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 Chiara (Jonas Carpignano)
Writer-director Jonas Carpignano completes his Calabrian trilogy with A Chiara, an enthralling drama about a teenage girl coming to terms with her family’s role in the mafia, which won the Europa Cinema Label at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes. With a documentary-like authenticity, this is a touching, powerful film with a lyrical visual palette and a superb sense of time and place. As in Mediterranea and A Ciambra, which told stories about immigration and the Roma community, respectively, Carpignano takes us to Gioia Tauro at the southern tip of the Italian mainland. For ten years the director has embedded himself here, a place infamous for the penetration in all walks of life of the ‘Ndrangheta, the secretive mafia clan that by some accounts controls three percent of Italy’s GDP. – Ed F. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Crestone (Marnie Ellen Hertzler)
In her feature debut, Baltimore filmmaker Marnie Ellen Hertzler gets lost in the remote Colorado desert with five SoundCloud rappers in search of utopia. Shapeshifting between music videos, scripted fiction, and observational documentary, Crestone undulates to a far-out original score by Animal Collective. Together, the young musicians construct an alternate reality that both rejects and reflects the internet culture they seek to escape.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Dark Waters (Todd Haynes)
Legal dramas lionize those who rise above the allure of cynicism and greed. Sometimes it’s the victims of grand social injustice or the lawyers who help ensure their chance at public retribution. Either way, in almost every case the ethics of heroism wins the day because justice finally becomes tangible. Todd Haynes understands that the justice system hardly ever works in such cut and dry terms. Highfalutin jargon and endless procedural bureaucracy render the judicial process intimidating and isolating for the very citizens it’s supposed to help. With Dark Waters, the rare biopic that refuses to embrace climactic closure, he elides sentimental and rousing conventions one would associate with courtroom epics. – Glenn H. (full review)
Where to Stream: Amazon Prime
Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel (Maya Duverdier, Amílie Van Elmbt)
Watch an exclusive clip above.
The Chelsea Hotel has a storied history of artistry, creativity, and death. Coming to fame as a place for bohemians to find cheap rent, it grew in notoriety with the deaths of writer Dylan Thomas and Nancy Spungen, a staple in 1970s New York punk. Various poets and musicians littered the halls of the hotel, given a renaissance when Patti Smith’s Just Kids became a must-read. Directors Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier’s documentary explores a specific part of the hotel’s history––the last 10 years of its existence marred by a construction project that has lasted throughout that duration, an attempt by new owners to modernize the spaces that were home to not-yet-famous artists. Van Elmbt and Duverdier focus on the ghosts of this place, projecting old videos of past tenants onto the bare, cracked walls of each half-finished apartment. The feeling of this place, one deserving of reverence according to the filmmakers, has changed; it’s been stripped of what made it special. – Michael F. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
House of Gucci (Ridley Scott)
Upon sitting down to write about House of Gucci, I thought I’d open with a quote. There had to have been some line, however peripheral, that stuck. That wasn’t the case. How about a moment that encapsulates its 157 minutes? It has the components necessary to dive into its artifice, at least in theory. There’s the grandeur, and there are the more hyperbolic aspects that match whatever people loosely toss the term “camp” at. Alas, nothing on that front dug its heels into me either. Instead all I asked was why this thing is so hard to latch onto. – Matt C. (full review)
Where to Stream: Amazon Prime
Last Night in Soho (Edgar Wright)
Can someone get Edgar Wright a DJ residency? Or a prime-time (or drive-time) radio slot. Few working directors are so passionate and eager to play the tunes, to fill the audio mix of their films with their voluminous record collection. In the immensely entertaining Last Night in Soho, he associates and recalls––especially if you come from or reside in the UK––the Britpop era; that time in the mid-90s where British pop music (not forgetting the Spice Girls along with Oasis and Blur) was commercially triumphant, when it wore its British identity on its sleeve in ways that ranged from prideful to nostalgic to necrophiliac (the latter word as music journalist Scott Plagenhoef described it). Also vital to recall are the overlapping cross-currents of the Euro 96 football tournament (where the “It’s Coming Home” terrace anthem and meme derives from) and Tony Blair’s controversial rebranding of the UK Labour Party. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: HBO Max
Moon, 66 Questions (Jacqueline Lentzou)
A selection at Berlinale and New Directors/New Films, Jacqueline Lentzou’s acclaimed Greek drama Moon, 66 Questions is now arriving this month. David Katz said in his ND/NF review, “The film is at once a familiar tale of parent-child estrangement and rapprochement, but also a formal experiment in finding a fresher cinematic language to probe these sensitive issues. Like Jane Schoenbrun’s internet odyssey We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, it seems unusually attuned to the odd relationship between technology and loneliness, and the millennial generation’s compulsive need to self-document and live online. Linked to this is the appeal of the irrational: horror folk-myths for Schoenbrun, whilst Lentzou and her protagonist Artemis are drawn to occult energies to soothe real-life family trauma.”
