News

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Age Out (A.J. Edwards)

The only thing worse than never getting your happy ending is having it within grasp and realizing you cannot accept it. To see salvation and turn around knowing it would be a lie is the type of heartbreaking choice we often have to make in order to keep on going. It’s the decision that separates man from monster: an admission of remorse, guilt, and regret. Our actions cause ripples that affect countless others we haven’t met yet or never will and while that truth allows some to sleep at night, the rest wonder what nightmares the collateral damage of their deeds endure as a result. You could say that the only thing separating those two groups is love.

Oscar-nominated producer Bill Pohlad has a long history of aligning himself with auteurs on award-winning fare—from Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain to Terrence Malick on the Palme d’Or winning The Tree of Life to Steve McQueen’s Oscar Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave, and getting financially behind them with his River Road Entertainment banner. We talk with Pohlad on Crew Call today about his third career feature as director, Dreamin’ Wild, based on the New York Times Steven Kurutz article about the Fruitland, Wa-based Emerson brothers whose dad literally bet the farm (mortgaging it to the tune of $100K) on the duo’s singing talents in the 1970s, and built them a studio. They didn’t make it initially — not until 2008 when the album they made some near 40 years prior, “Dreamin’ Wild,” was discovered by a record collector in Spokane, Jack Fleischer, and championed fervently. The...

“At 20 when I met him, I knew I would see his name on a screen.”

Nancy Emerson beams with pride as she speaks of her husband, the singer-songwriter Donnie Emerson. Donnie’s had a strange career: after years in obscurity, in 2008, Dreamin’ Wild, an album he recorded with his brother Joe, became a cult hit, gaining notice from music lovers all over the world. Overlooked when it debuted in 1979, Dreamin’ Wild is now considered a classic of its time, and launched Donnie into a professional musical career.

Now the amazing story of Donnie and Joe Emerson gets the Hollywood treatment in the new film Dreamin' Wild, directed by Bill Pohlad. Debuting August 4, it recounts the amazing story of the Emerson Brothers and their sudden, belated rise to fame.

“I’m blessed that the underground took off in the music business,” said Donnie, shy and soft-spoken. “What it did — it crossed all the barriers.

The true story of the late-blooming musical duo, Emerson Brothers, at the heart of Bill Pohlad’s elegiac yet bizarrely dull “Dreamin’ Wild” goes a bit like that of Rodriguez, the Michigan-based musician followed in the Oscar-winning documentary, “Searching for Sugarman.”

Growing up amid modest means at their hardworking family’s Washington State farm, Donnie and Joe Emerson were two teenagers in love with making music. A real talent often charges family-wide operations of this sort—in the Emerson clan that was Donnie, a gifted songwriter on his guitar and an expressive soloist to boot, with boundless aspirations for the future of his still young life.

On the drums was his older sibling Joe, for whom music had never been an all-or-nothing pursuit. Through much sacrifice and support from their caring family the two released their only record, “Dreamin’ Wild,” in the late ’70s, a soulful, genuinely beautiful album doomed with the dead-end,...

Dreams are hard. Most of us wake up. And what a sad thing that is. Dreamin’ Wild, written and directed by Bill Pohlad and based on the article “Fruitland” by Steven Kurutz, aims to explore that ache through the lens of a quite-improbable true story. But first, some context. In the late ’70s, Donnie and Joe Emerson were teenagers living on their parent’s farm in Fruitland, Washington when they made an album called Dreamin’ Wild. Joe played the drums, and Donnie did everything else. Sadly, the records went largely unsold and un-listened. Three decades later, an anthropology student named Jack Fleischer discovered the album, listened to it, and loved it. This spurred an underground positive response to the album among collectors and music lovers alike. Finally it got into the hands of Matt Sullivan, co-owner of Light in the Attic, a reissue label that specializes in giving under-heard gems a fresh,...

Roadside Attractions has dropped a trailer for “Dreamin’ Wild,” Bill Pohlad’s follow-up to 2015’s “Love & Mercy.” The film stars Oscar winner Casey Affleck (“Manchester by the Sea”) and Emmy nominee Walton Goggins (“The Hateful Eight”) as brothers Donnie and Joe Emerson, musicians who unexpectedly find success when the owner of a boutique label (“Air’s” Chris Messina) wants to revive an incomplete album they self-released three decades earlier. This bittersweet stroke of luck dredges up a painful past but also provides the opportunity for closure. Noah Jupe (“A Quiet Place”) and Jack Dylan Grazer (“It”) portray the pair as teens. Beau Bridges co-stars as their father, and Zooey Deschanel plays Donnie’s wife, singer Nancy Sophia.

