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.
Alcarràs (Carla Simón)
Big agriculture and a renewable energy company (of all people) threaten the livelihood of a Catalonian peach farming family in Alcarràs, Carla Simón’s latest sunny pastoral and her first since the 2017 debut Summer 1993. Alcarràs is set in the present day, though you’d hardly notice, and like many of its characters it looks towards the past. That idea––that time has a way of sometimes flattening out––feels central to Simón’s film and distinguishes it from similar works of social realism: Alcarràs appears simple, even slight at first, but is deceptively far-reaching; enough at least to have impressed a Berlinale jury led by M. Night Shyamalan (and including no less than Ryusuke Hamaguchi), who collectively awarded Simón the Golden Bear. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Babylon (Damien Chazelle)
Those seeking an insightful exploration of cinema history in Hollywood’s Golden Age or a nuanced, affecting character study on the lives within this early era will mostly like be disappointed by Damien Chazelle’s latest. Babylon is a brash, bombastic, unwieldy comic opera conveyed with enough bad taste and directorial panache that it—refreshingly—registers as a refutation of the well-mannered prestige drama to which these kinds of nostalgic odes often conform. And while there’s a touch of wistfulness in regards to the communal power of big-screen cinema, the film is more defined by an acidic unsentimentality, both when it comes to its characters and the precarious world they inhabit. Capturing the mad, violent clash of high and low art during a period of upheaval in a fledgling industry that has no consideration for basic morality (much less the safety of its workforce), Chazelle’s indulgent, rollicking vision of the birth of sound pictures eventually evolves into an audaciously bold omen of the medium’s uncertain future. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Paramount+
EO (Jerzy Skolimowski)
At the age of 84, Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski has crafted the most vigorously energetic and vibrant films of the year. Inspired by Bresson’s seminal classic Au Hasard Balthazar, but taking the idea to formally dazzling new heights, EO tells the journey of a donkey traversing through Europe. Via a series of striking vignettes, we witness the totality of the human (and animal) experience, forcing the viewer to ponder their place in the world.
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
A Folded Ocean (Ben Brewer)
Few films have set out to tackle the idea of intimacy as literally as Ben Brewer’s 2023 Sundance standout A Folded Ocean. The lead visual effects artist of Everything Everywhere All At Once, Brewer’s bizarre and technically remarkable short watches two lovers as they fall and fuse into one another, producing an enmeshed figure of flesh that is as endearing as it is frightening.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Holy Spider (Ali Abbasi)
Ali Abbasi’s Border, an adaptation of a short story by Let the Right One In author John Ajvide Lindqvist, put its director on the map as one fluent in a dark genre idiom, and possessing transnational potential capable of enticing festivals and more commercially oriented fields (indeed, he is one of the directors on Craig Mazin’s upcoming HBO series The Last of Us). But Holy Spider returns him to the country of his birth with an even more direct statement on prejudice and repulsion than Border, and also, maybe, as much of a determination to upset and freak people out. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
A House Made of Splinters (Simon Lereng Wilmont)
A handful of moments in Simon Lereng Wilmont’s documentary A House Made of Splinters made me feel I’d accepted an invitation best declined. One such instance involves a young Ukrainian girl, Eva, whose phone call with her alcoholic mother is recorded from both ends. We hear Eva’s mother, who had previously been missing for multiple days on another bender, plead with her daughter to flee the shelter that took her in while her mother’s custody case was prepared in court. Once processed, Eva’s mother may lose custody, and Eva would then be sent to live in an orphanage. The phone call is devastating—we witness this child forced into a premature position of maturity as her mother breaks into a million pieces. Eva, however, does not collapse into tears. She maintains composure while her mother has a tantrum that, were the roles properly reversed, Eva would be having over some childhood frivolity. Instead Eva only quietly hangs up the phone on her not-quite-parent, both their futures ever in limbo. – Brianna Z. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Inheritance (Ephraim Asili)
