With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.
Crestone (Marnie Ellen Hertzler)
Exploring the bohemian lives of SoundCloud rappers who find their own oasis (or perhaps are living in a mirage of one) in the middle of the Colorado desert, Crestone is a brief, but complicated look at such a way of life. With a breezy Animal Collective score guiding the rather beautiful imagery, director Marnie Ellen Hertzler is also keen on showing the failures that come with such a life off the grid. Cuisines featuring terrible-looking bologna sandwiches and ketchup-infused ramen along with donation pleas for an $80K GoFundMe with $0 pledged show this escape from society may not be the luxurious, meditative experience as promoted on the on-screen Instagram updates from those in the group. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: VOD
Days of the Bagnold Summer (Simon Bird)
Laconic and moody, a Metallica t-shirt worn like a second skin, fifteen-year-old Daniel hobbles through his pastel-colored, chintzy home in a stretch of British suburbia like a black sheep in a Wes Anderson hallucination. He’s a few days away before his first-ever trip to the States, where his father moved with a new woman, with whom he expects his second child. A summer spent basking in the Florida sun is a far more alluring prospect than frittering it away with his best friend Ky and awkward, lonely mother Sue, but an intercontinental phone call is all it takes to make dreams crumble. As Daniel’s father tells his son that, regretfully, the trip is canceled, Sue is left to take up the pieces. Days of the Bagnold Summer, Simon Bird’s feature debut, is a chronicle of a failed journey, and of the far more intricate, tortuous one mother and son embark in the weeks that follow. It’s a coming of age tale where the road to maturity unfolds as a twofold quest, an opening up to the world as much as to one another. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Stream: Virtual Cinemas, VOD
Ham on Rye (Tyler Taormina)
Tyler Taormina’s singularly woozy debut about a group of teens making their way toward some cryptic rite of passage spins the high-school genre like a top. Purposefully devoid of clarifying exposition, it builds narrative mythology out of the dual uncertainty and excitement felt by young people making their initial crossing into adulthood. The result is a mysterious mash of sinister possibilities and forlorn melancholy that lingers like the smoky air so prominent in its central celebratory sequence inside a portal-like sandwich shop. – Glenn H.
Where to Stream: Amazon Prime
I Care A Lot (J Blakeson)
It’s the kind of grift that would make ‘Slippin'” Jimmy McGill proud. Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike) calls up her friend Dr. Amos (Alicia Witt) to get a line on any prospective dementia patients with good insurance and ample nest eggs that have come through her office. She gets her partner (professionally and romantically) Fran (Eiza González) to run a background check with help from police contacts and calls an emergency trial with Judge Lomax (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) if their assumptions can be corroborated. The senior man or woman doesn’t have to attend. His or her lawyer doesn’t have to be contacted. All Marla has to do is convince Lomax he/she can no longer look after him/herself and she wins control over everything: finances, property, and visitation. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Jumbo (Zoé Wittock)
“Another day working as the nighttime janitor at the tiny French amusement park. Everyone keeps asking me if they can fuck the Tilt-A-Whirl ride. Buddy, they won’t even let me fuck it.” This line isn’t precisely in the script, but as if adapted from the mind of dril, the new drama Jumbo follows Jeanne (Portrait of a Lady on Fire star Noémie Merlant) and her intense, erotic, and heartfelt relationship with the new attraction at the theme park she works at. A five-armed spectacle of excitement and thrills, the ride is given some loosely sketched-out psychology in the form of fantastical neon light responses and electronic, almost alien humming as the two converse, but the story’s perspective is tied solely with Jeanne. As intriguing a narrative set-up as this might be, Zoé Wittock’s feature debut sways too emotionally simplistic and cookie-cooker in structure to rouse up much passion. Simply put, one wonders what kind of visceral, outré energy a director like David Cronenberg or Claire Denis could have brought to such material. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Virtual Cinemas
Monsoon (Hong Khaou)
Monsoon, the latest film from director Hong Khaou, grapples with lost identity, being trapped between two worlds and cultures. Khaou’s previous work Lilting is a character study about a gay man trying to connect with the Chinese mother of his dead partner in order to cope with his grief. Their communication takes place without language as neither can speak the other’s, their bonding relayed through the translations of others but primarily through each other’s physical presence. They engage by acting around one another, simply existing in spaces that their lost loved one is not there to wander through. She did not know her son was gay as he never had the chance to celebrate with her while his lover was alive. Lilting attempted to blend the mutual cultural understanding with a story of untimely loss and living as a queer person in a traditionally heteronormative environment. – Logan K. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Monster Hunter (Paul W.S. Anderson)
Three years after the self-proclaimed final chapter in their long-running Resident Evil saga, B-movie power couple Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich are back to the lucrative well of Capcom video game adaptations for Monster Hunter, another hyperkinetic CGI spectacular from the director who inspired the term “vulgar auteurism.” Those who celebrate the contrived nonsense of Anderson’s original screenplays as postmodern anti-art manifestos will be over the moon at this one: We begin with a platoon of all-American UN troops (the film is financed by, among others, China’s Tencent Pictures) led by one scrappy badass babe (Jovovich) scouring the wide-open desert of… somewhere, in search of the ominously disappeared Bravo Team. (Bravo Team, as any movie & game junkie knows, rarely fares well.) – Eli F. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Nomadland (Chloé Zhao)
Set in the aftermath of the Great Recession, and against the majestic expanse of the American West, Nomadland affirms Chloé Zhao’s status as a vital contemporary filmmaker. Loosely using Jessica Bruder’s 2017 non-fiction novel as inspiration, she teams with star-producer Frances McDormand to capture a compelling and empathetic portrait of a nomadic lifestyle. Intimate like The Rider, her second feature, but broader in scope, Zhao’s film collages McDormand’s sensitive and restless performance with real nomads, shedding beautiful light on an elderly, transient, and discarded population. – Jake K.
