
It s Friday, folks, and do you know what that means? Not only have we reached the best day of the workweek, but after watching the latest episode of Marvel s
WandaVision, it s the perfect time to take in a movie. If you ve been hitting your personal Blu-ray collection pretty hard during the pandemic, why not pick up something new? Now, I know what you re thinking. Steve, there are hardly any new movies on the shelves nowadays. Yes, the Blu-ray situation has been rather grim as of late, but this week offers a few exceptions to the trend.
Dreamland (M, 101mins) Directed by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte ½ Like many other residents of Bismark, Eugene Baker (Finn Cole) thought the land was cursed. Having been lured to Texas’ giant plains by the promise of a new life, his family’s dreams had died, along with their crops. It was all too much for his father, who left Eugene and his mother Olivia (
Better Call Saul’s Kerry Condon) when the former was just five. Scrabbling to survive, they were seemingly saved when she married local lawman George Evans (Travis Fimmel). That was before the town suffered 14 dust storms in one year. Then the banks came for their farms.
Dreamland (MA) and a half
IN the mid 1930s, life in America’s west was tough from every aspect, graphically described in “The Grapes of Wrath”, John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel made into a movie that in 1941 got four Oscar nominations and two wins, one of which went to director John Ford.
In 1968, Arthur Penn’s movie about bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who made headlines until gunned down in May, 1934, by Texas Rangers Frank Hamer and Ben Gault, won six Oscars including Best Picture.
Both those precedents were running through my mind as I watched Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s fictional movie.
Star, power-producer Margot Robbie put the dream in Dreamland - director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte
The Hollywood-conquering Aussie has none of the airs and graces that might be expected, only a workhorse ethic and a passionate soul.
‘Ammonite’ director Francis Lee on outrage, and working with Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan
Who gets to tell what story and how? Can you write queer into history when you have no proof?
Top movies to discover this Summer
SBS Movies managing editor Fiona Williams offers her pick of the movies coming to SBS World Movies and SBS On Demand this month, as part of the Summer Of Discovery.
Speaking about the stratospheric rise of his star, Aussie Margot Robbie,
Dreamland director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte says of the big bang of her arrival: “I mean, Martin Scorsese really shot her out of a cannon. It was like, ‘whoa, who is the biggest movie star now? Oh, it’s you’.”
And it does feel that way. There Robbie was, stealing
The Wolf of Wall Street out from under Leo DiCaprio and then BOOM, she was taking over Hollywood. And not just in front of the camera either. Robbie and her husband Tom Ackerley are fast-rising fixers behind the scenes too, as co-owners of wildly successful production company LuckyChap Entertainment. The outfit counts her Oscar-nominated turn in