Fantasy

• Underdog Fantasy, the fast-growing sports gaming platform, today announced the launch of GuardDog, a pioneering investment initiative dedicated to fostering innovation in responsible gaming.
• Underdog is launching GuardDog with $1 million in initial funding to be used to support and accelerate early-stage startups focused on building new and creative solutions to address problem gaming and further responsible gaming.
• Mentors include Brianne Doura-Schawohl, renowned responsible gaming advocate; Adam Warrington, former vice president of Responsible Gaming at FanDuel; Chris Grove, partner at Acies Investments; Dan Hartman, former director of the Colorado Division of Gaming; and Sara Tait, former executive director of the Indiana Gaming Commission.
• With GuardDog, we intend to spur innovation to help companies that help people play the games they love — including all our games on Underdog — responsibly,” said Jeremy Levine, founder and co-CEO of Underdog.

• And who are the other people who seem to appear and disappear at random in her artist's studio?
• Kate soon finds herself drawn into a frightening labyrinth, where dreams, nightmares, memory and reality violently collide.
• "In its treatment of Kate's story, HAUNTED reflects themes that have laced themselves through my work since THE SINGING DETECTIVE," explains Jon Amiel.
• Most of the cast and crew worked as volunteers because they believed in the social impact of the film.

If you’ve made your way through our September picks and are looking for something new, this month’s streaming picks have something for everyone. There is a classic romantic comedy, some British crime drama and even some contemporary dance. The weather might be turning, and the sun might be shining – but these picks will have you wanting to spend some more time on the couch.

Yellowjackets season two

• In season one, a high-school girls’ soccer team survive a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness.
• Season two introduces Lauren Ambrose and Elijah Wood to the cast.
• Central to this season is the power Lottie (Courtney Eaton/Simone Kessell) has over the group.
• – Stuart Richards

  Read more:
  Cannibalism, mutilation and murder: the Australian calamities that rival Yellowjackets for survival horror

The Way Home

• The Way Home tells the story of three generations of women coming to terms with their trauma and how it has shaped their past and present.
• If you enjoy Christmas movies where a pretty, white heterosexual woman returns home to be conveniently reunited with a lost love, then The Way Home is for you.
• Ultimately, The Way Home is more enjoyable than the sum of its parts.

Am I

• The dancers are all in black with only their feet, arms and faces visible, accentuating the shapes made by their upper bodies.
• The backdrop is a wall of golden white light bulbs, which light in different patterns: at times a pixelated digital screen, other times an exploding sun.
• They move through sequences using silver rods to produce line drawings in two dimensions, then three-dimensional clusters and networks.

While the Men Are Away

• Well-meaning Gwen falls instantly for Frankie; the intense Esther is soon exchanging meaningful looks with Robert.
• The costumes and production design have a soft-focus, Women’s Weekly glamour – a far cry from rationing and making do.
• While the Men Are Away is a fantasy of queer visibility and acceptance, but the uneven script, churning plot and the often-didactic tone undermine its ambitions.

Annika season two

• Neon (New Zealand); season one is available in Australia on iView and BritBox The second season of offbeat BBC police procedural Annika stands apart in a genre that usually veers towards silliness or misanthropy.
• Season one followed the establishment of Glasgow’s specialist Maritime Homicide Unit, a small and unflappable team, which spends its time fishing bodies out of Scottish waterways and solving odd coastal crimes.
• This is all while Annika navigated the prickly relationship with her teen daughter Morgan.

• “She’s the ‘GODMOTHER’ of them all!”, exclaimed the poster, linking the African-American Coffy to Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone in The Godfather (released the previous year).
• But Coffy saw her for the first time as the main propulsive force in a Blaxploitation movie.
• A label more popular than scholarly, Blaxploitation captures the wave of low-budget, black-character-centred films that emerged from Hollywood in the first half of the 1970s.
• The film’s 50th anniversary allows us to reassess this vein of filmmaking and, more particularly, to think about the mixed politics of Grier’s own star image.

A liberated woman

• According to her lover, African-American politician Howard Brunswick, Coffy is a liberated woman.
• Nevertheless, a sense of constriction, as well as liberation, is still apparent in her screen persona.
• Only two years after Coffy’s release, feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey published her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.
• Grier, in Coffy, is frequently exhibited in this way, her unclothed body a point of obsession for the camera.

Dreaming of something better

• More than once, as she enacts her spree of purifying violence, Coffy speaks of being in “a dream”.
• Coffy’s dream of one woman redressing systemic injustice prompts caution, if not scepticism.
• Though the film is touched by the Black Panther Party’s imperative of militant resistance, it utterly lacks the Panthers’ attention to communal struggle.