Frustrated with Netflix? Check Cinesift!

Cinesift, a movie rating aggregator and competitor to Rotten Tomatoes, has an awesome service that will tell you which quality films are available on Amazon Prime and Netflix. If you're bored and the lesser dregs of Netflix will not satisfy your viewing needs, try their new search features to find a film worth watching that's available now!

Kanopy Highlights: Ajami

About a year ago, we rolled out Kanopy, a streaming service that includes hundreds of films from the Criterion Collection and more. We're happy to see classes and students taking advantage of this great video resource, and we want to spotlight some of the most popular titles from this collection.

This week, we're focusing on Ajami, a 2009 nominee for Best Foreign Language Film.

Ajami is a mixed-religious neighborhood in Jaffa, Israel, where tensions understandably run high. The film tells a crime story in those streets, intercutting between five different stories told from Jewish and Arab perspectives. The film doesn't use its interleaving and grittiness just for show; it reveals and humanizes the tensions of a community divided by religion and class.

You can follow this link to watch the film instantly, in your browser, for free with your AU login.

Kanopy Highlights: Smash & Grab

About a year ago, we rolled out Kanopy, a streaming service that includes hundreds of films from the Criterion Collection and more. We're happy to see classes and students taking advantage of this great video resource, and we want to spotlight some of the most popular titles from this collection.

This week, we're focusing on Smash & Grab, an experimental documentary about international jewel thieves.

Smash & Grab follows The Pink Panthers, a gang that has reportedly stolen billions in jewelry around the world. Director Havana Marking blends reality and fictional filmmaking techniques in startling ways. The film uses real surveillance footage of The Pink Panthers (we don't understand how she obtained it) to ratchet the tension, and her interviews with the gang members (which, again, we're baffled as to how she arranged) are presented as rotoscoped animation. This a documentary that gets close to its subjects – through the heightened lens of a partially-animated heist film.

You can follow this link to watch the film instantly, in your browser, for free with your AU login.

Kanopy Highlights: Wild Style

Still from Wild Style

About a year ago, we rolled out Kanopy, a streaming service that includes hundreds of films from the Criterion Collection and more. We're happy to see classes and students taking advantage of this great video resource, and we want to spotlight some of the most popular titles from this collection.

This week, we're focusing on Wild Style, a 1983 film credited with bringing hip-hop to the big screen.

Here's Kanopy's description...

Wild Style follows the exploits of maverick tagger Zoro (real life graffiti artist Lee Quinones), whose work attracts the attention of an East Village art fancier (Patti Astor) who commissions him to paint the stage for a giant Rapper's Convention. A document of the earliest days of hip-hop in the boroughs of New York, everything in Wild Style is authentic - the story, style, characters, and most of the actors, are drawn from the community. It features a pantheon of old-school pioneers, including Grandmaster Flash, Busy Bee, The Cold Crush Brothers and more.

"Charlie Ahearn's groundbreaking film about hip-hop, graffiti, break dancing, and rap in eighties." -Sarah Cardace, New York Magazine

"It's a fascinating time capsule, worth examining for anyone interested in the cultural roots of hip hop." -Keith Phipps, AV Club

"Wild Style is a cult classic - indisputably the most important hip hop movie, ever." - David Mattin, BBC

Wild Style was a community breaking through into film, and its impact made its way back. Artists like Nas, MF Doom, and Jurassic 5 have referenced Wild Style. As the film makes its way to museum and retrospectives, it continues to shape perceptions of hip-hop culture.

It's also a really good movie – and a must-watch if you haven't already seen it!

You can follow this link to watch the film instantly, in your browser, for free with your AU login.

Kanopy Highlights: Film canon classics

Still from Seven Samurai

About a year ago, we rolled out Kanopy, a streaming service that includes hundreds of films from the Criterion Collection and more. We're happy to see classes and students taking advantage of this great video resource, and we want to spotlight some of the most popular titles from this collection.

This week, we're focusing on classics from the film canon.

You can click the link on any of these films to watch them instantly, in your browser, for free with your AU login.

The Battle of Algiers – "One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s."

City Lights – "City Lights, the most cherished film by Charlie Chaplin, is also his ultimate Little Tramp chronicle. The writer-director-star achieved new levels of grace, in both physical comedy and dramatic poignancy, with this silent tale of a lovable vagrant falling for a young blind woman who sells flowers on the street and mistakes him for a millionaire."

