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.
Anora (Sean Baker)
Sean Baker’s Anora expands his filmmaking vision, pushing the writer-director-editor’s fifth consecutive story on sex workers into a higher plane of awards and commercial success. It’s a romantic comedy, a madcap dash around New York City, a movie ruminating on loss, love, and class disparity. Baker aims to put audiences through a ringer of emotional swings, ending with a desolation that’s been building in the background, easier to spot once the tinsel’s shimmer fades. With a true star-making performance from Mikey Madison and a deep bench of supporting actors, Anora whirls until suddenly it doesn’t, and all that’s left is earned, resonant silence from both its characters and audience. – Michael F.
Where to Stream: VOD
Barbie (Greta Gerwig)
Gerwig is undoubtedly doing the thing: making Barbieland a hyper-stylized reality full of musical numbers, unique props, and arcane lore. The world she’s built for her Barbies, under either government system, is really funny, dense with jokes and asides and winks towards the brand’s long, complicated history. It’s a relief to watch a big-budget movie this summer that spent its money on a unique visual language. There’s not just one dream house, but a whole cul-de-sac of dream houses. The hills are alive with the sound of Barbie! At its sharpest, Gerwig and Baumbach’s script harken back to the former’s work in coming-of-age comedies––Frances Ha, Mistress America, even Lady Bird. Gosling gets the majority of the laugh lines, Ken’s men’s-rights awakening pushing his limited brain capacity to its very limit as he learns how to oppress. – Fran H. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Beau Is Afraid (Joaquin Phoenix)
Ari Aster’s brazenly original three-hour odyssey Beau Is Afraid is, refreshingly, the kind of film where it seems no notes were given––or at least the director had the creative control to reject them. Jumping from some of the most brilliant dark comedy in cinema as of late to a boldly conceived existential journey to an emotionally rife reckoning with mother issues, this Charlie Kaufman-esque journey of the mind packs in quite a lot. Even at its most unwieldy, Aster’s film is continued proof that Joaquin Phoenix––brilliant here, at the center of every scene––is the rare breed of actor seeking new challenges with each performance. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Candy Mountain (Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer)
MoMA’s Bulle Ogier retrospective was occasion upon occasion for discovery, and even then it was great fortune to encounter Candy Mountain, a 1987 road picture directed by legendary photographer Robert Frank and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer (Two-Lane Blacktop, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) starring Kevin J. O’Connor, Tom Waits, Joe Strummer, and Dr. John, with the legendary French actress in a small, pivotal supporting role. Replete with cold, pale colors and a thoroughly comfortable vibe, it’s also, from the 2024’s vantage, more than a little melancholy for introducing sequestered communities that very likely don’t exist today. – Nick N.
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Chasing Chasing Amy (Sav Rodgers)
Watch an exclusive clip above.
With the unfortunate history of portrayals of many marginalized communities, the first films to kick open the door to mainstream representation were often made outside of a community, resulting in work that is deemed problematic in today’s environment. Chasing Amy being one such example: though the third film from Kevin Smith met some controversy, it did not have picket lines that his fourth, Dogma, would invite. For Sav Rodgers, a kid growing up in Kanas who adored Ben Affleck, Chasing Amy became a gateway into understanding themselves and, ultimately, who they wanted to become. In his highly personal feature film debut, the trans filmmaker expands upon his viral TED talk, unpacking multiple problems with Chasing Amy and the ’90s independent film scene. It was a time of gatekeepers that often, intentionally or not, suppressed mainstream LGBTQ films made from within the community, bankrolling and elevating voices like Kevin Smith––in his sheer provocation, a boy from the Jersey shore who may have unknowingly opened the door for pan and bisexual representation with his first feature Clerks. – John F. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Cuckoo (Tilman Singer)
Hunter Schafer is a very good actress. This probably won’t be news to anyone who watched even the first episode of Euphoria, where her aching vulnerability seemed to swallow the scenery whole. Fresh from appearing in the latest Hunger Games, the actress takes her first leading role in Cuckoo, a supernatural horror that doesn’t feel pushed to explain itself, offering a fun mashup of older, less-well-heeled filmmaking tropes. There is a nicely hammy turn from Dan Stevens and one finely tuned homage, but in Schafer it holds an ace: nailing the physical comedy and stretching her emotive face to the limit, the film is all hers. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood)
Dumped by Warner Bros. into a handful of theaters, Juror #2 is one of Clint Eastwood’s most confident works. In a testament to the filmmaking style of his mentor Don Siegel, Eastwood presents a story with no flab or fat, nothing but narrative anchored by no-nonsense performances. Its insoluble moral conundrum––what if all the choices you have are bad ones?––places it among the year’s most complex releases. – Daniel E.
Where to Stream: Max
La Salamandre (Alain Tanner)
This holiday season, Le Cinéma Club presents Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner’s rarely seen and newly restored gem LA SALAMANDRE. Two struggling writers — the wry journalist Pierre (Jean Luc-Bideau, Sorcerer) and sweet-tempered novelist Paul (Jacques Denis, I…For Icarus) — are hired to write a screenplay about a crime involving the beautiful and quixotic Rosemonde (Bulle Ogier, Out 1), who may or may not have shot her uncle.
Where to Steam: Le Cinéma Club
Nepotism, Baby! (Tij D’oyen)
A standout from this year’s Tribeca, Nepotism, Baby! shotgun-sprays get-famous-quick schemes, our ever-expanding desensitizations to atrocity, “self-hatred” that’s just narcissism wearing meeker clothes, and those who’d spit out a silver spoon. The face of these targets is Betsey Brown––her skill for playing insecurity (and its attendant mania) gives D’oyen’s project a discomfiting humanity, down to its no-escape end credits.
Where to Stream: Vimeo
Separated (Errol Morris)
Returning just a year after his John le Carré documentary The Pigeon Tunnel, Errol Morris’ latest work is a heartbreaking, infuriating look at the Trump administration’s policy to sever families apart at the U.S.-Mexican border. Featuring startling, informative interviews with those on the inside and less-successful reenactments, Separated doesn’t have the polish of the director’s finest work, but it doesn’t need to. Made in collaboration with MSNBC, this is a piece designed to reach the widest audience possible to expose the horrors happening on our own soil, and ones that will no doubt get worse in the coming months as evil forces return to govern the country. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: VOD
Small Things Like These (Tim Mielants)
Anyone looking to debate the limits of progress should cast an eye on 1980s Ireland. As a generation born in revolution and civil war moved from farms to towns, a middle class emerged. Some people had televisions; if they were good, some of their kids had Levi’s jeans. As certain things loosened, the Catholic church’s grip on most aspects of Irish life seemed to only grow tighter. Between 1922 and 1996, and aided by a callow state, the church was responsible for imprisoning tens of thousands of women (mostly young single mothers who couldn’t afford the child) into what was essentially indentured servitude. In these “laundries,” women worked seven days a week and weren’t allowed to leave. Their babies were taken from them and sold for adoption, or worse. Around 1,600 women died. The number of babies is estimated to be in the thousands. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
Kino Film Collection
Hairdresser’s Husband
Yvonne’s Perfume
Metrograph at Home
The Image Book
Netflix
The Dead Don’t Die
Prime Video
The Creator
De Palma
VOD
28 Days Later