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.
Bottoms (Emma Seligman)
It’s beginning to feel like South By Southwest is the Rachel Sennott Festival. After breaking out there three years ago with Shiva Baby (the movie premiered as a short in 2018 and would have again as a feature in 2020 if not for the pandemic), she made waves last year in Austin with sleeper horror hit Bodies Bodies Bodies. Now Sennott’s back with Bottoms, one of two new movies she’s headlining this week, and which adopts many characteristics of an SXSW offering: it’s gay, it’s bloody, and it’s horny. – Jake K. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Cassandro (Roger Ross Williams)
Rather than reverting to a traditional biopic structure––i.e. a greatest hits (and losses) in someone’s life––Williams and co-screenwriter David Teague open almost in media res as we meet Saúl (Gael García Bernal), a wide-eyed young man who is head over heels in love with lucha libre. He spends his days crafting costumes to wrestle in and helping his mother Yocasta (a magnificent Perla de la Rosa) who does laundry and clothes-mending for locals. Unlike her namesake from Greek mythology, Yocasta dreams of nothing but a wonderful future for her adoring son, reassuring him he will make “a man very happy someday.” – Jose S. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
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: Prime Video
Hannah Ha Ha (Jordan Tetewsky and Joshua Pikovsky)
Jordan Tetewsky and Joshua Pikovsky’s dryly humorous character study picked up the top prize at last year’s Slamdance Film Festival and now arrives to streaming after a theatrical run. Matthew Danger Lippman said in his interview that their debut is “a perfectly realized suburban dramedy, with the titular Hannah (Hannah Lee Thompson, a Baltimore-based musician) fumbling to find employment after her start-up douche brother (producer Roger Mancusi) comes to town. He’s mystified at her life, which consists mainly of hanging with her father (Avram Tetewsky, Jordan’s actual dad), watching The Twilight Zone, and working on a farm. An oddball cast of local characters round out this melancholy, lightly-satirical trip through suburban Massachusetts.”
Where to Stream: Tubi
Padre Pio (Abel Ferrara)
The film is grounded in the reality of Italian life shortly after World War I, as socialist ideas gained currency amid calls for a transformation of society and the populace imagined a better way of life following their army’s traumatic return from the battlefield. The town of San Giovanni Rotondo, located in the country’s southeast, is conceived by Ferrara and first-billed co-screenwriter Maurizio Braucci (who appositely worked on Martin Eden) as a microcosm of this societal shift, where the ruling class harass their charges and dispute the results of a key national election in an apt parallel to Trumpian America. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video, Tubi
Sanctuary (Zachary Wigon)
How well do you know your regular sex worker? How well do they know you? What Hal (Christopher Abbott) and Rebecca (Margaret Qualley) share may have begun as a source of fun, but it’s obviously evolved into something much deeper. It’s now akin to therapy and they both know it to be true. The problem, however, lies in how they interpret what these sessions actually provide. Does Hal need Rebecca to come and validate his fetishized insecurities so he can achieve orgasmic release? Or does she do it to empower him with the necessary confidence to lead a company that’s suddenly fallen to him upon the death of his domineering father? Can either of them really know for sure? Not with money involved. Honesty demands higher stakes. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Solaris (Steven Soderbergh)
Those familiar with the source material and especially Andrei Tarkovsky’s own canonically beloved 1972 Solaris knew more about what to thematically expect, but those drastically different interpretations also bring their own questions about the act of adaptation and translation (it’s worth noting that Lem vocally disliked both main feature adaptations based on comments made before his passing in 2006). On release in 2002, “cerebral” was the overused generalization for Soderbergh’s film as various critics chided it as being vacuous, overwrought, or outright tedious. As my conversation with my guest bears out, it’s much stranger than that reputation suggests, distilling the heady self-interrogations of the source material into the more emotionally palatable terrain of failed 1-on-1 relationships. Unlike the ethereal reflections haunting the space station in Tarkovsky, the foils in Soderbergh’s version are far more full-bodied in both presentation and their unlived demons. – Michael S. (listen to full Intermission episode)
Where to Stream: Hulu
A Thousand and One (A.V. Rockwell)
In the beginning of A Thousand and One, the New York City streets are alive, detailed and humming with swagger. It’s 1993 and Inez struts through Brooklyn after a five-year stint at Rikers Island, readjusting to the rhythms of freedom. The sun bakes the brownstones, hip-hop echoes around storefronts, and kids suck on ice pops––the kind of weather and atmosphere Samuel L. Jackson might be yammering about from his bedroom window. But there’s no time to waste. Inez is looking for Terry, the seven-year-old she left behind and hopes to reclaim. – Jake K.S. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Also New to Streaming
Hulu
Meet Joe Black
No One Will Save You
MUBI
The Cowboy and the Frenchman
Innocence
Prime Video
Buffaloed
Interstellar