Where to Stream: Hulu
Sin (Andrei Konchalovsky)
Like Andrei Rublev (1969), a somber epic of Russia’s greatest icon painter which Konchalovsky co-wrote with writer-director Tarkovsky, Sin follows an artist who’s never shown painting–or sculpting, for that matter. It unfurls as a study of a man struggling to reach the sublime while navigating a world riddled with conflict and misery. Nothing close to the violence that surfaced in Andrei Rublev, to be sure: in Sin, the conflict pivots by and large on the feuds between the Della Rovere and Medici families, rival clans who fought over Rome and Michelangelo’s loyalty. But there is also a deep spiritual conflict undergirding the drama, of a man struggling to find redemption through art, haunted by fame, deadlines, and moral failings. Continue reading Leonardo Goi’s interview.
Where to Stream: Virtual Cinemas
Supernova (Harry Macqueen)
Death feels like an inevitability in the road trip the English director depicts here, whether that is the physical reality of no longer being alive or gradually losing all the memories that define one’s personhood. Centered on Sam (Colin Firth) and Tusker (Stanley Tucci), we follow their journey through the English countryside en route to a piano recital that Sam has been invited to perform at. Over the course of their road trip in an old RV, they celebrate their years of love together, reunite with family members for a party and, most importantly, confront the inescapable reality of Tusker’s dementia getting worse. – Logan K. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Test Pattern (Shatara Michelle Ford)
Every new romance begins with the fantasy of everlasting happiness. Film as an art form is adept at capturing the intensity of euphoric early moments shared between two love-struck people discovering each other for the first time. Audiences know this is merely a precursor to the reality and heartbreak that comes next, but we still flock to love stories nevertheless. Shatara Michelle Ford’s Test Pattern is one of the most unique and sobering deconstructions of this classic construct. The cutesy first act finds corporate manager Renesha (Brittany T. Hall) falling in love with hipster tattoo artist Evan (Will Brill) after they meet-cute at a bar one night. While their early conversations are stilted and groggy, the two are drawn to each other in ways that are not entirely explainable. Honeymoon phases rarely make a lick of sense. – Glenn H. (full review)
Where to Stream: Virtual Cinemas
To the Wonder (Terrence Malick)
A Terrence Malick film is an event, no matter the time or the subject, but it is undeniable that there’s something markedly different and all-together special about To the Wonder. Perhaps it is Malick’s transition from period pieces into the modern world, or the tight focus on people whose only extraordinary circumstance is their search for love. Either way––and for whatever reason––Malick has never felt more sentimental or raw than he does in this film. There is a reality to this film that even his other masterpieces shied from, and his unflinching gaze at the way in which love ebbs, flows, grows, and evolves lays bare the romantic lies in almost every other film ever made. This is to say nothing of his trademark visual style, which makes even bland suburbs and fast food restaurants looks hauntingly lovely. To the Wonder confused people when it first came out, but, with time and understanding, regard for this film can and does grow stronger. – Brian R.
Where to Stream: Amazon Prime
Also New to Streaming
The Criterion Channel
Short Films by Akosua Adoma Owusu
After the Curfew
Three Short Films by Ramin Bahrani
Park Lanes
Lovers on the Run
Disney+
MUBI
All the Dead Ones
A Brutal Game
No No Sleep
Walker
Blue Valentine
Only God Forgives
Zebraman
VOD
Blithe Spirit (Ruby in Paradise
Silk Road (The Violent Heart
Virtual Cinemas