El Norte – "Brother and sister Enrique and Rosa flee persecution at home in Guatemala and journey north, through Mexico and on to the United States, with the dream of starting a new life. The personal travails of immigrants crossing the border to America had never been shown in the movies with such urgent humanism."

Eraserhead – "In David Lynch's 'dream of dark and troubling things,' Henry is left alone in his apartment to care for his deformed baby and has a series of strange encounters with the beautiful girl across the hall and the woman living in his radiator."

M – "In his harrowing masterwork M, Fritz Lang merges trenchant social commentary with chilling suspense, creating a panorama of private madness and public hysteria that to this day remains the blueprint for the psychological thriller."

Man with a Movie Camera – "This dawn-to-dusk view of the Soviet Union offers a montage of urban Russian life, showing the people of the city at work and at play Considered one of the most innovative and influential films of the silent era." Includes accompaniment by the Michael Nyman Band.

Seven Samurai –  "One of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, Seven Samurai tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to protect them from invading bandits."

Stagecoach – "John Ford's smash hit and enduring masterpiece Stagecoach revolutionized the western, elevating it from B movie to the A-list and establishing the genre as we know it today. The quintessential tale of a group of strangers thrown together into extraordinary circumstances, Stagecoach features John Wayne's first starring role for Ford."

#BlackLivesMatter documentary now available streaming

Films on Demand is a useful database for finding documentaries on a range of subjects, from the environment to teaching math. Now you can add timely social issues to that list as well: you can now stream #BlackLivesMatter, one of the first feature-length documentaries produced about the ongoing protests of racial inequality and police violence.

This is (at least as far as I know) the first documentary in our collection about the Black Lives Matter protests. Although there have been countless critical essays and videos on the topic, this succinct, powerful documentary captures snapshots of the protests around the country and and contextualizes them with history and stories from protestors.

We recommend previewing this film if you're teaching, learning, or just curious about the movement. Video can chronicle social change better than any words, and a well-produced documentary like #BlackLivesMatter is an especially great example.

Kanopy Highlights: Social justice documentaries

Still from Concerning Violence

About a year ago, we rolled out Kanopy, a streaming service that includes hundreds of films from the Criterion Collection and more. We're happy to see classes and students taking advantage of this great video resource, and we want to spotlight some of the most popular titles from this collection.

This week, we're focusing on powerful documentaries for social justice.

You can click the link on any of these films to watch them instantly, in your browser, for free with your AU login.

5 Broken Cameras – "5 Broken Cameras is a deeply personal, first-hand account of non-violent resistance in Bil'in, a West Bank village threatened by encroaching Israeli settlements. Shot almost entirely by Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat, who bought his first camera in 2005."

Body Typed series – "Body Typed is series of award-winning short films that uses humor to raise serious questions about the marketplace of commercial illusion and unrealizable standards of physical perfection."

Concerning Violence – "From the director of The Black Power Mixtape comes a bold and fresh visual narrative on Africa, based on newly discovered archive material covering the struggle for liberation from colonial rule in the late ’60s and ’70s, accompanied by text from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth."

In Whose Honor? – "What’s wrong with American Indian sports mascots? This moving, award-winning film is the first of its kind to address that subject. In Whose Honor? takes a critical look at the long-running practice of "honoring" American Indians as mascots and nicknames in sports."

Screaming Queens – "Screaming Queens tells the little-known story of the first known act of collective, violent resistance to the social oppression of queer people in the United States - a 1966 riot in San Francisco’s impoverished Tenderloin neighborhood, three years before the famous gay riot at New York’s Stonewall Inn."

Watch HBO documentaries for free through Films On Demand

from Citizen U.S.A.

You probably know HBO for Game of Thrones and their other hit shows, but they're also known as a powerhouse of prestigious documentaries, like the Academy Award-winning Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1.

Films On Demand just signed a deal with HBO to stream their collection of documentary films, and as part of the AU community, you can watch them for free! Follow this link to the HBO section of the Films On Demand website to see what all they have. Notable titles include the veterans stories of Alive Day Memories, Arab Spring documentary In Tahrir Square, citizenship road trip Citizen U.S.A., and a look at the life of a single mother in Paycheck to Paycheck. (And don't forget When the Levees Broke!)

