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.
All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh)
There are many films about the devastating effects of the AIDS crisis, but very few that grapple with the loneliness of those left behind or came of age as it began to make headlines. Through supernatural metaphor, Andrew Haigh’s latest––and best––film tackles the existential displacement of a gay man (Andrew Scott) fast approaching middle age, his isolation only underlined by the near-abandoned tower block in which he lives. His friends have long moved out of the city, he has to maneuver a generational divide with a new, younger romantic partner (Paul Mescal) whose adolescence was far different to his, and he feels a longing to return to his childhood and come out to the parents who died before he became fully aware of his own identity. It’s a powerful, haunting film, one whose resonance comes entirely from its queerness; a faithful adaptation of the source material likely wouldn’t trouble many best-of-the-year lists. – Alistair R.
Anyone But You (Will Gluck)
If anything, Anyone But You‘s spirit is encapsulated in having a running joke about “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield (gags involving that artist’s back catalog seeming to be the Will Gluck auteurist touch) as if the movie’s wholly bland pop soundtrack puts it above that at-least-memorable 2000s ditty. Slight self-awareness with no effort to actually do anything new is the definition of unearned arrogance. This is why it fails as a romcom: too much smarm and not enough charm. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Concrete Valley (Antoine Bourges)
Welcome to Antoine Bourges’ love letter to the Thorncliffe Park apartment complex, better known as “Arrival City”—the usual landing spot for new immigrants coming into Toronto. Titled Concrete Valley and starring a mix of professional and amateur actors blurring the line between fiction and non-fiction, Bourges’ film spends a lot of time with residents to help flesh out their motives and narrative in the form of Rashid (Hussam Douhna) and Farah (Amani Ibrahim), a Syrian couple who have already been living there for five years. The palpable tension in their marriage as he lies in bed while she readies for work reveals things haven’t been easy. There’s little warmth shared between them beyond their love for their young son (Abdullah Nadaf’s Ammar). – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Metrograph at Home
Darkroom (Aslı Baykal)
Composed of scenes in which children are either running around or experimenting with old cameras and microphones, Darkroom draws attention to how games and analog technology can re-introduce a sense of intimacy to those facing the destabilizing whiplash of displacement. This warm portrait of the kids involved in the Sirkhane Darkroom After-School Photography Workshop in Turkey—near the borders with Syria and Iraq—offers a tender appraisal of a tight-knit community in a conflict zone.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniels)
A general rule film students learn the first few weeks of their intro class is that a film teaches you how to watch it within the first five minutes. Well, most. The latest outing from Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) throws everything it’s got against the wall and, if it doesn’t stick after a minute, turns itself on its head and shoots its characters into the next parallel universe. Marvel opened up this can of worms and if there can be countless Spider-Men, why can’t Evelyn Wang, a Chinese-American laundromat owner and collector of random hobbies, also have a parallel existence she’s just starting to tap into? – John F. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
I Didn’t See You There (Reid Davenport)
The democratization of filmmaking has afforded the opportunity to see the world through perspectives one otherwise would never have the chance. Taking this approach in rather intimate, radical form, Reid Davenport’s Sundance winner I Didn’t See You There is a first-person look at the director’s everyday journey with disability. From his wheelchair, we vividly see how society is lacking in accessibility, whether it’s a stray cord on the ground someone absent-mindedly leaves in front of his apartment or the way an airport attendant oversteps their boundaries in asking questions about how to assist. While putting the viewer directly in his perspective, Davenport also adds a wealth of personality, including expressing his desire to move on from making personal films about his disability. In many ways, I Didn’t See You There feels like his definitive statement and I look forward to seeing what other stories Davenport is hoping to tell. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: VOD
Memory (Michel Franco)
Memory hands Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard (deserved winner of the Venice competition’s acting prize) gifts of roles, in a love story whose exact contours it’s tempting to keep concealed. Franco definitely operates with the element of surprise, having tricked viewers sitting down to (for instance) Sundown of his attractive leads Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s exact relationship. Chastain plays Sylvia, who works as a social worker––she bluntly puts it herself: she’s employed at an “adult daycare center”––somewhere in an outer New York borough. She keeps an ascetic, spartan life with her beloved daughter Anna (Brooke Timber), always avoiding unnecessary social contact whilst aggressively monitoring her movements. More is revealed, but Sylvia’s past as a severe alcoholic, in light of which she dedicatedly attends AA meetings (shown in the opening scene, with non-professionals filling out background roles), clearly determines current life choices. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Occupied City (Steve McQueen)
Steve McQueen’s first documentary feels more like an unedited podcast with dizzying visual accompaniment than a feature film, despite ruminating on its subject, Amsterdam under Nazi occupation, for more than four hours. It’s as if a scholar––here it’s Bianca Stigter: Dutch journalist, author, and documentarian who is married to McQueen––dumped their research on us in a monotonous marathon voiceover. The visual element––at first fascinating, eventually reduced to distraction––amounts to an Amsterdam address book, often as dry as a rolodex itself. – Luke H. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Onlookers (Kimi Takesue)
A visually compelling documentary in search of an idea, Kimi Takesue’s portrait of Laos and specifically its tourism industry is now available to stream following a theatrical release. C.J. Prince noted in his Slamdance review, “There’s plenty going on within Takesue’s latest film––all looked at with a sense of curiosity and bemusement––but in the end there’s very little to take away.” For more from the director, Metrograph is also streaming her first two features Where Are You Taking Me? and 95 and 6 to Go.