History, art, ideology, and love make up the four pillars of Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance, a thrillingly alive debut feature that resides both inside the square rooms of a West Philadelphia house and outside the boundaries of genre. As its title suggests, to assume the past experiences, lessons, and artistic creations of others can be liberating. But there’s also great personal responsibility to pass on that knowledge in some productive way. – Glenn H. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Knock at the Cabin (M. Night Shyamalan)
With its Twilight Zone-esque thrills, taking a high-concept, small-scale scenario and exploring it with pressure cooker intensity, Knock at the Cabin sets M. Night Shyamalan the restraints to craft one of his most impressive feats of directing. Further proving to be one of the most empathetic directors working on a studio level today, he also packs in moments of fright as we glimpse apocalyptic disasters through the omnipresent form of a television broadcast, grounding the unthinkable in a startling familiarity. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: VOD
M3GAN (Gerard Johnstone)
Not outwardly terrifying, director Gerard Johnstone’s sci-fi slasher features a lifelike AI doll named M3GAN, programmed to attach itself to a single child. In the case of Akela Cooper and James Wan’s story, M3GAN finds her child soulmate in Cady (Violet McGraw), a young girl recently orphaned by a fatal, parental car accident. The rest of the story plays out with absurdity, a film reliant on knowledge, tech, and habits recognized by 2023 audiences. M3GAN works due to our own reliance on and ability to trust technology we don’t understand, taken to logical ends by the film’s willingness to ham up this story, go for big laughs, and succeed in finding them more often than not. – Michael F. (full review)
Where to Stream: Peacock
My Year of Dicks (Sara Gunnarsdóttir)
The title doesn’t lie. My Year of Dicks is exactly that: five chapters from 1991 wherein Pam (Brie Tilton) sought to lose her virginity. Five boys. Five penises. And the most uncomfortable conversation a teenager can ever have with a parent. From unrequited love to realities that will never touch the fantasy drawn up in her head, Pam tries to be what they want while also trying to get what she wants and all the while finds herself embroiled in embarrassing, sometimes problematic situations so hilariously obscene that they must be true. We can assume they are: Sara Gunnarsdóttir’s film was adapted by Pamela Ribon from her own memoir. Some material is too good to not bite the bullet and share with the world. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
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: AMC+, Shudder
The Whale (Darren Aronofsky)
In the mid-1990s Darren Aronofsky wrote a list of ten movies he hoped to one day pursue. His first six, from Pi to Noah, all came from it. (No one seems to know if mother! did, though I wager its inclusion is likely.) It seems a stretch to think he had “adapt a play written in 2012” on there, but you never know. The Whale is very much a filmed play, and it makes no pretensions otherwise: the set is a Set, the acting is Acting, and monologues come quick and fast. It’s based on Samuel D. Hunter’s Obie-winning work of the same name and stars an exceptional, resurgent Brendan Fraser as a 600-pound man attempting to reconnect with his daughter. Suffice it to say this film would be quite small without him. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Women Talking (Sarah Polley)
With Women Talking, Sarah Polley adapts Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel in a way that feels like a response to the last several years. The book, which concerns women in a Mennonite colony deciding whether to leave their community and the men who spent years assaulting and raping them, published after the downfall of Harvey Weinstein and the formation of the #MeToo movement, which made its subject and themes reverberate around topics that were, and still are, at the forefront of media and public discourse. Polley leans hard into the bigger ideas, making her film less of a chamber piece and more a fumbled commentary on where we are now. Schematic in its intent and pedestrian in its execution, Women Talking is a well-meaning drama that’s obvious in all the wrong ways. – C.J. P. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
MUBI (free for 30 days)
Daughters of the Dust
Bless Their Little Hearts
This Transient Life
Beasts Clawing at Straws
Fluid Frontiers
Netflix
We Have a Ghost
Prime Video
Smile
VOD
After Love
Let It Be Morning