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.
Astrakan (David Depesseville)
Astrakhan fur is unique: dark, beautiful, and stripped exclusively from newborn lambs, even ones killed in their mother’s womb. (Stella McCarthy once said it’s like wearing a fetus.) That ruthlessness—a sense of lost innocence; blood sacrifice—runs deep in Astrakan, a new film from France and one of the better in Locarno this year; and if that title isn’t enough to give pause, plenty else in the opening exchanges will. The first act is a procession of flags, both red and false: at the opening the protagonist, Samuel, lightly goads a snake in the reptile house of a zoo; moments later a rabbit is hung and skinned in his kitchen with all the ceremony of a boiled kettle; queasiest of all, an older lad is seen walking toward the house cradling berries in his shirt, just enough that the lip of his underwear and his midriff are left strikingly visible. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor)
A recent episode of Amazon’s The Boys showed a superhero shrink to the size of an uncooked grain of rice and walk into the shaft of his lover’s penis. The episode’s creators visualized this orifice as a dark cavern, all wet and leaky, but now we have the real thing––if still wet and leaky, now throbbing with awkward and unmistakable life. This astonishing image, one of many in De Humani Corporis Fabrica, is brought to us courtesy Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, a filmmaking duet who, almost a decade on from their breakout masterpiece Leviathan, continue giving viewers new and vital ways of seeing the world. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Domino (Brian De Palma)
The latest from Brian De Palma hits film culture not unlike a moody son trudging to their graduation party at a parent’s behest, a master of big-screen compositions relegated to VOD for those who bother plunking down. That tussle between pedigree of talent and nature of distribution foretells the chaos within: at one moment lit like a Home Depot model living room–a fault I’m more willing to chalk up to incomplete post-production, less likely to blame on Pedro Almodóvar’s longtime DP José Luis Alcaine–the next photographed and cut as if an old pros’ sumptuous fuck-you to pre-vis-heavy and coverage-obsessed action-filmmaking climate, the next maybe just an assembly of whatever master shots the team could scrounge together during those 30 production days. To these eyes it’s a chaotic joy; nearly malicious, deeply serious about the wounds of contemporary terrorism, and smart enough to pull off a mocking of the circumstances around those fighting it. – Nick N. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Dry Ground Burning (Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós)
In the late 1950s newly elected President of Brazil Juscelino Kubitscheck ordered the country’s capital be moved from Rio de Janeiro toward a more central location. Thus began Brasilia, a modernist utopia built in the span of a few years and designed to unite people from all walks of life. Except reality didn’t quite live up to that dream. The thousands of workers who helped build the new capital—and the thousands of migrants who sought to move in—ended up segregated in satellite cities the government created to keep Brasilia safe from unwanted “invaders.” Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós’ explosive Dry Ground Burning is a portrait of one such places, Ceilândia, and an engrossing homage to a handful of people stranded in its crime-ridden slum of Sol Nascente: a vast canvas, in turns wistful and furious, of what life in Bolsonaro’s Brazil amounts to for those living on the periphery of the periphery. Few titles unveiled at this year’s Berlinale— where Dry Ground Burning screened in the Forum section—will register quite as timely; fewer still manage to deal with topics this sensitive without feeling exploitative. A paean to the marginalized that refuses to treat them as victims and instead grants them agency and dignity, this is an unsettling docu-fiction hybrid, a moving and invigorating watch. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Hypnotic (Robert Rodriguez)
This is probably an odd thing to say, but whenever watching a modern potboiler I find myself asking, “What would Bertrand Tavernier think?” The kind of French cineaste that found themselves most at home in the company of the disposable American crime film, the esteemed director could wax poetic on the most disreputable of pictures. If you squint during Hypnotic––a collaboration between Robert Rodriguez and Ben Affleck that’s likely been cooking since they first met at a 1997 Miramax holiday party––you can see faint traces of a classic noir like Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool, or something of such ilk. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: Peacock
