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.
Armageddon Time (James Gray)
Armageddon Time is the sort of film usually invoked as a “portrait of the nation” or “state of the union address,” something taking the temperature of a country—most likely the United States—at a particular time in history. But it’s also a work that makes self-consciousness a virtue: its wonderful writer-director, James Gray, is informed up to his eyes about the virtues and pitfalls of films like these, and here makes something so idiosyncratically his own but that audiences and critics might still mislabel with one of those aforementioned ideas. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Avatar (James Cameron)
After pulling the film from their service to drum up interest in the theatrical re-release, Disney has now returned James Cameron’s box-office king Avatar to Disney+ ahead of the sequel arriving in just a few weeks. While the adventure certainly loses a bit of its magic on home viewing, I, like many, will be revisiting it before heading into The Way of Water.
Where to Stream: Disney+
Christmas, Again (Charles Poekel)
Christmas time is a lonely time for many; a “time of giving” that reminds more than a few of us what we’ve lost. This is the feeling Christmas, Again wades in, as produced, written and directed by Charles Poekel. We follow Noel (Kentucker Audley), who’s selling Christmas trees on a Manhattan curb for the fifth winter in a row. He’s getting over a recent break-up and working with the younger brother of the friend that used to be his partner. – Dan M. (full review)
Where to Stream: OVID.tv
Cyrano (Joe Wright)
There is a moment forty minutes into Joe Wright’s Cyrano where everything kicks up a notch. As a military regiment practices their swordcraft on a stunning pier in Sicily the titular Cyrano de Bergerac (Peter Dinklage) crafts an agreement with new recruit Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.). He will write beautiful poetry as correspondence to Roxanne (Haley Bennett) from Christian—who lacks the words—thereby espousing his own love for the same woman. “I will make you eloquent while you make me handsome,” Cyrano explains, convinced they do not live in a world wherein someone like him could be with someone like her. Christian breaks into song and the camera runs away, darting through the regiment training on the pier. Soon enough we cut above the action, taking in the pier and the seas that surround it. The sequence is exhilarating and the film’s pace does not slow from there. Roxanne has her own problems. Namely: she’s broke and needs to get married, ideally not to a poor soldier like Christian. – Dan M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Amazon Prime
Dual (Riley Stearns)
Dual, Riley Stearns’ third feature following Faults and The Art of Self-Defense, establishes its endgame within the first five minutes. Opening on a split football field with two small sets of audiences in its bleachers, the dark comedy watches as two young men, doppelgängers, fight to the death under lights and TV cameras usually set for a high school state championship game. The double wins, killing his original form, setting the table for the following 95-minute story. – Michael F. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
The Kingdom II (Lars von Trier)
Before his latest opus, The Kingdom Exodus, arrives on MUBI, Lars von Trier has restored never-before-seen director’s cuts of the first two parts of his 1990s series The Kingdom. Set in the neurosurgical ward of the Danish hospital of Rigshospitalet, we’ve been itching to catch up on the series and now thankfully MUBI has afforded the opportunity with the first and second parts, comprised of four episodes each, now available and the rest coming soon.
Where to Stream: MUBI (free 30 days)
Nocebo (Lorcan Finnegan)
Christine’s (Eva Green) perfect life comes crashing down with a phone call on what should be the best day of her professional career. A children’s clothing fashion designer, her latest catwalk is proving an immense success once the buzzing pushes her into the next room to learn horrible news for which we can only hypothesize from the word “bodies.” As shock and horror wipe the smile from her face, she hangs up with a quietly distraught attempt to pretend none of it happened. That’s when Christine spies the blind dog standing in the corner of the room. She watches as it approaches, the masses of ticks covering its flesh made visible in the light. It shakes. A mite burrows into her neck. And everything turns upside-down. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Something in the Dirt (Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead)
The characters in Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s films shouldn’t be in these situations. They’re out of their depth, caught up on a conspiracy, a cult, or an idea that’s far beyond their grasp. Something in the Dirt doesn’t change that narrative, instead doubling down on the absurd, conspiratorial situations that the filmmakers create, only for their lead actors to be swallowed up by the bigness of what they uncover. Once again using the DIY model, Benson and Moorhead co-direct and co-star in their newest human science-fiction adventure, playing two Los Angeles dudes who interact with a floating crystal. – Michael F. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund)
Ruben Östlund might like his fish in a barrel but he’s a ruthless shot. Following a Palme d’Or win for The Square, the Swedish filmmaker returns to Cannes in competition, and if the contemporary art scene had taken the brunt of that sometimes brilliant, sometimes baggy film (the rare example of an art satire that actually worked), his latest has both the fashion world and the 1% solidly in its sights. With a title derived from an industry term for the worry lines on a person’s forehead, Triangle of Sadness is a film as vast as the sea itself, Östlund’s first real epic. It is his White Lotus, his “wafer-thin mint,” and his Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie rolled into one: a scatological rinsing of wealth and hubris from a filmmaker who, with each passing effort, only further cements himself as contemporary cinema’s auteur of such things. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Zama and The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
A pair of Lucrecia Martel’s finest films are now on MUBI. Ryan Swen said about her latest film, “At once impenetrably hazy and startlingly clear, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama emerges as a film impossibly burrowed into the mindset of its eponymous bureaucrat, letting the torpor of his entrapped existence in a strange land suffuse every odd encounter, every diminishing framing, every unsettling flight of fancy. Appropriately, Martel refuses to provide any sense of concrete resolution, itself its own assertion of the primacy of the strange. All is real, nothing is real, everything is fated.”
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Also New to Streaming
Hulu
The Forgiven
My Old School
MUBI (free for 30 days)
The Hunt
Rose Plays Julie
The Road
Experimenter
Netflix
The Swimmer
OVID.tv
Fake It So Real
Stinking Heaven
Prime Video
Good Night Oppy
VOD
The Woman King