The film, based on a longform essay by New York Times reporter Steven Kurutz titled “Fruitland,” premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, where Marshall Shaffer (The Playlist) wrote, “‘Dreamin’ Wild’ amounts to...

Not many films hit an emotional crescendo around the publication of a Pitchfork review, but Bill Pohlad’s “Dreamin’ Wild” is sufficiently sincere and embedded in musical nerdery to make it work. As onetime brother act Donnie and Joe Emerson huddle with their family around a 30-years-late evaluation of the album they recorded as teenagers, one particular critical reference sends them giddily reeling: “To twist a Brian Wilson phrase,” it reads, “[the album] is a godlike symphony to teenhood.” For fortysomething Donnie, who has spent his whole adult life scrambling for anyone to listen to his music — let alone love it — the mere mention of his musical hero in relation to his work is a crowning triumph: Donnie, as played by a typically disheveled, downcast Casey Affleck, looks briefly, guardedly happy for a moment, and this often melancholic film is suddenly suffused with well-being.

For those who remember Pohlad’s last film,...

Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Roadside Attractions releases the film in theaters on Friday, August 4.

There is such raw tragedy when it comes to artists like Van Gogh or Jonathan Larson, with success and recognition of their genius only coming after they died. That fear lies in the heart of so many creative people, but “Dreamin’ Wild” is the real-life story of something even stranger. Based on the real story of Donnie and Joe Emerson, and based on the “Fruitland” article published by Steven Kurutz in The New York Times in 2012, “Dreamin’ Wild” is the tale of two musicians finding success when the 30-year-old record they recorded as teenagers finds a new audience.

Donnie Emerson (Casey Affleck) has never fully given up on his dreams of making it as a musician. He lives, unfulfilled, with his loving musician wife Nancy (a conspicuously...

Click here to read the full article.

It may have been music critic Robert Christgau who once observed that the hardest works to write about are the ones that earn a B+, or are just on the cusp of A-. Mind you, that might have been said by Roger Ebert or a critic for The Hollywood Reporter or any reviewer since the beginning of time. The point is, it’s the imperceptible flaws that curb enthusiasm which are almost as impossible to define as whatever makes something extraordinary. What is the ineffable deficit between very good and great?

In a sense, Dreamin’ Wild is about that margin of error. Based on a true story recounted in a work of journalism called Fruitland by Steven Kurutz, it’s a tale of two musician brothers, Don and Joe Emerson (Casey Affleck and Walton Goggins, respectively). In the early 1980s as teenagers, the boys made an album,...

Producer Bill Pohlad’s River Road Entertainment on Monday named veteran producer Kim Roth as co-president and chief financial officer of the company.

The move came as part of a major reorganization at the production company, which also promoted Christa Zofcin Workman to co-president and chief operating officer.

“I am incredibly excited to re-energize River Road and its mission as a filmmaker-friendly home to extraordinary creative projects as well as a developer and producer of its own home-grown material,” Pohlad said in a statement. “So much is changing in the industry and in the world, but we remain optimistic and excited to have Kim and Christa leading River Road into the future.”

Also Read: 'Jurassic World: Dominion' to Resume Production at UK Pinewood Studios by Early July

Roth, who spent 16 years at Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment, joins River Road from Macro, a multi-platform media...

Exclusive: Bill Pohlad’s River Road Entertainment has hired veteran producer Kim Roth as Co-President and Chief Creative Officer and promoted Christa Zofcin Workman to Co-President and Chief Operating Officer, Deadline has learned.

Roth and Workman will work alongside each other to implement the vision and drive the overall strategy for the Oscar-lauded 12 Years a Slave and The Tree of Life studio, including developing and nurturing strategic partnerships within the industry. Roth will oversee the development and production of projects, while providing management and direction to the creative team. Workman will continue to oversee business operations, legal affairs and management of the company’s intellectual property.

“I am incredibly excited to re-energize River Road and its mission as a filmmaker-friendly home to extraordinary creative projects as well as a developer and producer of its own home-grown material,” said Pohlad. “So much is changing in the industry and in the world,...