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.
Breaking (Abi Damaris Corbin)
Following on the heels of his impressive turn in Steve McQueen’s Red, White and Blue, John Boyega does noble work in Breaking, directed by Abi Damaris Corbin. Boyega stars as Brian Brown-Easley, the 33-year-old Marine veteran who held a bank hostage in order to get a disability check from the Department of Veterans Affairs he was owed. The amount was eight-hundred and ninety-two dollars. – Dan M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Destello Bravío (Ainhoa Rodríguez)
In the arid, lunar landscape of Ainhoa Rodríguez’s Destello Bravío, a whole village waits for things to fall apart. We’re in the rural outskirts of Spain’s Extremadura region, a few miles from the border with Portugal, but the hamlet remains unnamed—it juts into being from a fable, a land of almost biblical desolation and solitude. The old folks marooned here are the last surviving members of an old species, but the film is so committed to its oneiric and sepulchral fabric that they may as well be dead already. Ghosts in a ghost town. In a tale that draws so much of its perturbing allure from its relationship with the supernatural, it’s fitting that watching Destello Bravío should carry a kind of cosmic quality—like watching a dead star flicker, knowing the source of the light you see died a long, long time ago. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Gagarine (Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh)
Gagarine might not be explicitly about an autistic character; it’s never directly stated that the 16-year-old protagonist Youri (a sensational Alseni Bathily) is autistic, but it is one of the greatest pieces of representation that our community has ever experienced in cinema. Similar to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, an official diagnosis is not necessary for viewers to understand the protagonist’s autism. It is clearly evident throughout watching their fixations and their mannerisms. – Logan K. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard)
We can now rank Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Book among the most summative, cryptic, apocalyptic, and defiant closing statements in cinema. Whatever might be said about his passing as the loss of anything further, every Godard film can have endless rewards—as one idea begets another, so too could every reference inspire the impulse to look into its source and the people who created them. Because Godard’s cinema is nothing if not the work of a human mind, and in The Image Book we close on a galvanizing thought. – Nick N.
Where to Stream: Filmatique
Jean-Luc Godard on the Dick Cavett Show
Jean-Luc Godard was only human—an idea that might have been debated just one week ago but was put to rest with Tuesday’s news he has died at 92. Yet his 1980 appearance on one of America’s most famous talk shows initially resembles an alien making contact with Earth: when an opening shot of national favorite Dick Cavett pulls out to reveal the most iconic figure of 20th-century cinema, the two men create an opposition worthy of his cinema—like a moment in history struck before our eyes. This week, in honor of Godard’s passing, Le Cinéma Club revisits their conversation.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Mija (Isabel Castro)
One of the more affecting films I saw at Sundance Film Festival earlier this year was Isabel Castro’s debut documentary Mija, which takes a poignant and personal look at two daughters of undocumented immigrants from Mexico who are attempting to break through in the music industry. After a theatrical release, it’s now streaming on Disney+, immediately vaunting to the streaming service’s most worthwhile release of the year.
Where to Stream: Disney+
Neptune Frost (Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman)
Neptune Frost—the directorial debut from poet, rapper, actor, performer Saul Williams (co-helmed with Anisia Uzeyman)—exists in a state of singularity, teetering between present and future. Set in a makeshift village in Rwanda and featuring musical elements composed by Williams, the drama looks at technology, capitalism, and the big machine, and raises a middle finger by promoting protest, gender fluidity, and cosmic connection. Repetition becomes an anthem as Williams’ characters, a coltan miner and intersex runaway, find one another through shared dreams. It’s full of anger, passion, love, and a collective desire to impact the world and those that run it from high places. – Michael F. (full review)
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky)
Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film was, somehow, not streaming until Filmatique uploaded a 4K restoration. Perverse to call anything Tarkovsky underseen or underappreciated, but a presentation finally faithful to his and Sven Nykvist’s intent might shed a little more light on The Sacrifice‘s greatness. Burning house or no, it’s hard to name any final film that better closes a corpus.
Where to Stream: Filmatique
Searching for Mr. Rugoff (Ira Deutchman)
The history of movie culture is full of colorful characters committed to elevating the experience. Donald Rugoff’s exhibition and distribution company Cinema 5 paved the way for a second generation of companies enhancing cinematic culture like the studio (sm)art-house divisions and Landmark Theaters, and then a third wave of companies like the Alamo Drafthouse and A24, turning movie-going into an event. In Searching for Mr. Rugoff, film distribution veteran and producer Ira Deutchman goes back to an early mentor, inspired by a speech given by the great exhibitor Dan Talbot (proprietor of Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and New Yorker Films) at the IFP Gotham Awards several years ago. In the speech as told by Talbot, Rugoff moved to Marthas Vineyard after having lost his company and started showing films in an old church. – John F. (full review)
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Speak No Evil (Christian Tafdrup)
Speak No Evil is terrifying, shocking, and deeply, deeply unsettling. There’s no getting around the upset factor. Audiences who catch this Sundance entry from Denmark should be warned: this one’s gonna hurt. The latest from Christian Tafdrup has the brutal shock value of George Sluizer’s The Vanishing and gut-punching, visceral impact of Haneke’s Funny Games. Speak No Evil does not reach the level of ingenuity and freshness found in those similarly potent antecedents. But what it lacks in originality is compensated in chilling execution. – Chris S. (full review)
Where to Stream: Shudder
Steve Erickson Presents
One of America’s greatest living novelists and perhaps its premier chronicler of cinematic myth—honestly, pick up Zeroville and see if you can stop—Steve Erickson has curated a selection of favorite titles on Filmatique. Putting fresh historical spin on films as embedded as Metropolis (“Fritz Lang’s Olympian vision of proles in rebellion against the bosses in a dehumanized future looked less like a cautionary tale than a thing of marvel to Hitler & Goebbels”) or fresh as Goodbye to Language (“Do not be distracted by characterizations of this as ‘experimental,’ a word that should make all of us reach for our revolvers when it comes to art”), Erickson brings to this list the same brilliance that’s characterized a literary career we’re still due to fully appreciate.
Where to Stream: Filmatique
Teenage Emotions (Frederic Da)
Watching Frederic Da’s Teenage Emotions can feel like a bit of a shock at first. Shot entirely on iPhones in extreme close-ups, Da films teenagers around a Los Angeles high school in what looks like raw, point-and-shoot footage. In its opening minutes, the shoddy and garish nature of the visuals makes the film look like it could be mistaken for an assignment made by one of its characters. But in no time these perceived flaws turn out to be the film’s greatest assets. On a surface level, Teenage Emotions is an ugly film, but that ugliness helps give it a vitality that makes it one of the most authentic and entertaining portraits of high school in ages. – C.J. P. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Three Thousand Years of Longing (George Miller)
In Three Thousand Years of Longing, an introverted historian (as if there’s another kind) meets a genie. The historian is played by a bespectacled Tilda Swinton, affecting a North English accent, and the genie (or “djinn,” to use Arabic, as is this film’s wont) by Idris Elba—blue, shimmering, with pointy ears, and liable to disappear in a puff of smoke if the appropriate words are spoken. The director is George Miller, directing for the first time since Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015. As acts to follow go, they don’t get much harder. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
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MUBI (free for 30 days)
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