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.
Camera (David Cronenberg)
One of David Cronenberg’s most haunting projects contains nary an exploding head or freshly formed orifice. 2000’s Camera instead turns its smeary digital lens towards an aging thespian, his depressive musings compounded by the most rapid-fire tempo Cronenberg’s ever waged. A key part of the canon that’s nevertheless flown under-radar, and Le Cinéma Club present it, free, for one week as Crimes of the Future arrives. – Nick N.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Fire Island (Andrew Ahn)
Fire Island is primarily a retelling of Pride and Prejudice. In a similar vein to Clueless, the masterful modernization of another Jane Austen novel, Ahn and writer / co-lead Joel Kim Booster have updated the classic romance novel with a fresh twist. Flipping the script on the 19th-century England-set tale involving straight white people, Fire Island marks a 21st-century, entirely queer, racially diverse interpretation. Focusing on Noah (Booster) and Howie (Bowen Yang), gay Asian-American best friends who are taking their annual vacation to Fire Island along with a group of their other friends, they are in search of sun, alcohol, and good sex, not expecting love to come over the horizon. – Logan K. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Freddy Got Fingered (Tom Green)
Picture this: A disturbed young man, prone to zoophilic outbursts, returns to his family home in Portland, Oregon, after being fired from a factory job in LA. His father berates and belittles him, often leaving his mother shaking from fear. He strikes up a relationship with a wheelchair-bound nurse to whom his father refers as a “cripple” and “retard slut whore.” Tired of the abuse, the young man invents a lie during a family therapy session: that his father sexually molested his younger brother, Freddy. The brother is committed to a home for abused children, their mother leaves the house, and the young man learns to channel familial trauma into art. Then picture this: the synopsis offered above is not for a dour, European arthouse drama but a $14 million, 20th Century Fox-distributed comedy written by, directed by, and starring a Canadian comedian most famous for an MTV prank show. – Matthew D.L. (read his full interview with Tom Green)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Friends and Strangers (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––one that draws 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)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Miami Vice (Michael Mann)
I dare you to find a movie that is more self-assuredly cool than Miami Vice. I dare you to find a film that is more in love with itself than Miami Vice. I dare you to find two characters more cool-infused than Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell as Ricardo Tubbs and Sonny Crocket (respectively) in Miami Vice. This movie burns with the fire that only the truly un-self-conscious can embrace, and every scene drips with style and grace. The violence is sudden and real while still managing to be thrilling and electrifying. Every beat is calibrated for maximum sleekness, and thanks to the investment of the actors and the determination of writer-director Michael Mann, that cool is achieved. The soundtrack thumps, the sun shines, and the bullets fly. This is the pinnacle of action in the new millennium. – Brian R.
Where to Stream: HBO Max
The Northman (Robert Eggers)
Whether the dread-inducing rituals of witches or a turpentine-fueled descent into hysteria, Robert Eggers’ cinema is of unflinching immersion. Trapped in the center of symmetrical frames and surrounded by immaculate production design, the only escape for his characters’ fury seems to be bounding off the screen onto the audience themselves. The effect oscillates between entrancing and grating, wearing one down until there’s no choice but to succumb to the mania and plunge into the madness. A considerable step up in scope, his third feature The Northman gratefully bears scant touches of a compromised vision, delivering a bloody, visceral Viking epic that utilizes a simple revenge template as the canvas to examine the contradictions of a hero’s journey. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Peacock
Terence Davies: A Retrospective
As his latest feature Benediction arrives in theaters, I was pleased to speak with the brilliant Terence Davies about the making of his latest work. Now, the opportunity to catch up with his past work has arrived courtesy of The Criterion Channel, featuring Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980), Death and Transfiguration (1983), Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), The Long Day Closes (1992), The Neon Bible (1995), Of Time and the City (2008), The Deep Blue Sea (2011), Sunset Song (2015), and A Quiet Passion (2016).
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Also New to Streaming
Amazon Prime
Pulse
Signs
The Criterion Channel
100 Years of Judy Garland
Atlantis
Billy Wilder’s 1940s
Double Indemnity
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger
Fire Music
Karen Dalton: In My Own Time
Microbudget Movies
Queersighted: The Musical!
‘Round Midnight
Seconds
HBO Max
Beach Rats
Border
Damsel
The Grand Budapest Hotel
They Shall Not Grow Old
Total Recall
Hulu
Alien series
The American
Burn After Reading
Corky Romano
Die Hard series
Martha Marcy May Marlene
MUBI (free for 30 days)
Irreversible
Have a Nice Day
Sycorax
The World of Kanako
Wet Sand
And Then We Danced
Netflix
The Departed
Mission: Impossible
Mission: Impossible II
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
Titanic
Tubi
The Apartment
Assault on Precinct 13
Bad Lieutenant
Blue Velvet
Death Proof
Deep Cover
Dick Tracy
Drive
Fail Safe
Fargo
The French Connection
Hardcore
Hard Target
A History of Violence
Hoop Dreams
The Immigrant
I’m Not There
Ismael’s Ghosts
The Long Goodbye
Malcolm X
Midnight Cowboy
Mother
The Night of the Hunter
Psycho
Speed
Starship Troopers
Straw Dogs
Sweet Smell of Success
Thief
Two Lovers
True Romance
Videodrome
VOD
Charlotte
Dashcam