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.
Asteroid City (Wes Anderson)
Wes Anderson has done it all: India by train, Rhode Island by foot, the Mediterranean by sub, France by bike, faux-Germany by hotel, apple-orchard America by fox, animated Japan by dog, motel Texas by friends, New York City by family. But––despite the feeling that this couldn’t possibly be true––he’s never told a story in western America. In setting he hasn’t gone further west than Houston (which is, of course, the south). Until Asteroid City: Arizona desert by quarantine. – Luke H. (full review)
Where to Stream: Peacock
Beatrix (Lilith Kraxner & Milena Czernovsky)
One of the best films in recent years––still without U.S. distribution––is streaming for free the next two weeks on Le Cinéma Club. It’s one perfect revelation after another: engenders not-unfair comparisons to Akerman (what felt easy in March carries so much more significance after 2022), Schanelec, Martel, and (if you’re a real psycho) Nathalie Granger, though Kraxner and Czernovsky’s exchange between the macro scale of time, micro duration of individual shots, and incidents within each is sui generis, perpetually surprising, visually and aurally imprinted nearly 10 months on. Here’s a film that actually breathes and has blood in its veins.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Enys Men and Bait (Mark Jenkin)
Perched on the cliff of a windswept island off the coast of Cornwall is a shock of white flowers. Every day a woman studies their petals in religious silence before heading home and jotting notes in a diary. Date. Daily temperature. Observations. The year is 1973, the month April, and that’s about as much contextual information Mark Jenkin’s sinuous, entrancing Enys Men parcels out. We don’t know who the woman is, what or who those notes are for, when she got to the island, when she’ll leave. Penned by Jenkin, its script credits her as “The Volunteer,” whose daily pilgrimages to the cliff feel like a vocation, an act of faith. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe)
Laxe knows how to create a grounded, taut drama with a real sense of time and place. His opening sequence, a foggy, ethereal nighttime scene where diggers bulldoze giant Eucalyptus trees is infused with foreboding in a tangible natural terrain that towers over human activity. This is a region exposed to the elements, where people submit to nature as if it’s a greater power. Fire Will Come is, it should be no surprise, a prophetic title, and that’s part of the tension that Laxe carefully ratchets up. This is a stately film, sometimes to a fault, (even at 85 minutes some scenes seem overly drawn out) that builds slowly from silence to a crescendo, a natural disaster for whom Amador will become something of a sacrificial lamb. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: OVID.tv
Geographies of Solitude (Jacquelyn Mills)
Considering the Wikipedia page for Sable Island states a population of zero (minus the six-to-twenty-five rotating personnel team from the Meteorological Service of Canada), the text labeling Zoe Lucas as a “full-time inhabitant” at the end of Jacquelyn Mills’ Geographies of Solitude seems to confirm what we presume throughout its duration: this twenty-five-mile-long and one-mile-wide crescent sand dune off the coast of Nova Scotia is a world of one. It’s been that way for forty years, ever since Lucas returned following a brief stint in the 70s as a volunteer cook/burgeoning environmentalist. That time has seen her compiling detailed spreadsheets on topics like the famed Sable Horse population, invertebrate species, seal/bird migrations, and plastic waste. As Lucas says, you can’t solve a problem without first collecting the data. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Incredible But True (Quentin Dupieux)
In Being John Malkovich, an entire half-hour passes by before John Cusack’s hangdog puppeteer peaks behind his filing cabinet and finds a tunnel to another man’s brain (and, ultimately, oblivion). Incredible But True––another film about a tunnel and likely oblivion––is directed by Quentin Dupieux, a French filmmaker whose absurdist tendencies would rival even Charlie Kaufman’s. He is also better-known for his brevity. Dupieux’s two most recent films (Deerskin and Mandibles), both clocked in at less than 80 minutes. (They were also his best.) Realité, his most indulgent, asks only for 95. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Scarlet (Pietro Marcello)
In his previous film Martin Eden, and now with Scarlet, Pietro Marcello has found a novel way to depict artistic striving, closely tying it with the concept of labor. It’s also something that runs through Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, about the poetry-penning bus driver of the same name: both filmmakers have helped demystify our idea of the artist as a potential “great man of history” and the deification often accorded them. The would-be literary maven of Martin Eden and two artist-craftsmen of Scarlet are engaged instead in a noble struggle, a bit like the eternal workers’ struggle of Marcello’s other chief interest: that of leftist political thought. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, Kemp Powers)
So it’s come to this: Spider-Man 10, technically. The future prophesied by many Hollywood alarmists, but now with more madness in the multi-verse (I cringe every time I hear it). Our prologue sees a super-powered Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) battling the iconic comic villain The Vulture, only to be interrupted by new variants like Spider-Man 2099 (Oscar Isaac) and his pregnant wife Spider-Woman (Issa Rae) emerging from another universe to assist her. Come there be something a little nefarious with them? – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Squaring the Circle (Anton Corbijn)
You are likely familiar with the photographs and narrative films of Anton Corbijn (Control, The American, A Most Wanted Man), but now the artist has directed his first-ever documentary on a subject he knows well. Squaring the Circle, a Sundance and Telluride selection, entertainingly examines the work of Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell, the creative geniuses behind the iconic album art design studio, Hipgnosis. Featuring brand-new interviews with Paul McCartney, Roger Waters, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Peter Gabriel, Noel Gallagher, and more, the documentary charts how the pair were responsible for some of the most recognizable album covers of all-time, including Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Paul McCartney and Wings’ Band on the Run, and Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, all three of which celebrate their 50th anniversaries this year.
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
Film Movement+
Hellhole
Metrograph
Focus on Sudanese Group
Hong Sangsoo Focus
Three by Tsai Ming-liang
MUBI (free for 30 days)
A Dangerous Method
Shampoo
Hal
Tristana
Stations of the Elevated
Justine Triet
Prime Video
Burning
The Wandering Earth II
The Wailing
VOD
Medusa Deluxe
The YouTube Effect