These are great film – not just to watch for your own enjoyment, but for coursework and scholarship. HBO documentaries have great educational value, and using one is a fun, productive way to mix up a presentation or research.

Alternative programming: Getting real about Rio

from Rio de Janeiro: Urban Future

The 2016 Rio Olympics start tomorrow, and this year seems particularly fraught. Every Olympic event has some enormous, costly, potentially negative impact on its host – remember the broken hotels in Sochi and the wasted construction in Athens? – but Rio has it worst in recent memory. The Zika virus outbreak and hazardous water conditions are enough cause for alarm, but the government's ongoing anti-crime and urban renewal efforts have revealed the dangerous state of the city.

To learn more about the challenges facing Rio as it heads into the global spotlight, consider watching one of these three streaming documentaries. (You will need to log in with your AU username/password to access these.)

• Rio de Janeiro: Urban Future
  The Urban Future series looks at programs attempting to revitalize major cities. The Rio episode highlights the displacement of families living in neighborhoods razed to build Olympic facilities. What will happen to those communities after the Olympics are over and the buildings fall into disuse?

• The Road to Rio
  Monty Python's Michael Palin hosts this unexpectedly serious travelogue, where he describes the contrast between Rio's glitzy Olympic-friendly image and marginalized neighborhoods overrun with drugs as "a mixture of construction and ruin at the same time."

• Witness: Rio
  In the grimmest of the three documentaries, Eros Hoagland takes a camera into Rio's favelas document the city's violence and the effect of the police's attempts at "pacification."

Get a DC Library card to get InstantFlix for free!

DC Public Library's Tenley-Friendship branch is just down the road from us, so we get excited when we can promote their services too. Like audiobooks! AU doesn't have a collection, but the Tenley-Friendship library is just a few blocks away.

Now DC Public is expanding its streaming video collection, which we're happy to promote too! If you have a DC Public Library card, you can now access InstantFlix (also called IndieFlix), a collection of independent movies. InstantFlix is all over the place in a good way: just on the front page, we see a Mythbusters-style reality experiment show, Sundance movies, a Jet Li kung fu movie, PBS documentaries, and something called Angry Nazi Zombies.

InstantFlix also has a "QuickPick" option that tried to give you a recommendation to watch instantly. It's like the movie version of Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. Plus, they have whole categories for cooking videos and campy 80s movies. They have Death Bed: The Bed That Eats! We love that it's highlighting weirder, out-of-the-way stuff.

Once you get your library card (you can register online or in-person), you'll have access to the whole InstantFlix catalog for free. Join, and binge forever

More big movies streaming through the AU Library

Our streaming video collections got even better this month with a few additions we want to share with you – including a rotating collection that's only up for a limited time.

Firstly, we have two big new titles available to stream. When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee's documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is now available on Films on Demand, and the award-winning Argentinian film La Historia Oficial is available through Kanopy. These films are often favorites for courses at AU, and we hope having them available streaming makes them more accessible.

But for our biggest addition, we've opened the doors to our collection through Swank Digital Campus. Swank allows us to license feature films, but previously we could only share these titles with individual pre-approved classes. Now the collection is available for the AU community to watch for free, including big classic movies like The Godfather, Dr. Strangelove, and All The President's Men.

(The caveat is that we can only license Swank titles for a year at a time, so some of them will expire over the course of the year. Watch them early!)

We know that streaming plays a huge role in how people consume media, so we're excited to bring you more and more of these sorts of high-profile movies through the library.

Vanity Fair turns blockbuster movie credits into a budget list

A $200 million movie budget almost seems abstract. We can say that a whole bunch of that money went to the effects, but what does that actually mean? How much does the assistant director figure into it? Does Robert Downey Jr. just get $180 million and everyone else splits it up?

Vanity Fair made a mock movie credit roll to break down how much money goes to each crew member, and the numbers are sobering. Pay rates vary wildly from position to position; cat cameos get paid more than some stuntpeople. The most unusual are the positions where people earn different amounts for the same jobs. Set production assistants, for instance, have a $5000 range, maybe because some spend longer or only work with the second unit.

Watching a giant wall of credits can become a little numbing, but you start to get the sense of the scale of film production when you see that $229,000 went into matte painters. And if you feel a little anger at the lead actor being paid about as much as the rest of the cast combined, we don't blame you.

