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.
American Fiction (Cord Jefferson)
Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is in a rut. He’s still trying to get a publisher to accept his latest book in a market that doesn’t exactly embrace his erudite style. His gig as a college professor lecturing to students that are too “goddamn delicate” to embrace thorny topics of race has him ostracized from colleagues. He’s estranged from family, all of whom are juggling their own issues––health problems, divorce, the financial strain that comes with both. When Monk concocts an elaborate joke to get more fame and acceptance, it’s taken shocking seriously, setting off a series of misadventures exploring how white America is more willing to accept the most reductive, pandering stories of Black trauma versus something that rings holistically authentic. With American Fiction, Cord Jefferson––who has worked on series such as Succession and 2019’s Watchmen––has crafted a directorial debut of biting satire but one that smartly stays grounded in the perspective of Monk’s journey. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Cat Person (Susanna Fogel)
The talk of the internet in late 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker story about a date gone horribly awry lit a short-lived fire of discourse surrounding gender and power dynamics. About five years later does the big-screen adaptation arrive, and while it expands details of the original text in a few compelling ways, its new third-act addition calamitously renders the whole experience a pointless, heavy-handed, misjudged exercise that relies heavier on horror tropes than any sense of humanity. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Cobweb (Kim Jee-woon)
With Cobweb, South Korean genre stalwart Kim Jee-woon falls back on that old piece of received wisdom: “movie people, ain’t they crazy?” When in self-satirizing mode, it’s uncanny how often filmmakers will depict their industry and their working environment as a barely held-together farrago; if this were accurate, how many movies would actually be completed? But also premiering at Cannes this May was Sean Price Williams and Nick Pinkerton’s The Sweet East, which reversed this trend slightly by portraying its two filmmaker characters, played by Jeremy O. Harris and Ayo Edebiri, as eerily perfect professionals not lacking for sharky opportunism. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Double Blind (Sophie Calle and Greg Shepherd)
For her first foray into video, French artist Sophie Calle and her then-lover Greg Shepard filmed their turbulent road-trip across the United States with a pair of camcorders. The footage is paired with a voice-over consisting of each artists’ private reflections on the state of their relationship. Their clashing accounts from the trip produce a humorous and heart-rending record that challenges the relationship between fiction and reality, reinforcing Calle’s notion that “everything is fiction, in a way.”
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
The End We Start From (Mahalia Belo)
The End We Start From, the debut feature from acclaimed television director Mahalia Belo, offers all the standard elements of a drama centered on a near-apocalyptic event. Early in the film, unrelenting rain pounds London, the power goes out, and water eventually trickles under the door of an unnamed pregnant woman played by Jodie Comer. She is alone in the house, tending to herself while her husband is out-of-town. Soon that trickle blasts the front door off its hinges, and before we know it she is in labor at the hospital. These scenes in the outside world are appropriately chaotic––and feel like sequences audiences have seen many, many times before. – Christopher S. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Four by Dan Sallitt
Words rarely suffice to describe the films of Dan Sallitt; fortuitous that they can do all the talking. Between 1998 and 2019, Sallitt wrote and directed four of modern American cinema’s more distinct characters and performances: quiet and stilted only because they’re nearly bursting at the seams of emotional realization that, if it comes, never does for the sake of pat narrative effect. Metrograph at Home are now making them available in a package that lets the films exist individually and as part of a collective. If I can’t guarantee you’ll love (or even like) them, I can promise nothing similar is within arm’s reach. (Also––shameless plug––extra points if you spot my two appearances in Fourteen.) – Nick N.
Where to Stream: Metrograph at Home
Ghostwritten (Thomas Matthews)
From Adaptation to Barton Fink, the topic of writer’s block is, of course, nothing new in the realm of cinema, but Thomas Matthews’ Ghostwritten goes to impressive lengths to immerse the audience in the mind of said writer. Following one-hit-wonder novelist Guy Laury (Jay Duplass) taking part in a winter residency attempting to crack his next project, the film’s jagged, (mostly) black-and-white aesthetic courtesy of cinematographer Daryl Pittman is its greatest strength. As the script fumbles to find much new to say about creative frustrations as Guy’s journey gets stranger, there’s the sense the experience would be more impactful as a mostly wordless one, relying solely on its admirable form.
Where Stream: VOD
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (André Øvredal)
Reflecting on the making of his debut feature Shivers, David Cronenberg once remarked that he figured his vision for an ultra-modern horror film exploring current anxieties would be commercially unviable due to the genre being primarily associated with the gothic castle settings of the Universal and Hammer pictures of the sort. Well, now in an age where the genre is nothing if not modern explorations of the age of smartphones, Trump’s presidency, generational trauma, pandemic-inspired doomerism, etc., the gothic seems highly unique. So one partly wants to welcome André Øvredal’s maybe-out-of-touch The Last Voyage of the Demeter, based on a lone chapter from Bram Stoker’s vampire urtext, yet there’s a modern anxiety at play here too: the ubiquity of intellectual property. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: Paramount+ with Showtime
Scarlet (Pietro Marcello)
In his previous film Martin Eden, and now with Scarlet, Pietro Marcello has found a novel way to depict artistic striving, closely tying it with the concept of labor. It’s also something that runs through Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, about the poetry-penning bus driver of the same name: both filmmakers have helped demystify our idea of the artist as a potential “great man of history” and the deification often accorded them. The would-be literary maven of Martin Eden and two artist-craftsmen of Scarlet are engaged instead in a noble struggle, a bit like the eternal workers’ struggle of Marcello’s other chief interest: that of leftist political thought. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: Kino Film Collection
Suncoast (Laura Chinn)
Floridian residents of a certain age viscerally remember the name Terri Schiavo. She was a woman in a vegetative state who became the center of a national right-to-die debate when her husband petitioned against her parents to remove her feeding tube. Filmmaker Laura Chinn had a unique experience of the case, which took place in her hometown of Clearwater: her brother shared a hospice center with Schiavo in the mid-aughts as the case reached its divisive climax. That’s the inspiration for her debut feature Suncoast, which she wrote and directed. Set at the same time and place, the film is a dramedy that wears its messy little heart on its sleeve. Beautifully shot and acted, it refuses to take sides in one of the most controversial modern debates, and is all the better for it. – Lena W. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Youth Without Youth (Francis Ford Coppola)
Anticipation for Megalopolis is so high you’d think Francis Ford Coppola hasn’t made a movie since Dracula. That’s roughly the latest appreciation of his cinema goes in the public eye, and though I won’t pretend his recent-ish digital trilogy––Youth Without Youth, Tetro, and Twixt, all debuted between 2007 and 2011––is nearly so approachable as his ’70s classics or ’90s crowdpleasers, they’re also, to a T, the sui generis odd object increasingly larger swaths of cinephilia not only pore over but elevate above a canonized masterwork. His decades-in-the-making epic arriving soon and Youth coming to the Criterion Channel marks high time: the latter still looks like nothing else, and its tale of a genius attempting to undo the forces of time might well and truly presage what’s to come. If it doesn’t, not a worry––Youth can endure all the more as a standout in this great American filmography. – Nick N.
Where to Steam: The Criterion Channel
Also New to Streaming
Hulu
Beloved
Prime Video
Strays
VOD
The Book of Clarence
I.S.S.