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 That Breathes (Shaunak Sen)
Move over, Sandra Bullock—there’s a new Bird Box in town. The only film to have collected prizes at both Sundance and Cannes, Shaunak Sen’s taut, tender documentary has a healing power that’s sourced straight from its subjects: two brothers in Delhi who have devoted their lives to saving the Black Kite—a majestic, medium-sized, hypercarnivorous raptor of the air—from going extinct in Delhi’s fatally-polluted skies. Set to the backdrop of India’s rising social turmoil and Islamophobia, the threatened and neglected state of this bird reflects the brothers’ reality in a place that doesn’t fully recognize their humanity. But that doesn’t stop them from operating. It seems nothing can. From a garage to a fully funded, state-of-the-art facility, All That Breathes tracks the brothers as they weather storm after storm and find flight with their fellow Kites. – Luke H.
Where to Stream: HBO Max
American Revolution 2 (Howard Alk & Mike Gray)
Chicago, August 1968 — The Democratic National Convention embodies the US’s political crisis. In the wake of the civil unrest, Howard Alk and Mike Gray’s American Revolution 2 documents the unlikely bond that formed between the Illinois Black Panthers and the Young Patriots—a group of poor white Appalachian citizens living uptown. Despite attempts to suppress this film by the Chicago mayor, it premiered at the Playboy Theater in April, 1969 with the help of Hugh Hefner, was lugged around Europe by Jean-Luc Godard, and remains a powerful testament to democracy in action through civil debate and community engagement.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Attachment (Gabriel Bier Gislason)
Leah’s (Ellie Kendrick) reasons for being in Denmark are purely academic. At least, that’s what she tells former actress Maja (Josephine Park) upon meeting by accident at a bookshop. It’s a cutely fateful collision, the former with a stack of research and the latter dressed as an elf while running to an engagement to read to a bunch of school children. Maja’s haste causes a mix-up in their attempt to pick everything up, ensuring they must come together once more in calmer circumstances. A mug of tea and conversation later has Leah waking up in the Dane’s bed, a day away from catching her flight back to London. Her decision to stay might not reveal this trip was also a chance for escape. Ignoring her mother’s calls does. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Shudder
Beast (Baltasar Kormakur)
There’s no better form of getting over a dead parent or spouse than combatting a killer animal. At least that’s the thesis of The Shallows, Crawl, and now Beast. Arriving in the coveted late-August B-movie spot (basically the January doldrums for slightly cooler people), Beast is a lean and likably earnest, if slightly unremarkable, creature feature. The newest from director Baltasar Kormakur––who has not quite graduated to the IP blockbuster class while his contemporary Jaume Collet-Serra (who used to specialize in these kinds of movies) now serves as master to The Rock––seems to prove the Icelandic journeyman is perhaps destined for Vulgar Auteurist glory in our degraded age. If never undercutting the somewhat ridiculous scenario with bad jokes and even unafraid of making some overt stabs at psychology with dream sequences, it’s the kind of genre film unafraid to have the stakes clear and just serious enough. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Corsage (Marie Kreutzer)
In Corsage, Vicky Krieps delivers a performance brimming with salty despondency and inner life. Gasping for breath in the garment from which this film takes its title, the Luxembourgish actress stars as Elisabeth Eugenie, the 19th-century Hungarian queen and Hapsburg empress tasked with quietly presiding over a kingdom in its early stages of unraveling. The director is Marie Kreutzer, an Austrian filmmaker whose previous effort, The Ground Beneath My Feet, told another story of a woman and an unraveling. While that film competed for the Golden Bear, Corsage took Kreutzer all the way to Cannes, making a splash in Un Certain Regard and justifiably rewarding Krieps for her work. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Expedition Content (Ernst Karel)
From Sweetgrass to Leviathan to Manakamana to El Mar La Mar to Caniba, Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab is responsible for some of the most fascinating non-fiction cinematic work of the century thus far. Their latest project is Expedition Content, directed by Ernst Karel, a master of sound works including some of the aforementioned titles, and Veronika Kusumaryati, a political and media anthropologist working in West Papua. An immersive sonic journey, the film is culled from 37 hours of audio recordings made in 1961 on the so-called Harvard-Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea by recent college graduate and Standard Oil heir Michael Rockefeller to study the indigenous Hubula (also known as Dani) people. Using almost no images, Karel and Kusumaryati’s film documents the strange encounter between the expedition and the Hubula people.
