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.
All My Friends Hate Me (Andrew Gaynord)
Pete (Tom Stourton) hasn’t seen his university mates in years. Ten years to be exact. It happens. Life happens. We reach adulthood, mature, and set goals for ourselves that the people who were closest to us during that formidable period simply cannot follow—their own ambitions lie upon different forks in the road. So resentment shouldn’t factor in. Nor should jealousy. Yet Pete can’t help wondering about both. A little voice in the back of his head wonders if a decade was too long to pretend things could pick up where they left off. Would their very posh upbringing think he abandoned them to work with refugees? Do they think he thinks he’s better than them for doing it? What if he thinks that? – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Annea Lockwood / A Film About Listening (Sam Green)
A guided meditation through the soundscapes of pioneering composer Annea Lockwood. Inspired by her lifelong dedication to careful listening, documentarian Sam Green encourages us to tune into the surrounding world by closing our eyes rather than opening them. From the reverberation of different types and shapes of glass to the crackling of a piano as it burns to the ground, Lockwood treats every sound as “a piece of music in itself.”
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Beba (Rebeca Huntt)
Writer-director-subject Rebeca Huntt worries aloud whether her family will ever speak to her again after watching her feature debut Beba. It’s a real concern: not only because of how intimate and uncensored this introspective look at her life and ancestry proves, but because they have a history of verbally and emotionally shutting themselves off from each other. Her brother and father haven’t spoken in over a decade. Her brother isn’t seen or heard from during the film, beyond still photographs. The depiction of her parents makes it seem they aren’t on great terms, either, despite continuing to live together in their rent-controlled Central Park West one-bedroom apartment. None of these truths or assumptions are judgments, though. They’re merely facts Huntt has been forced to confront. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Benediction (Terence Davies)
Time is everything in a Terence Davies film. In Benediction, his biopic about English poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden), he eventually covers his subject’s marriage to Hester Gatty (Kate Phillips). There’s a shot of the couple standing still, facing the camera as they pose for a wedding photo (a shot that tends to pop up throughout the director’s filmography). The camera flashes, we see the black-and-white photo, and then a fade transitions us to the future, where it rests on their bedside while Hester looks at their newborn child. The sequence is an encapsulation of what Davies does best: observing life with one’s head facing backwards, the cumulative weight of the past bearing down on every moment of the present. – C.J. P. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Los conductos (Camilo Restrepo)
Succinctly potent like a concentrated shot of a mood-altering substance, Camilo Restrepo’s Los conductos renders a Colombian portrait of a damaged soul reclaiming his humanity amidst widespread bleakness. In a swift 70 minutes, the lugubriously solemn film punctures one’s psyche as it interrogates a society’s moral corrosion that has normalized violence as the lone avenue to salvation for the marginalized. – Carlos A. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
The Films of Derek Jarman
Enfant terrible, queer icon, vanguard of British cinema, friend to Tilda Swinton—these and more explain the force that was Derek Jarman, whose most essential films are streaming exclusively on the relaunched Filmatique. Among them are his Shakespeare twist The Tempest, art-history exploitation Caravaggio, and Blue, a daring final statement on life with AIDS.
Where to Stream: Filmatique
Not Okay (Quinn Shephard)
I’m not saying you couldn’t want to pivot careers from photo-compositor to writer, but to make it seem like a) the former is just a matter of loosely using the lasso tool in Photoshop to make a perfect mask that’s good enough to fool the world and b) it’s a stepping-stone job shunted to the corner and treated like an internship because “anyone can do it” put me in a bad mood right away. I get it, though. Writer-director Quinn Shephard needs her abhorrent lead character Danni Sanders (Zoey Deutch) to have both skills for Not Okay to work. (There was a “content warning” before my screener that highlighted an “unlikeable female protagonist,” as if those three words were akin to graphic violence.) Narrative first; authenticity who? – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
We Met in Virtual Reality (Joe Hunting)
Joe Hunting has spent the last few years documenting VRChat, a social-virtual-reality platform that allows users to create their own worlds and avatars. His debut short, A Wider Screen, was just a taste of the kind of communities existing within the virtual realm, and his feature documentary We Met in Virtual Reality rather lovingly expands on that. There’s a casualness to the way Hunting drops the viewer into VRChat, truly making one feel like a part of the scene and space from the get-go—not far removed from how Frederick Wiseman’s films hone in on the atmosphere and perspective of their subjects. In late 2020, with COVID still raging, people communed within the safety of virtual reality, creating everything from karaoke bars and amusement parks for parties to recreations of films (e.g. Jurassic Park) for users to explore. There’s sometimes an absurdity to how cartoonish avatars clash with the surprisingly realistic spaces that have been built, be it a classroom or mountain range—this is part of the documentary’s charm. – Juan B. (full review)
Where to Stream: HBO Max
Also New to Streaming
Amazon Prime
The Criterion Channel
MUBI (free for 30 days)
Drug War
By the Grace of God
The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine
Wilderness
Adolescents
A Letter from Yene