Take film with you over summer break with Kanopy

Three days of finals remain! Summer is close, and we imagine everyone wants to head home as soon as possible. It also means that you won't have access to our gigantic DVD collection.

Fear not: you can still stream a whole bunch of movies through Kanopy. We mentioned Kanopy last year; they have a huge library of streamable movies that you can access with your AU login. Just looking at their homepage, you can watch the George Takei documentary To Be Takei, the classic dinner conversation movie My Dinner with Andre, Hong Kong favorite In the Mood for Love, and the child-traumatizing Watership Down. That's a seriously impressive lineup without even diving deeper into the collection, especially their documentaries.

If you're aching to learn more about film on a day off, you can also watch the entire The Story of Film series through Kanopy. The Story of Film might be the greatest documentary series about the history of motion pictures, and you can binge the entire thing for free on a week off.

It's ironic that as soon as classwork is done and you have the free time to watch things, you're probably moving away from campus. But now you can take at least a big chunk of those films with you through Kanopy. Just remember your username!

Watch these great new documentaries from Docuseek2

From Big Dream

Our media librarian Chris Lewis once called streaming video website Docuseek2 "an embarrassment of riches" for fans of documentaries. We're not gonna disagree: Docuseek2 lets you stream some incredibly high-quality documentary films, and this week, their collection got even larger.

43 new titles are now available via Docuseek2, including the comedic short Drones in My Backyard, women-in-STEM documentary Big Dream, and I Am Become Death: They Made the Bomb, a collection of interviews with participants in the Manhattan Project. Docuseek2 picks their films well, so even without seeing them, we can reasonably recommend everything they've added this month.

We added a full list of Docuseek2's newest additions to the end of this list. If you want to browse the rest of their other 700+ films, you can always browse our full catalog list of Docuseek2 titles.

A Fragile Trust
After Winter, Spring
Arresting Power
Banking Nature
Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery
Big Dream
Black Dawn
Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart
Cheat Neutral
Code Black
Cuba: The Accidental Revolution - Pt. 2
Diamond Road
Divide In Concord
Drones In My Backyard
Game Over: Conservation in Kenya
Gore Vidal
GTFO
I Am Become Death: They Made the Bomb
Independent Intervention
Inside Burma
Japan's Peace Constitution
Kabul Transit
Madam Phung's Last Journey
Monumental
Oil and Water
Racing To Zero
Salvador Allende
School of Babel
Shift Change
Soldiers of Conscience
South Africa Belongs to Us
Split Estate (short version)
The Hand That Feeds
The Homestretch
The Motherhood Manifesto
The Mystery of the Lost Red Paint People
The Storytelling Class
The Tree that Remembers
The Trouble with Bread
They Are We
Toast
Where Am I? 
Without Shepherds

Paramount opens their vault to YouTube. Will other studios follow suit?

(embedded above: all of Masters of the Universe! For free!)

Major movie studios are usually extremely protective of their copyrights and lead the charge against video piracy. So it comes as a surprise that Paramount Pictures has opened up a great deal of their film archive for consumption on YouTube.

The Paramount Vault channel, which opened about a year ago, includes over 100 films from the studio's history. These movies are free to stream, with ad breaks interspersed roughly every 15 minutes. These types of studio archive-sponsored YouTube channels tend only to include older, black-and-white films, the Paramount Vault has a few comparatively recent movies as well, like the Wachowskis' directorial debut Bound and 2009 Australian horror movie The Loved Ones.

The quality of the films included is all over the place (we don't have any expectations for American Ninja), but Paramount's willingness to release all these movies into the wild is a good sign for an open future of film distribution. We're happy knowing that The Man from Rio Grande is available for anyone with a phone within a few seconds for no cost.

Alternative programming: Vote if you can

Today is Super Tuesday, arguably the biggest day in the presidential primaries that could solidify each party's candidates for November. Like everyone else, we'll be watching the results as they trickle in tonight, and although we expect plenty of discussion about who did and didn't drive the vote in each state, we probably won't hear much about who couldn't vote. Around the county, voter ID laws intended to prevent fraud continue to obstruct the ability to vote, especially along racial and class divides. Regardless of the perceived benefits of such laws, that's a big problem.

Up until a court ruling last October partially overturned them, Super Tuesday state Texas had some of the strictest voting restriction laws in the country. In 2014, Bill Moyers covered the Texas law and the suppressive effects of voter ID laws on his syndicated PBS show in the episode "The Fight-and the Right-to Vote." Moyers elaborates on these problems with help from a member of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund and a writer for The Nation.