Where to Stream: VOD
Neptune Frost (Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman)
Neptune Frost—the directorial debut from poet, rapper, actor, performer Saul Williams (co-helmed with Anisia Uzeyman)—exists in a state of singularity, teetering between present and future. Set in a makeshift village in Rwanda and featuring musical elements composed by Williams, the drama looks at technology, capitalism, and the big machine, and raises a middle finger by promoting protest, gender fluidity, and cosmic connection. Repetition becomes an anthem as Williams’ characters, a coltan miner and intersex runaway, find one another through shared dreams. It’s full of anger, passion, love, and a collective desire to impact the world and those that run it from high places. – Michael F. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophüls)
One of the most monumental documentaries in cinema history, Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow and the Pity has been restored and has arrived with new subtitles on OVID.tv. Initially banned from its intended television premiere back in 1969, the two-part feature takes a staggeringly intimate look at the Nazi occupation in France, specifically in the area of Clermont-Ferrand. As we hear harrowing tales of first-hand accounts some 25 years later, Ophüls keys on the intricacies of how the fascist regime stripped away humanity in some cases bit by bit and, in others, overnight. As time passes and the past gets relegated to headlines and history books, The Sorrow and the Pity is a startingly confrontational work unpacking the human toll of the Holocaust hearing directly from those that were spared. Alongside other films from the director, OVID.tv is also featuring a conversation between Ophüls and Jean-Luc Godard.
Where to Stream: OVID.tv
This Much I Know to Be True (Andrew Dominik)
If you missed your recent one-night-only chance to theatrically experience Andrew Dominik’s reunion with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, take heed: MUBI has now released This Much I Know To Be True, which captures performances from their past two studio albums, Ghosteen and Carnage, this week. Filmed in spring 2021 ahead of their UK tour, we see the two, accompanied by singers and string quartet, as they nurture each song into existence. The film features a special appearance by close friend and long-term collaborator, Marianne Faithfull. Shot in color by cinematographer Robbie Ryan, it marks a follow-up to One More Time with Feeling, which will also be available on MUBI starting next month.
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Vortex (Gaspar Noé)
Stories from multiple perspectives have been onscreen at least since Rashomon, but even the great Akira Kurosawa might have found something to like in the new Gaspar Noé. The agent provocateur returns to remind us that death is inevitable and rarely dignified. His newest film is Vortex and it takes place in Paris, specifically the apartment of a married couple on the final furlongs of life. It opens on the pair enjoying an evening on the balcony: “life is a dream,” the wife says; to which the husband responds, “a dream within a dream,” quoting Poe; then a clip of Françoise Hardy (“I’m one foot in the grave,” she sings) over a black and white image of a wilting rose. The mind wanders to Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuel Riva in Amour, another story of wilting roses in the French capitol. (For once, though, Haneke looks the sentimentalist.) – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
You Will Die at Twenty (Amjad Abu Alala)
Set in a remote Sudanese village where religion and prophecy are valuable currencies, You Will Die at Twenty beautifully examines misguided notions of faith. After giving birth to her first baby, Sakina (Islam Mubarak) visits the local Sheikh for a formal blessing. Instead of hearing promising words about the child’s bright future, she receives a dire omen: the boy will die on his 20th birthday. – Glenn H. (full review)
Where to Stream: Film Movement Plus
Also New to Streaming
Amazon Prime
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
HBO Max
Bringing Out the Dead
The Counselor
Crossing Delancey
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Night Moves
Punch-Drunk Love
MUBI (free for 30 days)
The Wild Goose Lake
Little Girl
Goldie
Towards Tenderness
Mother Joan of the Angels
On the Job
Netflix
Boogie Nights
Catch Me If You Can
Leave No Trace
Se7en
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Tubi
A Matter of Life and Death
All That Jazz
Blow Out
Blue Velvet
Last Tango in Paris
Lean on Pete
The Matrix Trilogy
The Mosquito Coast
Out of Sight
Orlando
Thief