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      Looking for the Next Streaming Cult Classic? Try Arrow.

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      Horror is well-represented on this service, which makes it an ideal spooky season addition to your streaming menu.Over the past several months, we’ve examined and recommended several streaming services for the discriminating movie lover — sites and apps for those whose tastes run toward titles a bit more esoteric than the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Our latest entry spotlights a terrific subscription streamer for genre film fans.The subscription streaming service Arrow has its roots in a boutique physical media distributor much beloved by cinephiles: Arrow Video, established in England in 2009 as an offshoot of the theatrical distributor Arrow Films. The company quickly established itself as a favorite among genre film fans, offering painstaking restorations of long-neglected horror and cult titles on discs packed with copious bonus features; they were one of the reasons so many American collectors invested in all-region disc players, before the company expanded to the U.S. market in 2015.Arrow was one of several companies to enter the subscription streaming space during Covid lockdown, with their platform launching in October 2020. Their initial offerings numbered around 400 titles; they’ve since doubled that number, bolstering their library with short films, documentaries and curated “Selects” collections from name-brand directors like Roger Avary, Eli Roth and Edgar Wright.Horror is unsurprisingly well-represented on Arrow, which makes it an ideal spooky season addition to your streaming menu; the scary movie offerings are so plentiful that one can even deep-dive into subgenres like slashers, giallo, J-horror, zombie movies and once-banned “video nasties.” But there’s more than mere horror in the catalog, which also features offbeat Westerns, science fiction, yakuza crime epics, martial arts movies galore and cult movies of all stripes and decades. Acclaimed directors such as George A. Romero, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci get well-deserved spotlights, along with lesser-known (to the general public, at least) auteurs like William Grefé and Seijun Suzuki.Arrow’s interface is smooth and easy to use, and the pricing is agreeably reasonable: $6.99 per month or $69.99 for the year, with a current promotion (code: SHOCKTOBER24) cutting 50 percent of the price for the first month. Its offerings are certainly specialized; this is not a Netflix replacement. But viewers with a fondness for the esoteric (and we know you’re out there) will be hard-pressed to find more quality bang for their streaming buck.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      David Harris, Actor in the Cult Classic ‘The Warriors,’ Dies at 75

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      He played Cochise, a member of the Warriors gang who navigated a panoply of costumed aggressors in New York City.David Harris, who played a member of a street gang in the 1979 cult classic movie “The Warriors,” died on Friday at his home in New York City. He was 75.His daughter, Davina Harris, said the cause was cancer.As the Warriors evaded and did battle with rival crews in New York City streets and subway cars, Mr. Harris in the role of Cochise dutifully supported his brothers. In a gang that conformed to matching red leather vests, Cochise cut a defiant presence with his headband and turquoise necklaces that bobbed to the rhythm of their violent journey home to Coney Island.After the Warriors are falsely accused of killing a gang leader, they have to navigate a panoply of colorful and costumed rivals — malevolent mimes, pinstriped baseball bat thumpers and villains aboard a school bus fit for “Mad Max.”In a movie with moments (the sinister bottle clinking, the baritone bellow of “Can you dig it?”) that have been recreated and parodied in media in the decades since the film’s release, one of Mr. Harris’s scenes inside a rival gang’s den was a central point in the mayhem.After being seduced by an all-female gang, a party in an apartment quickly turns sideways, with a hand near Mr. Harris’s face suddenly wielding a switchblade. He bobs and dodges, jumps and jukes before swinging a chair and plowing through a door that allows him and his fellow members to escape bullets and blades.“We thought it was a little film that would run its little run and go, and nobody would ever talk about it again,” Mr. Harris said in an interview in 2019 with ADAMICradio, an online channel about TV, films and comics.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Teens Think Movies and TV Shows Have Too Much Sex, Study Finds

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      At least that is what they told researchers at U.C.L.A. The high popularity of romance plots in movies and shows suggests otherwise.Movies and television shows about rich people are the last thing we want to watch. And skip the sex: We prefer content that focuses on platonic relationships. (There’s enough porn online as it is.) We do like fantasy as a genre, increasingly so. But please, pretty please, fix how you incorporate social media into story lines. It’s cringe.That is what young people — ages 10 to 24 — think about movies, television shows, video games and social media, according to a study released Thursday.The study, Teens & Screens, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that 63.5 percent of participants said they wanted content that depicted platonic relationships, as opposed to romance and sex. That is up from 51.5 percent last year. (Questions involving romance and sex were not shown to participants ages 10 to 13.)Of course, what study participants say and what they actually do can vary wildly. There is ample evidence to the contrary among shows that are popular with younger audiences, including “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” a raunchy comedy; “Emily in Paris,” an impassioned romance; and “Tell Me Lies,” a steamy soap.Movies like “Poor Things,” which found an insatiable Emma Stone romping through a Paris brothel, and the sexually frank “All of Us Strangers” attracted a surprisingly large audience of people in their early 20s, according to box office analysts.This year’s study was conducted in August and included 1,644 young people.“We’re trying to shift the culture by giving storytellers better information,” said Yalda T. Uhls, the founder and chief executive of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers, which is based at U.C.L.A. “The problem is often that Hollywood storytellers use their own memories of their teenage years or what their children in Los Angeles are doing, and that does not remotely represent what young people really want.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fan Bingbing, Once China’s Top Actress, Returns to Film Years After Tax Scandal