We'll no doubt hear all about campaign momentum tonight, but the people who don't get a voice in this process – by accident or by design – need a moment too. Thanks to Films On Demand for making this segment available streaming through the AU Library.

Our streaming video partners celebrate the less-known corners of Black History Month

Our friends at Kanopy and Docuseek2 provide access to some great documentaries, often ones with a socially conscious perspective. In time for Black History Month, both companies have collections dedicated to the American black experience – and they're stories you probably haven't heard before.

First up is Kanopy's African American History collection, a group of 14 films often about contemporary issues at the intersection of race, class, and culture. There are a number about history too: of particular interest is The Barber of Birmingham, a documentary about a barbershop owner who was a lifelong civil rights activist and held the American flag during the Selma march.

Docuseek2 also has a Black History Month playlist, which has a much stronger historical bent and focuses on undertold black history. The most exciting-sounding is Finally Got the News, a film about Detroit's League of Revolutionary Black Workers from the 1960s.

Both these sites supply AU with some terrific documentaries, and you owe it to yourself to watch at least one of their Black History Month selections. We're especially thankful that they turned their spotlight to parts of African-American history that are often overlooked.

Introducing Kanopy, now streaming the Criterion Collection

Cinema fans and students rejoice: you can now stream a huge chunk of the Criterion Collection through Kanopy.

Kanopy is a digital video service the AU Library just subscribed to that offers access to full-length films – and in our case, that means hundreds of the titles available through the Criterion Collection, the go-to brand name for film buffs. Their titles read like a list of the greatest movies of all time. Hoop Dreams, Seven Samurai, The Great Dictator, and Tokyo Story are some of the most cherished, ever, and all five are available to stream instantly from your choice of device.

To access Kanopy, visit this AU-specific website. You might notice movies labeled "Request"; we only have access to the Criterion titles, so not everything on Kanopy will be available. Follow this link for a list of just the Criterion Collection's films. Many of these are also accessible through the catalog now, so if you searched for Burden of Dreams on DVD, you'll find a streaming version too. (As with all our streaming video sites, you'll have to log in with your library credentials if you are off-campus.)

We've bragged about the quality of our world cinema and silent film databases, but access to 300 titles from the Criterion Collection takes the cake. If you need to see a significant film for a course or just want to watch one of the classics, there's a good chance you can see it for free, right now, on the same device you're using to read this.

We'll wait here while you check out Kanopy. You'll want to.

Night of the Living Dead is getting longer

George Romero's Night of the Living Dead established many of the zombie tropes we still know and love today, like lumbering speed, the importance of beheading, and parallels to contemporary social issues. Though films before it had undead monsters, Night of the Living Dead might be the first (and arguably still most) culturally significant zombie movie. And shockingly, there's even more of this foundational movie that we've never seen before.

At a screening earlier this month, Romero announced that he had discovered an old reel containing nine additional minutes of zombie chaos. Maybe it had been cut to keep the running time trim, but that's a substantial chunk of one of most influential horror films. Hopefully we'll see it resurface on the restoration that Romeo was working on or the inevitable Blu-ray release

In the meantime, you don't need to wait to watch the current version of Night of the Living Dead. As it turns out, the film was never actually copyrighted; it can be streamed from any number of sites and services. We even embedded it above!

Take the Media Services Challenge: watch these 100 great documentaries

Congratulations on, presumably, passing mid-terms! Your workload will likely be in a bit of a downswing before we head into final project season, so you might be ready to spend some time chipping away at things you've been meaning to watch. If you're the type that has always wanted to see more documentaries but never knew where to start, we have 100 films for your list.

This summer, we all put our brains together and made a list of the 100 best documentaries available in our collection through streaming. There are a few classics including The Battle of Chile and King Corn, as well as odder ones like The Yes Men Save the World. All of these documentaries are free to watch via your web browser if you sign into your library account, and they're among the best in our collection.

If you're feeling really driven, we're challenging anyone with a hunger for documentaries to watch all 100 on the list before they graduate. No one has yet completed the Media Services Challenge, but if you do, we will enshrine you in a place of glory that we have yet to determine, probably on the wall next to your desk. It's like a Man vs. Food challenge, but with fewer ribs and more social theory.