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 Banquet (Ruth Paxton)
It’s a question we ask through the duration of our lives: what’s the point? Maybe you say these words in search of meaning where humanity as a species is concerned. Maybe it’s to find purpose as an individual when nothing seems to be going right. Jason (Richard Keep) wonders what the point of surviving is when his fate has already been sealed. His wife Holly (Sienna Guillory) is being forced into the role of caretaker while also wading through the reality that she’s now a single mother, regardless of breath remaining in his lungs. Is hers and their daughters’ (Jessica Alexander’s Betsey and Ruby Stokes’ Isabelle) suffering worth it? Will ripping the Band-Aid off now render their ability to cope with his loss easier? Easy answers don’t exist. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
France (Bruno Dumont)
“My work is all about transfiguration… I’m not a naturalistic filmmaker at all.” So goes one of the most widely quoted statements by French auteur Bruno Dumont, now as noted for his bold stylistic experimentation across different genres as he is the dour, powerful slabs of “transcendental” cinema with which he first made his name at the turn of the millennium. Here lies a blindspot of director-focused appreciation: his latest film France has the appearance of a glossy, luxe piece of entertainment––almost a French Succession––that could appeal to a wide, even non-cinephilic audience across its home country. But those familiar with his output can’t help scan the precis of this film and perceive a likely Trojan Horse, or a piece of subversion at cross-purposes with its exterior sense. Is this the regressive underside of auteurism, that secretly wants our favorites to make a recognizably similar film each time out the block? – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Friends and Strangers and You Like It, I Love It (James Vaughan)
Nothing happens in James Vaughan’s Friends and Strangers in the same way that nothing happens in the films of Hong Sangsoo. The people navigating this entrancing debut feature (a lively pantheon of Australian twenty-somethings plus the occasional grownup proper) meet and talk; couples come together and drift apart; plans are shared and swiftly abandoned. But even a non-event can have its own sense of happening, and even a maze of chance encounters can reveal its own intelligent design. Populated by young adults fumbling after a coherent identity, Friends and Strangers behaves like them. It is a film of detours, digressions, and everyday surrealism––onethatdraws its unsettling allure from the angst that comes when you realize the path you’ve walked along isn’t paved anymore, and the future you’re venturing into will be entirely your own making. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Le Cinéma Club are also streaming (for free) Vaughan’s 2013 short You Like It, I Love It, in which two adrift brothers lead a directionless life and are thrown asunder by their neighbor (Friends and Strangers‘ unforgettable Greg Zimbulis). Per Vaughan, “I like films that sound slight on paper, but are as layered and engaging as an experience.”
Where to Stream: Metrograph at Home and Le Cinéma Club
The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson)
Just when we think Wes Anderson’s exhausted his quirky, colorful, dry, indie extravaganza filmmaking style, he proves us wrong—again. The French Dispatch sees Anderson employing new tricks as confidently and creatively as he does his old favorites. The star-heavy film takes us ceremoniously through the last issue of “The French Dispatch” via three separate stories told by their respective writers (Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright). Nearly every shot a masterfully considered feat, all very hard to look away from. – Luke H.
Where to Stream: HBO Max
Hellbender (Zelda Adams, Toby Poser, John Adams)
As an accused witch is lifted into the air by rope in the hands of three women, we anticipate the worst. There’s no choice when we already know what the latest DIY-horror from the Adams Family (John Adams, Toby Poser, and daughter Zelda Adams) is about. So if hanging as a test for witchcraft means the victim remains alive, what comes next? Does she rise even higher before decimating those who dared to think they could destroy her? Does the fact that everyone watching being women mean they too are witches readying to finish the job? Even when it all eventually ends in a ball of flame and burning flesh, the punk-rock segue ushering in the present leaves the consequences uncertain. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Shudder
Mr. Bachmann and His Class (Maria Speth)
I have no doubt that, when released, Mr. Bachmann and His Class will make many want to become teachers. This three-and-a-half-hour German documentary about a retiring educator genuinely flies by: we follow Bachmann over a year teaching his final class of young kids. It’ll remind you of how life-changing a good teacher can be—the power they have to teach a young mind empathy, respect, and the ability to listen. – Orla S.
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Servants (Ivan Ostrokhovsky)
The success of Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida and Cold War has revealed, among arthouse audiences, a heretofore unimagined ravenous hunger for Eastern Bloc period dramas of Catholic conviction and political compulsion, shot in academy ratio and shimmery digital grayscale. Thus Servants, a hushed drama about underground activism, secret police, fear and trembling at a seminary in the former Czechoslovakia. – Mark A. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Strawberry Mansion (Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley)
What if the government didn’t strictly tax your paychecks and transactions, but your dreams as well? With their vibrant, imaginative, and genre-melding new film Strawberry Mansion, directors Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley envision this reality in the near-future of 2035, but with their clear admiration for analog technology, it could just as well take place in an alternate timeline recalling decades past. Following a dream auditor named James Preble (Audley) who ventures to a remote farmhouse for his latest assignment, he’s tasked with auditing the dreams of the eccentric, elderly Bella (Penny Fuller), who has failed to file hers for decades. Fondly recalling Michel Gondry’s Science of Sleep as reality and dreams start to meld, the film is equal parts lovely and frightening as it explores romantic bliss, destructive capitalism, and the significance of the subconscious state we all spend a third of our lives experiencing. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
Amazon Prime
Hulu
MUBI (free for 30 days)
Ms. 45
Remembrance: A Portrait Study
Nightfall
Chelsea Walls
White Afro
Yakuza Apocalypse
VOD