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      Fan was a megastar until 2018, when she was fined tens of millions of dollars over unpaid taxes and her career tanked. “Green Night” is her first film since the scandal.Fan Bingbing will return to the screen on Friday with the online release of “Green Night,” six years after one of the biggest names in Chinese cinema spectacularly fell from grace over a tax scandal.Fan was at the peak of her career in 2018, with a long list of blockbusters and lucrative deals with luxury brands, when she disappeared for months. She re-emerged in October that year with an apology. The authorities in China fined her the equivalent of almost $70 million in unpaid taxes and penalties.The scandal halted Fan’s film career in China, the biggest movie market outside the United States. She avoided criminal charges, however, and remained in the public eye as she expanded a beauty product business, Fan Beauty.In her return to film, Fan is the lead in “Green Night,” a film by Han Shuai, a Chinese director, and set in South Korea. It will be available to stream in the United States on Friday after making its debut on the festival circuit in Berlin last year.In “Green Night,” Fan, now 43, plays a Chinese woman who partners with a young South Korean woman to break free from oppression. The film is about “women helping women and women redeeming women,” she said last year at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea. “Some of my experiences and some stories in recent years are integrated into the character I present in the movie.”Fan Bingbing, in red, and the South Korean actress Lee Joo-young at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea in October 2023.Lee Jae-hee/Yonhap, via Associated PressFan could not be reached for comment. Speaking about her hiatus, she said at the Busan festival that the break had given her “time to ground” herself.Her downfall was triggered by an accusation online that she was paid millions of dollars more for her work on a film than was reported to the tax authorities. The practice of using two contracts was widespread in many industries in China as a way to avoid taxes, but this accusation prompted a wider investigation into the entertainment business.“I have had deep and profound self-reflection,” Fan wrote in her 2018 apology, posted on the social media platform Weibo. “I feel shamed and guilty for what I have done.”The authorities in China maintain strict control of the media, including entertainment and censor content they deem inappropriate. Movie stars and other prominent figures in the entertainment industry are expected to adhere to the government guidelines.“Green Light” has not been released in mainland China, but many internet users there appeared to be able to watch it through unofficial channels. Douban, a Chinese platform where users can review movies, books and music, indicated Thursday that around 38,000 users had watched the film. More

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      ‘The Line’ Review: Greek Tragedy

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      The dark side of college fraternity life comes to light in this harrowing, well-acted campus drama.Films about fraternities tend to describe a familiar arc of moral degradation, and Ethan Berger’s campus cautionary tale “The Line,” about the initiation of freshmen into a well-heeled but toxic brotherhood at a Southern liberal arts college, is no exception: You probably won’t be shocked to learn that frat life is crude, boorish and dangerous, as “The Line” makes abundantly clear. But if the movie’s portrayal of rivalrous (and homoerotic) hypermasculinity doesn’t always seem original, it is nevertheless realized with seriousness and vigor. Berger takes a keen anthropological approach to the rites and rituals of the fictitious Kappa Nu Alpha house, and he makes it so that you can almost smell the stale beer and crumpled Ralph Lauren. The details are believable, and therefore more disturbing.Our entree into the crass, bad-mannered world of KNA is Tom Backster (Alex Wolff), an obtuse sophomore militantly devoted to the traditions of the frat. Wolff plays him with a thick, mealy-mouthed Southern accent, which he painfully exaggerates to better fit in with his dunderheaded peers, for whom articulating a full sentence is tantamount to betrayal.Tom’s clashes with Gettys O’Brien (Austin Abrams), the club’s handsome, Billy Budd-esque newcomer who repeatedly flaunts the rules, is the conflict at the heart of the movie. Its escalation is predictable, but Wolff and Abrams (both excellent) embody their characters with intensity and conviction, which makes even the film’s most heightened confrontations feel deeply plausible.The LineNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      5 New Horror Movies to Stream for Halloween on Hulu, Max and More