Where to Stream: OVID.tv
Piggy (Carlota Pereda)
There’s a reason Carlota Pereda films Sara (Laura Galán) urinating through her clothes as an old friend (Irene Ferreiro’s Claudia), who’s drifted away towards the clique that bullies her, puts a bloody hand on the back window of a serial killer’s van while screaming for help. We need to understand her fear. Just because Sara is a teenager who’s been brutally victimized by an entire town of peers doesn’t mean she’s measuring the situation and deciding to let Claudia, Maca (Claudia Salas), and Roci (Camille Aguilar) die. She’s afraid for her own life. What if she tries to save them and the killer (Richard Holmes) watching from the driver’s seat simply throws her in the back? So she freezes. And, to her surprise, he helps her instead. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Saint Omer (Alice Diop)
Great cinema reveals mysteries of the human condition as no court of law could. This infanticide drama examines two women through a prosecutor’s sharp, mistrusting eyes, only to conclude on a note of mercy and motherly understanding. It’s a piercingly insightful investigation of the female experience that exposes justice as an oft-simplified notion. Both lead actresses are sensational. Diop blends the observational focus and authenticity of documentaries with the fanciful touch of fiction to hypnotic effect, marking her as the year’s single most exciting newcomer in narrative filmmaking. – Zhuo-Ning Su
Where to Stream: VOD
Something in the Dirt (Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead)
The characters in Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s films shouldn’t be in these situations. They’re out of their depth, caught up on a conspiracy, a cult, or an idea that’s far beyond their grasp. Something in the Dirt doesn’t change that narrative, instead doubling down on the absurd, conspiratorial situations that the filmmakers create, only for their lead actors to be swallowed up by the bigness of what they uncover. Once again using the DIY model, Benson and Moorhead co-direct and co-star in their newest human science-fiction adventure, playing two Los Angeles dudes who interact with a floating crystal. – Michael F. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (Jia Zhangke)
Of all the monumental parts that tend to constitute the films of Jia Zhangke–the shifting socio-economic landscapes; the departing mountains; Zhao Tao–none has been as prevalent or essential as time. He is a director with one eye on the then and one eye on the now (and occasionally one on the future). Time is once again key to his latest work, a documentary titled Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, in which Jia uses both the writings of Ma Feng and a series of interviews with celebrated authors from his native Chanxi to cast an eye over China’s shift from rural to urban living; the implications of that change if not the more state-censorship-sensitive aspects. The mood, as ever, is one of reminiscence. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: OVID.tv
The Two Sights (Joshua Bonnetta)
To quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for documentarian Joshua Bonnetta, the Scottish Outer Hebrides is something of a “very silly place.” This is not to denigrate the remote cluster of islands on Scotland’s northern tip, and its inhabitants––far from it. More that, when taken as a whole, Bonnetta has been able to uncover a vast cluster of eccentricity on these sparsely populated lands, where people can see, hear or intuit things others can’t, and then tell of it gladly. Empirical science would question this, of course, but Bonnetta’s interviewees seem to transcend that, and instead carry knowledge more common to the animist practices of early homo sapiens, or maybe another plane of human evolution altogether. To cite a timely cinematic reference point, the desired end-goal of the Bene Gesserit breeding project in Dune, is this ability to intuit the future––the cutting-edge of human evolution in author Frank Herbert’s computer-absent neo-feudal world. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: OVID.tv
Also New to Streaming
HBO Max
Empire of Light
MUBI (free for 30 days)
To Sleep with Anger
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
Aphotic Zone
Burial
Peppermint Soda
A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here
Beast
Prime Video
Seriously Red
Somebody I Used to Know