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 Hero (Asghar Farhadi)
In A Hero, the discovery of a bag of gold coins sets the scene for a knotted Bressonian morality tale. The director is Asghar Farhadi, a filmmaker who has spent his career examining those blurred lines between right and wrong; decency and hubris; righteousness and folly. Taking place in the city of Shiraz, it proves a return to familiar ground for him: both the first he has made in his native Iran after the awful misstep that was Everybody Knows, as well as a return to the moral complexities of A Separation, still his finest film to date. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: Amazon Prime
Attica (Stanley Nelson and Traci Curry)
There’s a moment towards the end of Stanley Nelson and Traci Curry’s documentary Attica where a white state trooper is seen putting his fist in the air while screaming, “That’s White Power!” The other men around him smile and cheer because they’ve scored a victory for white men in blue. They’ve just taken back the maximum-security Attica Correctional Facility after a five-day stand-off where about 1,200 inmates rebelled and took 42 staff members hostage to negotiate prison reform. And they did it, in their own words, with “White Power.” How is “White Power” defined? Well, as the footage and first-hand accounts reveal, it means knowingly picking off unarmed Black and Brown men with high-powered artillery after saying they wouldn’t be hurt. “White Power” is white supremacy. And cowardice. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Free on YouTube (through February 28 only)
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude)
After a sex tape is released online, a schoolteacher (Katia Pascariu) goes on an odyssey through sunny Bucharest. She later faces a kangaroo court made up of her colleagues and peers. In the middle many other things happen. Combining narrative and archival filmmaking with elements of theatre, political allegory, memes, and satire, Radu Jude—perhaps the most idiosyncratic filmmaker to emerge from the Romanian New Wave—created one of the strangest, most singular films of the year in Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn. It also won the director a Golden Bear, an acknowledgement as overdue as it was richly deserved. – Rory O.
Where to Stream: VOD
The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet (Ana Katz)
This year, because Sundance is a virtual festival operating in the midst of the coronavirus, there’s a tendency to label any depiction of isolation and mass hysteria as a “pandemic movie.” It’s not exactly a spoiler to say The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet matches that criteria. During one stretch of director Ana Katz’s impressionistic slice of Argentinian life, an ambiguous airborne disease forces the population to wear oxygen helmets. Anyone that doesn’t have access to one of these astronaut devices must keep their head no higher than four feet from the ground. Many crawl, squat and duck their way through offices and city streets. It’s a masked, paranoid existence that appears both familiar and otherworldly. – Jake K.S. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Office (Johnnie To)
It’s worth noting that there’s probably a certain expectation when hearing the following words “a Johnnie To musical.” One thinking his classical formal talents would lean towards something that could resemble one of Vincente Minnelli’s MGM masterpieces, yet it’s probably closer to one of Fritz Lang’s nightmares; an architectural hell, the artificiality of the sets; lines and bars only enforcing the idea of a prison, and the giant clock in the center of the office, on a constant countdown to doomsday. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: OVID.tv
Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)
On a basic level, Paul Thomas Anderson makes films about magnetic presences — figures who emanate such greatness that it’s nearly as impossible for bystanders to be around them as it is to not be around them. Phantom Thread, Anderson’s ninth film, is of a piece with much of his career in that way, telling of a prodigal 1950s dressmaker, Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), who inspires equally rapturous reactions to his handiwork and his mercurial disposition. Just as The Master unmasked a serious-man character study as a psychological survey of bullshit artists and Inherent Vice played dress-up as a noir story to spin a tale of immovable sadness, so too does Phantom Thread present itself as a rigorous biopic-like narrative while its interests are far less fussy or predictable. This is less an examination of a singular person than a look at the torturous and sublime experience of his creative process as it relates to the most important people in his life. Read my full review here. – Michael S.
Where to Stream: Netflix
Sundance Film Festival 2022
The 2022 Sundance Film Festival is now underway, and like last year, you can experience some of the year’s best new films from the comfort of your home. One can see our complete coverage rolling out here, as well as a preview of our most-anticipated films.
Where to Stream: Sundance Film Festival
Taming the Garden (Salomé Jashi)
If you happen to maintain your own personal garden and feel stressed about the upkeep, look no further than Salomé Jashi’s visually striking observational documentary to put things in perspective. The garden at the center of Taming the Garden, however, isn’t glimpsed until the film’s final moments as this journey through the country of Georgia is almost entirely about the grueling task of transplanting majestic, century-old trees many, many miles by land and sea. Lest you believe this can be done with some simple equipment, the tree at the center of the story weighs as much as a house and requires months upon months of work to find its new home. In capturing this process, Jashi takes a vivid, evergreen look at the effects of gratuitous wealth. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Also New to Streaming
The Criterion Channel
What About Me
What We Left Unfinished
Hulu
MUBI (free for 30 days)
Nights of Cabiria
The White Sheik
Nowhere to Hide
Tarnation
Comets
Netflix
Definition Please (review)
Donkeyhead (review)
Paddington
VOD