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      Out this week, a period possession movie starring Sarah Paulson, a chef-driven supernatural thriller starring Ariana DeBose and more.‘Hold Your Breath’Stream it on Hulu.A mother braves the elements, and evil, in this busy but hackneyed feature debut from the directors Karrie Crouse and Will Joines.Sarah Paulson plays Margaret, a loving mother trying to shield her two daughters, Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins), from sinister entities that she suspects lurk outside their isolated Dust Bowl home. Among them is a mysterious drifter (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) with questionable healing powers.Crouse’s script hurls horror conventions against the wall — possession, survival, eco-disaster, home invasion, folk horror, body horror, religious mania — in hopes that something sticks. But nothing does, so what’s left is a movie about a grieving mother protecting her children from dust and wind for 94 minutes — a scary scenario for 1930s Oklahoma, the film’s setting. But not here.Instead, there are predictable jump scares, creaking floorboards, silhouetted figures in the distance and every 10 minutes another fire for Margaret to put out. It’s “The Mist” but silt, “The Babadook” minus a Babadook, “The Night of the Hunter” with no edge.‘V/H/S/Beyond’Stream it on Shudder.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Saoirse Ronan Has Lived, and Acted, Through a Lot

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      “I wish I could live through something,” says the teenage title character in the 2017 movie “Lady Bird,” yearning for a life beyond suburban Sacramento.The actor playing her, Saoirse Ronan, had, at that point, already lived through enough for several lives. Then 23, she’d been acting since she was 9, and had already garnered two Oscar nominations. “Lady Bird,” Greta Gerwig’s debut as a solo director, would earn Ronan a third. Another followed, in 2019, for her role as Jo March in Gerwig’s “Little Women.”This year, Oscars buzz surrounds Ronan once again, thanks to her leading roles in Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun,” which opens in theaters Friday, and Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” out Nov. 1st.Ronan’s career reads as a series of evolutions, pushing into new territory with every role — over the years, she has also played a 1950s Irish immigrant in New York, a child assassin, a vampire, Lady Macbeth and Mary, Queen of Scots. Now 30, with over two decades of experience in front of the camera, the Irish actress has committed herself in “The Outrun” to a character containing multitudes: a woman raised in a remote island community, who returns to recover from her addiction to alcohol.In “The Outrun,” Ronan’s character, Rona, returns home to the Orkney Islands in Scotland to recover from her alcohol addiction.Martin Scott Powell/Sony Pictures Classics“It was so much more than just making a film for me,” Ronan said, in a video interview from New York. She described an experience that was both physically and emotionally demanding: “I think actors are sponges, you’re able to open yourself up to everything around you.” For “The Outrun,” that meant swimming in the icy sea, delivering lambs on-camera and going deep into the psyche of a woman in crisis.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stream Maggie Smith’s Greatest Performances

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      In “Downton Abbey,” “A Room With a View” and dozens of other films and television series, she delighted audiences with her portrayal of sharp, tart-tongued and often wryly funny Englishwomen.Maggie Smith, who was 89 when she died on Friday, made her professional stage debut on Broadway in the 1950s, when she was still in her early 20s. In the decades that followed, she worked steadily in movies and television, while regularly returning to the theater.Smith won her first Oscar for the title role in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), a charismatic and manipulative teacher who has a profound and, at times, destructive effect on the lives of the teenage girls in her charge. She went on to win another Oscar, a Tony and four Emmys, and became known in her later years for playing a particular type of Englishwoman: sturdy, smart, sharp-tongued and rooted sometimes stubbornly in the traditions of the past.Audiences in the 21st century came to love Smith in two recurring roles: as the heroic Professor Minerva McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” movies and as the coolly disapproving Dowager Countess Violet Crawley in the period TV drama “Downton Abbey.” But her career was long and eclectic, with a mix of serious and comic characters, in both supporting and leading roles. Here are 10 of Smith’s best performances that are available to stream:1972‘Travels With My Aunt’Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.Though she was only in her late 30s at the time, Smith took an early step toward her most familiar screen persona — the dynamic and unforgettable older relative — in this adaptation of Graham Greene’s offbeat adventure novel. Filling in for Katharine Hepburn (who differed with the studio and with her old friend, the director George Cukor, on how best to tell her character’s story), Smith ended up nabbing her third Oscar nomination, playing the eccentric globe-trotter Augusta Bertram, who enlists a stuffy, middle-aged Londoner in one of her illicit moneymaking schemes while hiding her true connection to him. Smith builds an outsize yet complex character via flashbacks that show how she learned to eschew conventional mores and to enjoy life on her own terms.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More