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.
The Adults (Dustin Guy Defa)
Six years after directing his last feature, Dustin Guy Defa returns with The Adults, a film of complicated shared histories and gradually revealing inner lives. With his relatively sprawling Person to Person, Defa followed a wide array of characters over five interweaving storylines. This time he focuses on one family and, closer still, on an unmistakable feeling: that of moving out and growing up, only to return home and realize all that delicately assembled adulthood was merely a façade. Playing out across a leafy town in upstate New York, The Adults follows a trio of siblings as they reunite: the brother who went away and the sisters who did not. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Amanda (Carolina Cavalli)
Sofia Coppola’s eighth feature doesn’t hit theaters for another few months, but you’d be forgiven if you thought it was actually Amanda, writer-director Carolina Cavalli’s darkly humorous, stylish feature debut about an indolent young woman looking for a friend. Consider its opening frame: a little girl lounging alone in a pool while munching on cereal and basking in the afternoon shadow of her bourgeois family’s Italian villa. When she subsequently splashes into the water, nearly drowning in front of her older sister and housekeeper, it’s clear that her brief life of solitary luxury has already thrust an incommunicable existential crisis upon her. You almost expect Stephen Dorff’s absentee father from Somewhere to have been responsible. – Jake K. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh)
Martin McDonagh’s fourth film marks an In Bruges reunion between the writer-director, Farrell, and Brendan Gleeson. It again finds the two leads as another mismatched, in-a-rut couple of men serving up heaping portions of existential despair and black comedy. But this rut is of a very different ilk—much smaller in scope, lacking villainy, almost cute… until it isn’t. Banshees is McDonagh’s A Straight Story, but he doesn’t go full monty. He works in a few comically violent McDonagh beats that rip us out of the ordinary. But it’s the permeating sense of normality, routine, and unremarkableness that gives them their punch. To note the simplicity, he opens on a white screen with a glowing white font. (Why does that feel like a theater-director move?) – Luke H. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Birth/Rebirth (Laura Moss)
Likely a film that some will find underwhelming due to its lowkey, mostly affectless style, it’s a rather impressive feat of narrative economy that manages to separate itself from the seemingly endless indie horror crop. Directed by Laura Moss, there’s the sense they either don’t have much of a feel for the genre or rather harbors a general disdain for the shorthands it’s fallen into (hopefully they don’t get absorbed into bad studio product soon), the film’s tendencies refreshingly feel free of the trappings of calling-card cinema. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy (Nancy Buirski)
Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy professes to be something more than just a documentary about the making of Midnight Cowboy: an extremely ambitious film attempting to navigate the impact and cultural presence of John Schlesinger’s masterpiece while also exploring the history of American queer cinema, the death of the Western in the mainstream, and the counter-culture of the ’60s transforming into the nihilism of the 1970s. Packing so much information and so many perspectives into 101 minutes occasionally comes across as overstuffed. But Desperate Souls’ sheer enthusiasm for Midnight Cowboy and the cultural period is infectious, a vibe that compensates for certain faults holding it back from becoming a truly great documentary. – Logan K. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Goddamned Asura (Lou Yi-an)
Based on a real-life shooting in a Taipei night market, Goddamned Asura explores multiple points-of-view to show why a video game developer opens fire on customers in a food stall. Director Lou Yi-an juggles locations from slums to high rises, schools to jails, shifting among social classes and generations, replaying situations with different outcomes. “The harder my characters want to climb uphill, the harder I want to pull them down,” he said. “We all do things in life over and over again, even though they never work.” Lou’s uncompromising but sympathetic film was chosen to represent Taiwan at the Oscars. – Daniel E.
Where to Stream: VOD
It’s What Each Person Needs (Sophy Romvari)
With her latest short, Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari examines the fulfillment of human desires through a digital connection. Whether it’s sexual in nature or simply wanting someone to talk (or sing) to, Becca Willow Moss’ clients have a range of wants. In her affecting portrait of work that can often be overlooked, Romvari elegantly assembles the various aspects of her artist subject’s moonlighting with striking intimacy and importance. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Klondike (Maryna Er Gorbach)
Klondike is a funny title for this harrowing, at times absurdist Ukrainian war drama, set as conflict with Russia began to spike in 2014. Referring as it does to the Klondike Gold Rush (the setting for Chaplin’s famous silent comedy), we could expect the resonance of two historical events to overlap, or at least sense a link between the actual subject and the analogy. But any gold in the grey expanse of the febrile Donbas region, where Klondike‘s set, is nary to be found: the landscape seems only dotted with cows and convoys of surface-to-air missiles. Perhaps it’s just a red herring designed to mock the idea of attributing meaning, which is what the shellshocked or aggressive characters in this film are also scrabbling to do, to no avail. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Rodeo (Lola Quivoron)
It’s as well-worn a trope as any in the coming-of-age genre: the elusive, underground subculture that draws in a young protagonist, whose discovery of this world helps them learn more about themselves in the process. Director Lola Quivoron’s latest feature Rodeo, an Un Certain Regard prize winner at last year’s Cannes, mercifully sidesteps such cliches in its exploration of a motocross community that exists just off the fringes of suburban Paris. Unfortunately, this is because it becomes overly formulaic in a different way, very quickly transforming into a familiar tale of a young person’s indoctrination into a criminal gang and lacking enough depth in cultural specificities of its surrounding world to ever truly stand out. – Alistair R. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Seventeen (Joel DeMott & Jeff Kreines)
Depicting ample pot-smoking and underage drinking, as well as a revealing narrative about race relationships in Reagan’s America, Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines’ eye-opening film captures the intense confusion that comes with abandoning adolescence and stepping into adulthood.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Stane (Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović)
Following up one of the best debuts of recent years with the riveting coming-of-age stale Murina, director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović is back with the short Stane. Danica Curcic reunites with the director to lead another vigorously executed tale of female rebellion amidst a suffocating patriarchal stronghold. As we follow her character, who is about to inherit her family construction business as they celebrate the building of a new Croatian church in NYC, we witness a reckoning with the personal and professional as she can’t politely hold in her anger any further. As each sequence is conceived with a sense of foreboding, building mystery, it’s further reason to get excited for the Croatian director’s second feature.
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Also New to Streaming
MUBI (free for 30 days)
Untold Hours
I Thought the World of You
Netflix
Crank and Crank: High Voltage
Prime Video
Black Death
Children of Men
The Double
Observe and Report
Rumble Fish
VOD
Between Two Worlds
Oldboy: 20th Anniversary Restoration