Kino Lorber announces Kino Now digital streaming platform

Over 600 Theatrical Hits, Classic Films and International Award Winners from the extensive Kino Lorber Catalog readily available for rental and purchase

New York, NY — Sept. 30, 2019 — Kino Lorber is proud to announce the launch of Kino Now, the arthouse distributor’s new VOD platform showcasing over 600 new releases, classics, and award winning international films. An additional 600 films will be added over the next several months, all from the company’s extensive library. Kino Now brings movie lovers the masterworks of yesterday and new films destined to be the classics of tomorrow. Available a click away for rental and purchase all in a one-stop shop, this superbly curated digital library brings new convenience to savoring great cinema at home, as well as allowing film lovers to build permanent digital collections of their favorites to watch whenever they want on any device. Kino Now will offer exclusive early access to new theatrical releases, festival hits and exclusive titles not available on other streaming platforms or not yet available on home video. 

The platform will also include special “bundle” offerings of selected hard-to-find titles as well as beloved collections from renowned filmmakers from all over the world and throughout cinema history. Collections include themes like “Episodic Cinema” featuring the best of international TV series (including Deutschland 83, and the Emmy Award-nominated Bad Banks), Documentary Series & Extended Play (including Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth), Auteur Collections built around world-renowned filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Lina Wertmüller and Fritz Lang, and the Pioneers of Cinema restorations of the early works of African American filmmakers and the first women filmmakers.

The Playlist section will soon recommend personalized, specially curated selections that will be regularly updated, tied in with major international film festivals, holidays and cultural events. They will also be curated around themes such as Italian, French and German cinema, Hispanic Heritage, Festival Winners & Oscar Runs, Euro Horror, Director’s Spotlights, First Films, and Staff Picks.

The site will be annually refreshed with over 50 new theatrical releases from Kino Lorber’s first run and repertory divisions and over 500 yearly additional titles as “festival direct” exclusives and indie art house digital premieres.

“We’ve been leaders in building a direct to consumer business with physical media and now is the time to assert our leadership in the direct to digital space,” says Richard Lorber, President & CEO of Kino Lorber. “Our superb library will be continually enhanced by the coming of newly acclaimed and award winning theatrical releases. We believe a younger generation of cinema lovers will embrace our collection as a kind of art house iTunes with Kino Now putting at their fingertips cinema masterworks of the past and the classics of tomorrow.”

New titles coming soon to Kino Now include Rick Alverson’s The Mountain, starring Tye Sheridan and Jeff Goldblum, Chinese auteur Bi Gan’s box office hit Long Day’s Journey into Night, Lila Avilés’ The Chambermaid (Mexico’s current official Oscar® submission), Franco Rosso’s 1980s British reggae hit Babylon, renowned international documentaries like Walking on Water, an intimate portrait of the artist Christo, and urgent climate change spectacle, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch and many more. 

Current selections include new arthouse hits such as Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini (starring Willem Dafoe), and Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s boldly hilarious Diamantino; new restorations of repertory re-releases, such as Frank Simon’s queer drag classic The Queen; critically-acclaimed documentaries such as Alexandra Dean’s Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, Matt Tyrnauer’s Studio 54, and Pamela Green’s Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché; and classics of world cinema from master directors such as Jean-Luc Godard (Alphaville, The Image Book), Jean-Pierre Melville (Bob le Flambeur), Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad), and a collection of seven films by Lina Wertmüller, the first woman nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director and upcoming recipient of the Academy Honorary Award.

For repertory lovers, a deep selection of catalog titles from the company’s Kino Classics label, ranging from key landmarks of film history including Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, and silent comedies by Buster Keaton, to groundbreaking archival collections like Pioneers of African-American Cinema and Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers, and cult classics from genre masters Mario Bava, Jean Rollin and Jess Franco to contemporary cult favorites like Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Kino Now will also offer a wide range of documentaries, including Oscar® nominees Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea and Talal Derki’s Of Fathers and Sons as well as the Alive Mind Cinema catalog titles that focus on spirituality and consciousness. 

Digital rentals and purchases can be watched on KinoNow.com. The service is available on Roku and will be available soon on AppleTV, Amazon Fire, and more.