I Have Electric Dreams (Valentina Maurel)
Nothing catches fire in Valentina Maurel’s I Have Electric Dreams, but the atmosphere is so inflammable, the air so taut, everything could ignite at any moment. True to its title, this cumulatively harrowing tale of a 16-year-old girl and her estranged, anger-prone father feels like it’s been yanked out of an electric storm. Even the frames carry a kind of static, throbbing in-sync with parent and child as they crash into each other only to drift away and collide again, each confrontation more seismic than the others. To be watching Maurel’s feature debut is to bear witness to a self-destructive waltz; there are scenes of almost unbearable sadness and loneliness, but Dreams is no dirge, and all dread the film accrues only makes its closing catharsis so much more affecting. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (James Mangold)
If you went to the movies in 1989 you might have heard Indiana Jones growl the line “it belongs in a museum.” You’ll hear him say it again in The Dial of Destiny (premiering this week at a notably geriatric Cannes Film Festival) but you won’t get his enemy’s timely response: “So do you.” Harrison Ford was 49 years old back then, in a film called The Last Crusade––which it, of course, was not. Ford returned as Jones in 2008 for Steven Spielberg’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and now, miraculously, once again for director James Mangold’s first swing at the franchise: an effects-drenched, largely amiable swan song for the whip-cracking explorer that never really lives up to its hero’s adventurous spirit. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to 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: VOD
Perpetrator (Jennifer Reeder)
Just when you thought filmmakers and creators had exhausted everything worth saying in American high school-set comedies and thrillers, along comes Chicago-based independent Jennifer Reeder, who seems devoted to this subgenre as if by a monastic oath. The high school movie––with its classic, standby imagery of jocks, lockers, and losers––seems to have passed through three main cycles in the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s, and in spite of its absolute specificity to the US education system, has found itself weirdly comprehensible and translatable in many different cultures. With Ghost World a notable exception, it’s also never felt especially feminist, which is what makes Reeder’s perspective fresh and novel. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: Shudder, AMC+
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (Jeff Rowe)
Four teenage boys run through the streets of New York City. They go to their local bodega, pick up pizzas, watch a movie in the park, and head back home later than their expected curfew. Except: they’re mutant turtles grown to human-size! The idea of the teenage turtles has always been absurd in concept. With constant attempts to reboot it for younger audiences, the franchise exists in a state of fluctuated success. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem should bring the turtles back into the mainstream, as director Jeff Rowe takes the four brothers throughout multiple boroughs on a mission to save the humans that have dismissed them. – Michael F. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Women Talking (Sarah Polley)
With Women Talking, Sarah Polley adapts Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel in a way that feels like a response to the last several years. The book, which concerns women in a Mennonite colony deciding whether to leave their community and the men who spent years assaulting and raping them, published after the downfall of Harvey Weinstein and the formation of the #MeToo movement, which made its subject and themes reverberate around topics that were, and still are, at the forefront of media and public discourse. Polley leans hard into the bigger ideas, making her film less of a chamber piece and more a fumbled commentary on where we are now. Schematic in its intent and pedestrian in its execution, Women Talking is a well-meaning drama that’s obvious in all the wrong ways. – C.J. P. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
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The Criterion Channel
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The Blue Caftan
Directed by Allan Dwan
Hal Hartley: A Retrospective
High School Horror
Hopping Vampires of Hong Kong
Noir by Gaslight
MUBI (free for 30 days)
The films of Pedro Almodóvar
Robin Hood
Orchestra Rehearsal
The Big Heat
Our Idiot Brother
Macbeth
The Passenger
Netflix
Arrival
Cry Macho
The Deer Hunter
Public Enemies
Prime Video
Children of Men
Memento
Observe & Report
Red Eye
The Truman Show
VOD
The Elephant 6 Recording Company
Madeleine Collins
Millie Lies Low
The Pod Generation