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.
A Compassionate Spy (Steve James)
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The latest film from acclaimed documentarian Steve James, A Compassionate Spy, comes with a fascinating subject: the spy who leaked nuclear information from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union, therefore ensuring that America could not establish a nuclear monopoly on the world. It’s easy to see why James would be drawn to the spy, Theodore “Ted” Hall, and his wife Joan as he has often been interested in using individuals as the framework to explore larger societal issues. Utilizing a hybrid of recreations, archival footage, and modern-day interviews, James crafts a portrait of a man, a relationship, and the sheer weight of the decision to betray your country to save the world. – Logan K. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Donbass (Sergei Loznitsa)
Sergei Loznitsa’s Donbass forms a rough trilogy with two of his previous features, My Joy (2010) and A Gentle Creature (2017), offering another social allegory that functions as a bitter criticism of Russia’s contemporary politics. This time, instead of an unidentified Russian setting, the action takes place in the eastern Ukrainian region that gives the film its title, where a Russian-supported war has been ongoing since 2014. Given that Loznitsa is Ukrainian, this change of scenery might explain the added ferocity of his critique, which is extreme enough to make for an acutely oppressive viewing experience. – Giovanni M.C. (full review)
Where to Stream: Film Movement+
Evolution (Kornél Mundruczó)
A triptych of interconnected stories form Evolution, which begins at the end of the liberation of Auschwitz, in 1945, skips forward to an apartment in Budapest circa the 1990s, and ends in present-day Berlin. As blunt as its title, it proposes the back-of-a-napkin theory on how prejudice has evolved in those eight decades and, in a macro way, perhaps how Germany itself has. The director is Kornél Mundruczó, a Hungarian filmmaker who—alongside his frequent collaborator and co-screenwriter Kata Wéber—has attained a certain auteur status for blending such tidy allegories with incredibly realized cinematic bombast—White God (2014), Jupiter’s Moon (2017), and Pieces of a Woman (2020). – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Hip-Hop
Born 50 years ago, there’s been a number of hip-hop celebrations across the world and now The Criterion Channel is offering up their own mammoth salute with Wild Style (1982), Style Wars (1983), Beat Street (1984), Krush Groove (1985), Deep Cover (1992), Fear of a Black Hat (1993), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme (2000), Scratch (2001), Paid in Full (2002), Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest (2011), Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap (2012), and Jamel Shabazz Street Photographer (2013). If that’s not enough, Do the Right Thing (1989), Boyz n the Hood (1991), and Poetic Justice (1993) drop next month, followed by Belly (1998) and Belly 2: Millionaire Boyz Club (2008) this November.
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Lola (Andrew Legge)
Andrew Legge’s Lola, a faux found footage film that plays with historical and science fiction, gives weight to an emerging idea: could this be the best year for Irish cinema? If you believe the metrics of Rotten Tomatoes, the best-reviewed film of 2022 was once The Banshees of Inisherin. At the time of writing, it’s An Cailín Ciúin (aka The Quiet Girl), a film in the Irish language. Aftersun, the most beloved of any this year, stars Kildare’s Paul Mescal. With Jessie Buckley’s turn in Women Talking leading from the front, there is the wild possibility that five of next year’s acting nominations at the Oscars could go to people from that damp Atlantic rock—one or two might even win. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Night of the 12th (Dominik Moll)
A dramatization of true events, The Night of the 12th mines a particular subgenre of the crime picture, the “Cold Case” (its own Bush-era CBS procedural). The one it rips from headlines occurred on October 12th, 2016, where we find Clara (Lula Cotton Frappier), a happy 21-year-old girl leaving a party by herself in a sleepy suburb of France. Confronted by a masked stranger who, in the flash of an eye, throws embalming liquid and a lit match on her, her promising life is cut short as a charred corpse turns up. Tasked with solving the case are two Grenoble detectives, whose intellectual and experiential might are considered superior to the small town’s police force, and the young-ish Captain Yohan (Bastien Bouillon) and veteran cop Marceau (Bouli Lanners) form a decidedly complementary couple in their affect and appearance. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch)
From its opening, woozy camera swirls and, even, the genre-satisfying final shot, Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film is unlike any you’ve ever seen, mostly because it can’t be bothered to take too deep an interest in the subject. Instead of human-hunting or castle-scouring, he asks us to spend a bit of time with two mouthpieces of his own snobby, cranky, ultimately affable personality as they… talk art. That’s the extent of it, event-wise, but there’s too much else to dismiss, most notably the trenchant commentary on why people are attracted to these sorts of things in the first place and why, unfortunately, it might not make us as happy as we feel. Yet, for all its elucidating on that point, few films from 2014 offer as much pleasure as Only Lovers Left Alive. – Nick N.
Where to Stream: Hulu
Saturday Fiction (Lou Ye)
A filmmaker perhaps too prolific for his own good, Lou Ye takes his latest spin ‘round the festival circuit with Saturday Fiction, a movie stuffed to bursting with sumptuous movie-movie atmosphere, the swoony charge of ideas about art, love, and espionage, and good-enough storytelling solutions. – Mark A. (full review)
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball)
“1995” declares a 1970s-style title card in the opening minutes of Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, a film presented in fake grain filters meant to suggest the scratchy 35mm video nasties of that era (the ‘70s, not the ‘90s). The date proves totally irrelevant to Skinamarink’s minimal plot; at best it vaguely informs the technology we see in the two-story suburban household where the entire film takes place. This might pass as a conscious irony, but over the ensuing 100 minutes it becomes far more plausible that this semiotically lazy confusion of time and history is a quality of Ball as director, and not of his film’s barely glimpsed preschool-age protagonists. – Eli F. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Straub-Huillet: Pillars
The radical work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet gets the spotlight at Metrograph with an epic collection featuring A Visit to the Louvre (2004), Black Sin (1989), Cezanne, Conversation with Joachim Gaasquet (1990), Class Relations (1983), Death of Empedocles (1982), Fortini/Cani (1976), From the Cloud to the Resistance (1979), Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’’s “Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene” (1972), Itinerary of Jean Bricard (2007), Moses and Aaron (1974), The Mother (2012), Sicilia! (1999), The Return of the Prodigal Son / Humiliated (2003), and Too Early, Too Late (1982).
Where to Stream: Metrograph at Home
What Comes Around (Amy Redford)
What Comes Around is a tricky film to talk about without massive spoilers unless, of course, the eventual marketing campaign decides divulging its secrets will help them sell it. I’m hoping they ultimately choose to keep its twists and turns under wraps because going in blind adds a dimension that I’m sure playwright Scott Organ (who adapts his own “The Thing with Feathers”) intended and director Amy Redford matches. As she mentions in the press notes, What Comes Around is about provocation. It’s about telling us one thing only to transform it into another thing and spark a conversation that many of us still might not want to engage in. It’s about exploiting one’s power over another and falling prey to theirs. It’s about double standards. It’s about control and debilitating shame. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
AMC+
Paint
The Criterion Channel
The Delta
Directed by Dustin Guy Defa
Dos Estaciones
Eurothrillers
Grindhouse Gothic: Roger Corman Directs Edgar Allan Poe
Rowland Brown’s 1930s Underworld
Starring Kay Francis
Unemployees
Three by Lou Ye
Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
Disney+
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
MUBI (free for 30 days)
Duet For Cannibals
The Ballad of Narayama
Black Rain
There’s Always Vanilla
The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales
Starman
Netflix
Collateral
The Departed
Inglorious Basterds
Lost in Translation
Paramount+
The Whale
VOD
Brother