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.
2024 Sundance Film Festival
Through Sunday, one can experience the 2024 Sundance Film Festival from the comfort of their own home, if it’s in the United States. Having seen over 50 titles in the lineup, in terms of films with tickets still available I can highly recommend Good One, Between the Temples, Tendaberry, Black Box Diaries, Ibelin, Kneecap, Didi, Brief History of a Family, Porcelain War, Sugarcane, Sujo, Seeking Mavis Beacon, Skywalkers: A Love Story, Union, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, and Realm of Satan. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: Official Site (through Sunday only)
Amanda (Carolina Cavalli)
Sofia Coppola’s eighth feature doesn’t hit theaters for another few months, but you’d be forgiven if you thought it was actually Amanda, writer-director Carolina Cavalli’s darkly humorous, stylish feature debut about an indolent young woman looking for a friend. Consider its opening frame: a little girl lounging alone in a pool while munching on cereal and basking in the afternoon shadow of her bourgeois family’s Italian villa. When she subsequently splashes into the water, nearly drowning in front of her older sister and housekeeper, it’s clear that her brief life of solitary luxury has already thrust an incommunicable existential crisis upon her. You almost expect Stephen Dorff’s absentee father from Somewhere to have been responsible. – Jake K. (full review)
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Ferrari (Michael Mann)
Appreciating Ferrari, Michael Mann’s long-planned biopic on the Italian racing mogul, it helps to go back to the director’s original rationale for the project. Where many viewers found an underpowered, stuttering work, the compressed period of time and the plot strands contained within were judiciously chosen by screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin and Mann to highlight Ferrari’s imperious and, most importantly, monstrous capabilities. The climactic Mille Miglia sequence, more than any in Mann’s body of work, horrifyingly illustrates the cost of progress and profit motive’s denial of the human factor. And it being the first Mann film you could accurately call “operatic” since the ’90s only further enhanced what could be a dual directorial swan song with Heat 2, if it ends up being made. – David K.
Where to Stream: VOD
Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania)
Inserting yourself into the story you’re telling is always a risk. Kaouther Ben Hania, the director of Four Daughters, makes herself known in her docu-fiction experiment, seen coaching to some extent her subjects. The film moving between the rooms of their family home and a backstage setting with makeup being applied (perhaps admitting to the surprisingly glossy look of much of the film), it readily anticipates criticism of itself for exploitation. Though lining a couch for much of the runtime, our five subjects are very comfortable in front of the camera, and you kind of just trust them. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: Kino Film Collection
Hold Me Tight (Mathieu Amalric)
The narrative action of Mathieu Amalric’s latest directorial feature, Hold Me Tight, adapted from a play which was never staged, takes place in a kind of suspended timeline. One day Clarisse (Vicky Krieps) wakes up, gets dressed, and goes for a drive. In voiceover we hear that she has left her two children and husband and bears, it seems, no intention of returning. We see the family that has been left behind as they adjust to her sudden departure: the kids act out, the husband hides his panic, and they eventually begin settling into their new
Where to Stream: Kino Film Collection
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (Christophe McQuarrie)
As table-setting goes, it’s all just as sweaty as the film’s lengthy title, even for the relative lunacy of this franchise. Despite that, Dead Reckoning Part One acquits itself incredibly well––not only in the fact that it’s doling out exposition for two films, but also how it rewards the hulking setup with a breezy, exhilarating payout at each of its globetrotting locales. This series has always championed and thrived on the variety of its aesthetics, wearing as many masks as its superspy hero. Much like he did between Rogue Nation and Fallout, returning director Christopher McQuarrie does well to continue that tradition here with perhaps the most unlikely muses: Studio Ghibli. Despite some heavy, world-ending stakes, there’s a cartoonish playfulness to this Mission not seen since Ghost Protocol. Where Brad Bird evoked Wile E. Coyote, McQuarrie calls upon Castle of Cagliostro’s yellow Fiat and the early 19th-century wardrobe of Howl’s Moving Castle before building up to a coal-fired locomotive that echoes Castle in the Sky. It’s all wrapped in brightly lit framing with splashes of color that sell the far-out MacGuffin even more, and it delivers on a tender, oddball energy that could’ve been the work of Hayao Miyazaki, the Wachowskis, even Hideo Kojima. – Conor O. (full review)
Where to Stream: Paramount+ w/ Showtime
Offing (Oraib Toukan)
An account of the 2021 onslaught on Gaza from the perspective of Palestinian artist and father Salman Nawati, set against artist Oraib Toukan’s own lush footage in an investigation into the way images enter our consciousness.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Once within a Time (Godfrey Reggio)
The other movie on our list brought to life by the lovely, apparently never-tired Steven Soderbergh, Once Within a Time marks Godfrey Reggio’s first film since 2013’s Visitors. In his sixth collaboration with the legendary Philip Glass, Reggio, the documentarian behind the Qatsi trilogy, dreams up a retrograde phantasmagoria (think Guy Maddin’s early-20th-century aesthetic) rooted in an environmental renaissance that never stops becoming something new. The 52-minute jewel is a chimeric apocalypse built from a flurry of experimentally crafted moving parts that must be seen to be believed. – Luke H.
Where to Stream: VOD
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (Anna Hints)
Estonian director Anna Hints creates undeniable intimacy in her debut documentary Smoke Sauna Sisterhood. She sits with a group of women in this sacred place, religious in both its view of women’s bodies and experiences. Hints frames these women against a shifting light, shooting each and every one of their body parts, resting in their talk about joy and anger, fear and love. The documentary contains a piercing honesty and a collective thread, a fiber connecting these women to each other and to the outside world. Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is simple, powerful, and singular. – Mike F.
Where to Stream: VOD
You Hurt My Feelings (Nicole Holofcener)
In a landscape that has mostly lost its taste for comedy, every Nicole Holofcener film feels like a revelation. While she has more on her mind than just making audiences laugh, her gift for humor is undervalued, and her latest, You Hurt My Feelings, is as perceptive, insightful, and funny as her best work. The stakes may be considered low, but that is only in comparison to the ill-perceived notion that audiences need to be satiated with overcomplicated, heightened narratives that stretch beyond quotidian human issues. For these characters the stakes couldn’t be higher, and it’s refreshing to see a director examine the major emotional consequences of small but significant actions. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Paramount+ w/ Showtime
Alos New to Streaming
Disney+ and Hulu
The Last Repair Shop
Metrograph at Home
A Short Story
MUBI (free for 30 days)
Autobiographical Scene Number 6882
Netflix
The Babadook
Dumb Money
The Novice
Train to Busan
Prime Video
Shutter Island
Tubi
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
VOD
American Star