Where to Stream: Metrograph at Home
Orlando, My Political Biography (Paul B. Preciado)
Orlando, My Political Biography, Preciado’s new work––and his first behind the camera––is the latest to tackle Woolf’s text, and surely among the most original to do so. It’s structured as both a correspondence—messages from the writer to Woolf—and a series of kaleidoscopic vignettes starring trans and non-binary people. In various ways––deeply heartfelt, often funny, occasionally repetitive but never less than joyous––the performers speak about their relationship with the text through personal experiences while, in voiceover, Preciado distills a life spent grappling with the novel (both as intrepid reader and discerning academic) into a poetic and philosophical treatise, providing a robust foundation for the more earnest emotions onscreen. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Priscilla (Sofia Coppola)
After a couple of disappointments (which is to say “good” rather than great) in The Beguiled and On the Rocks, Sofia Coppola seemed, well, uninspired. Enter Priscilla Presley, who, knowing Coppola’s background––a child glued to one of the world’s most beloved men (albeit a more attentive one) and a woman who fell in love with a global rockstar (and Priscilla‘s composer, Thomas Mars)––came to Coppola with the story of her own life, telling the veteran writer-director she was the only one for the job. And boy was she right. Priscilla joins the company of Coppola’s best, further cementing her name among the greats. – Luke H.
Where to Stream: Max
The Promised Land (Nikolaj Arcel)
After his 2012 film A Royal Affair received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, Danish writer-director Nikolaj Arcel did what probably seemed logical at the time: go to Hollywood. But like many directors before him who walked that same path, the results were less than ideal––his being 2017’s disastrous Stephen King adaptation The Dark Tower. Six years later, Arcel returns to his home country and reunites with A Royal Affair star Mads Mikkelsen to make The Promised Land, a brutal, entertaining period piece and another showcase for Mikkelsen’s stone-faced magnetism. – C.J. P. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Youth (Spring) (Wang Bing)
Wang’s Youth series, set to progress through three more seasons, will be his farewell to shooting in China. Youth (Spring) documents a period of intense globalization and hyper-capitalism already well underway when he began filming nine years ago. The film stations itself down in the clothing factories of Zhili, where young people (some still teenagers) toil away for bottom-of-the-barrel wages. Although a little structurally scattershot, Youth (Spring) captures the trap laid out for its subjects, who repeatedly beg their employers for higher wages compensating for hard menial labor. The soundtrack’s constant grind of factory noise is more disturbing than any image. – Steve E.
Where to Stream: VOD
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)
In a media era increasingly shaped by immersive experiences, it’s hard to imagine another work as provocative, imaginative, and necessary as The Zone of Interest. Every Johnathan Glazer film arrives with the promise of glimpsing the artform’s creative frontier (Johnnie Burn and Mica Levi, take a bow), but the director’s first in a decade brought so much more. It was always going to stoke certain evergreen debates, but few could have expected it to hold such a mirror to our own doom-scrolling passivity. Martin Amis’ death falling within 24 hours of its Cannes premiere felt poignant. The timing of its eventual release has been another thing entirely. – Rory O.
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
Film Movement+
Still the Water and Radiance
Netflix
Melancholia
Thanksgiving
Prime Video
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
To the Wonder
VOD
Lovely, Dark, and Deep
Mean Girls
Monolith