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.
AIR (Ben Affleck)
Sonny Vaccaro knows his basketball. As played with reliable conviction by Matt Damon, the head scout in Nike’s dwindling hoops division has a keen eye for the next great players, attending high school all-star tournaments around the country and scanning for potential endorsements. But Sonny is also a gambler, and on the tail end of his trips he jets over to Las Vegas to lock in a couple parlays, betting on NBA money lines and spreads before throwing all his winnings away at the craps table a minute later. You get the sense this has become his beleaguered ritual. At some point those basketball instincts and his penchant to go for broke will align and finally pay off. – Jake K. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Employee of the Month (Véronique Jadin)
It’s review day and everyone is laughing about what raises and bonuses they’re going to request this year. Nico (Alex Vizorek) jokes about asking for an SUV and money. Why not? It worked for someone else in the past. EcoClean Pro’s manager Patrick (Peter Van den Begin) decided to give his latest intern (Laetitia Mampaka’s Melody) a stack of papers to shred on her first day, so it’s not much of a leap to assume the books have been cooked to allow for such extravagant perks to be passed around. Except, of course, when it comes to the team’s legal expert Inès (Jasmina Douieb). She’s worked here for seventeen years, does the equivalent of five jobs, and still makes the same abysmal salary as day one. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Evil Dead Rise (Lee Cronin)
Like the latest Scream installment, Evil Dead Rise takes its horror into an urban landscape, grappling with demonic forces––e.g. motherhood––that are sometimes just as horrific as the kills in Lee Cronin’s twisted black comedy. If not without a few false notes on the dramatic side, its horror delivers all the bodily fluid you’d expect in a rousing crowd-pleaser that makes a mostly worthy follow-up to Fede Álvarez’s stylish, ultra-violent 2013 edition. That film took the franchise in a new, perhaps too-cruel direction from Rami’s more playful B-movie style. The latest installment reframes its humor as much darker, with a take on caregiving and the evil mother in the vein of Carrie. Cronin elevates the material into something newer and edgier than Rami’s campy, handmade-looking originals. Perhaps there’s no going back once studios are involved, and Evil Dead Rise’s production design by Nick Bassett is nearly as elaborate as any Oscar nominee. – John F. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Fall (Jonathan Glazer)
Before The Zone of Interest debuts at Cannes this month, Le Cinéma Club are streaming Jonathan Glazer’s legendary short inspired by Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters––a powerful film that invites audiences to project their preoccupations and interpretations.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
The Five Devils (Léa Mysius)
The most visceral films are often described as sensory experiences. But how can a visual medium translate the sensations of smell without the aid of a John Waters-style scratch-and-sniff card? This is a stylistic quandary French filmmaker Léa Mysius approaches with ease in her accomplished sophomore feature The Five Devils, an entrancing time travel drama in which the odors of the natural world give way to the memories of those who walked there before. Its mythology is deliberately freed of explanation so we may have a child’s-eye view into the timeline-bending narrative––a striking decision that is likely to leave those wanting a straightforward explainer of how it all works firmly in the cold. It’s a film that rewards fantastical curiosity, not literal inquisitiveness, using its borderline-science fiction conceit as a jumping-off point for a more intimate examination of the still-fresh wounds affecting a seemingly functional family unit. – Alistair R. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
What can one say about the career of Guy Ritchie? The guy was nearly as essential to the rejuvenation of the British film scene in the ’90s as Danny Boyle. His feature debut Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and immediate follow-up Snatch endure in the cultural parlance to this day. What followed was a series of unfortunate events. A misbegotten Swept Away remake starring then-wife Madonna. An underseen, overambitious existential gangster epic starring Jason Statham (Revolver). Then a “comeback” movie (RocknRolla) that underwhelmed. Cue a successful rescue by Robert Downey Jr. and Arthur Conan Doyle. Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films were hits that brought him back into the Hollywood fold. Nowadays the filmmaker is an elder-statesman-of-sorts: equal parts independent director and company man, he offers up an Aladdin for every Wrath of Man. – Dan M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Huesera (Michelle Garza Cervera)
According to Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women who Run with the Wolves, the “Bone Woman,” or La Huesera, “collects and preserves that which is in danger of being lost to the world.” A Mexican myth sees her scouring the mountains and riverbeds for the remains of wolves, assembling what she finds to recreate the animal as though an ivory sculpture that will eventually become reanimated, ultimately reborn as a human woman freely laughing towards the horizon. They say she provides a glimpse of the soul when all seems to have been lost, less a monster to fear in the shadows than a necessary entity reminding us of what we still have. Thus we’re not wrong to question her place in Michelle Garza Cervera’s Huesera. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Shudder
It Is Night in America (Ana Vaz)
The few people bobbing up in Ana Vaz’s It Is Night in America are anonymous ciphers, their faces scarcely (if at all) visible, protruding limbs or silhouettes pressed against the concrete. Night, Vaz’s first feature, is a caliginous foray into the animal world hidden in and around Brasilia, where humans take a backseat and the megacity stands as a skyscraper-infested jungle. The film’s protagonists are a pantheon of exiles: monkeys bolting across streets, cobras hiding in private gardens, capybaras resting on lawns, giant otters roaming water ducts. “Are animals invading our cities,” a voice wonders halfway through, “or are we occupying their habitat?” It’s a question that might as well double as a tagline, but Night has a way of stretching and expanding its focus, and its close-up portraits of the capital’s fauna swell into something else entirely. Gradually, the film becomes a story of an invasion—a study of Brazil’s rampant urbanization and the creatures it made homeless. It becomes a tale of two cities, of two kingdoms fighting in a zero-sum game. It becomes a Western. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Saint Omer (Alice Diop)
Great cinema reveals mysteries of the human condition as no court of law could. This infanticide drama examines two women through a prosecutor’s sharp, mistrusting eyes, only to conclude on a note of mercy and motherly understanding. It’s a piercingly insightful investigation of the female experience that exposes justice as an oft-simplified notion. Both lead actresses are sensational. Diop blends the observational focus and authenticity of documentaries with the fanciful touch of fiction to hypnotic effect, marking her as the year’s single most exciting newcomer in narrative filmmaking. – Zhuo-Ning Su
Where to Stream: Hulu
Sick of Myself (Krisoffer Borgli)
From Sick of Myself’s opening scene depicting an awkward birthday dinner, the power dynamic between young couple Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and Erik (Eirik Saether) is succinctly established. The latter is taking off with new magazine profiles and gallery attention every day through his seemingly lame, vaguely defined art. Compared to a partner able to afford (and furthermore flaunt) a $2,300 bottle of wine as a gift during this expensive restaurant dinner, Signe, finding herself still employed in a café, is deeply jealous. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (Davis Guggenheim)
It started with a finger twitch. Michael J. Fox remembers being in bed in 1990 and staring at his pinky moving uncontrollably. At first he thought it might be a side effect from a night of heavy drinking, or perhaps his own imagination. Eventually he’d come to realize that “the trembling was a message from the future.” Three decades later, as he sits in front of a camera rocking back and forth in his chair, Parkinson’s is no longer confined to the slight fritzing of an appendage. It has taken over Fox’s entire life––visible in his struggles to walk, to hold a toothbrush, to send text messages––yet it’s never erased (only accentuated) his restless identity. – Jake K. (full review)
Where to Stream: Apple TV+
Also New to Streaming
MUBI (free for 30 days)
The White Ribbon
Black Jack
The Age of Stone
3 Faces
Maurice
VOD
The Blue Caftan
Chop & Steele
Everything Went Fine
A Life on the Farm
The Lost King
Paint
The Wandering Earth II