Little Big Screen: ‘Party Girl’ and other movies to stream with your library card this month

Still from *Party Girl.* — Courtesy of First Look Pictures.

The headlines haven’t been too kind to libraries of late, what with the book ban nonsense and slashed funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services. To plant some good press in your newsfeed, Little Big Screen is letting everyone in on a little secret.

Kanopy, one of the best streaming services, is free with a library card. So let’s check out a few a movies you could be watching, again, for free. You don’t even have to enter a credit card number and pretend like you’ll remember to cancel it.

Party Girl (1995)

Directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer

Party Girl was, according to the internet, the first movie to premiere on the internet. But the dirt-cheap indie, a vision of vintage designer and blissed-out one-liners, is more notable for being tailored to the particular it-girl talents of Parker Posey. Her club-kid-turned-wannabe librarian is centered in a mix of Chantay Savage and the Dewey Decimal System. It’s got the feel of finals week when a stash of 30mg XRs had to be divvied up between the upstairs of Blue Moose Tap House and double-spaced essays. Only this time hitting the books gets the bulk of the amphetamine salts.

Stream it for free on Kanopy.

La Chimera (2024)

Directed by Alice Rohrwacher

I know a dog named Arthur, so that could be coloring my perception of Josh O’Connor’s character of the same name in La Chimera, though O’Connor’s Arthur does drag himself around 1980s Tuscany as if there’s an unheld leash around his neck. A hound with a nose for the dead and buried, he leads a pack of goofball graverobbers, digging in dirt meant for fingernails and finding big-ticket black-market artifacts. This is what the rest of the pack is after, obviously, but not Arthur. He’s looking for something else in the centuries-old ruins of long-gone Italy. Something that’s been lost, not left behind.

Stream it for free on Kanopy.

Manhunter (1986)

Directed by Michael Mann

Dino De Laurentiis produced four of the five movies in the Hannibal Lecter franchise, and since the one he didn’t produce was Silence of the Lambs, you might think he totally missed out. But, no, Dino did produce the first and best of ’em: Manhunter.

William Petersen, who’d basically reprise this role in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, plays a profiler brought on to do psychedelic forensics when nobody in the FBI can catch a serial killer called the Tooth Fairy. And despite its influence, Manhunter definitely isn’t true crime — the film rejects realism. Petersen’s cop is haunted, and also, sun-kissed and hot as hell. Victims’ eyeballs burn as white and bright as the surface of a photocopier, and MoMA meets MTV whenever hammy synth jams turn headspaces into façades of sound.

Stream it for free on Kanopy.

Apollo 11 (2019)

Directed by Todd Douglas Miller

Something from the nonfiction section: A documentary about the 1969 moon landing cut from such gorgeous 65mm film that I have no choice but to describe it as “transportive” and “definitive.”

There are no talking heads, just snippets of newsy transmissions and audio recordings from Mission Control. “Be advised there are lots of smiling faces in this room and all over the world,” says one such recording upon the astronaut’s arrival on the moon. Apollo 11 lets us see those smiling faces, framed up in beehive hairdos, cigarettes dangling in every direction, as big and forever as Paul Newman or Robert Redford.

(And because we are so lucky to be alive in our own moment of history, Katy Perry might cross your mind when the cameras on the spacecraft go black and the astronauts begin their brutal reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.)

Stream if for free on Kanopy.

Upcoming notable films & events in local theaters

For other screenings you’ve gotta go see in local theaters, check out this month’s On the Big, Big Screen:

Iowa City

Saturday & Tuesday, April 19 & 22, Happiness, FilmScene

Monday, April 21, 6:30 p.m., Minority Report on 35 MM, FilmScene

Wednesday, April 23, 10 p.m., Late Shift at the Grindhouse: Rabid, FilmScene