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.

About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan made a triumphant return to Cannes last year with About Dry Grasses, for which Merve Dizdar won Best Actress at Cannes, and now Turkey’s Oscar entry now arrives on streaming. In his review, Leonardo Goi said, “The pastures in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s luminous new film are only dry at the very end. Save for that brief summery coda, the landscape in About Dry Grasses remains a snowcapped immensity where prairies are ringed by belittling peaks, people stand out as calligraphic silhouettes, and snow falls so heavy as to blot out everything. It’s as if it fell ‘to make oblivion possible,’ observes art teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), and in a film populated with wanderers trying to start anew, those words echo like a prayer. Geographically and thematically close to the rest of Ceylan’s oeuvre, the film finds him working once again in a remote corner of Eastern Anatolia and revisiting leitmotifs in his preferred mode: long, talky symposiums that pit characters against each other in games of verbal fencing. But none of it feels like a retreading. If anything, About Dry Grasses is both a distillation of Ceylan’s recurrent tropes and a purification of his style, a film made of conversations that remain explosive even at their most forbidding, shivering with a sense of fluid emotions constantly at play.”

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

Birth/Rebirth (Laura Moss)

Likely a film that some will find underwhelming due to its lowkey, mostly affectless style, it’s a rather impressive feat of narrative economy that manages to separate itself from the seemingly endless indie horror crop. Directed by Laura Moss, there’s the sense they either don’t have much of a feel for the genre or rather harbors a general disdain for the shorthands it’s fallen into (hopefully they don’t get absorbed into bad studio product soon), the film’s tendencies refreshingly feel free of the trappings of calling-card cinema. – Ethan V. (full review)

Where to Stream: Hulu

Civil War (Alex Garland)

While bound to spark hundreds of think pieces, Alex Garland’s stirring Civil War will undoubtedly go down, too, as one of the most provocative films of the year. It’s also an early contender for one of the best, offering a stunning warning: no matter what the cause, war is hell. Civil War is less interested in the causes of conflict and more about front lines as the Western Forces march towards the White House through the East Coast, turning small towns into battlefields. – John F. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Club Zero (Jessica Hausner)

Across her five previous features, Austrian director Jessica Hausner (Amour Fou, Lourdes, Little Joe) has developed a distinctly unique tone––one which carries through her sixth outing Club Zero. Led by Mia Wasikowska, the dark satire follows a nutrition teacher at an elite school whose relationship with five students takes a dangerous turn. While Hausner is perhaps intentionally poking the bear as it relates to eating disorders, one could swap out the subject of her new film to another topic du jour and still retain a cogent, one-of-a-kind look at cult mentality.

Where to Stream: VOD

Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve)

This is less a movie that feels incomplete than one that has achieved its questionable goals––a diligent follow to a diligent adaptation, a brilliant build upon a brilliant physical manifestation. By my count, though, that makes two projects––maybe, possibly a bit hack to lean on this point, but just for the sake of context: about $300 million––spent in debt to another’s work or promise of some other film. A strange instinct for notoriously burdensome material. Myriad allusions to Dune Messiah, Villeneuve’s promised adaptation of Herbert’s far smaller follow-up, yield promise: flashforward images are stark, and Part Two’s climax finds its actors already selling the pieces set in motion. I can’t pretend I don’t want to see it, that it won’t look and sound great. But enthusiasm’s turning a tad dry. – Nick N. (full review)

Where to Stream: Max

The Fall Guy (David Leitch)

An action rom-com with all the elements for something iconic, David Leitch’s The Fall Guy features truly remarkable stunt work and charismatic performances by Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, yet buckles under the weight of its plot. Adapted from a 1981 action series that lasted five years, the film would have been best-served as a complete reboot jettisoning much of a plot that intrudes and ultimately means less time for Blunt and Gosling together. – John F. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Ferrari (Michael Mann)

Appreciating Ferrari, Michael Mann’s long-planned biopic on the Italian racing mogul, it helps to go back to the director’s original rationale for the project. Where many viewers found an underpowered, stuttering work, the compressed period of time and the plot strands contained within were judiciously chosen by screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin and Mann to highlight Ferrari’s imperious and, most importantly, monstrous capabilities. The climactic Mille Miglia sequence, more than any in Mann’s body of work, horrifyingly illustrates the cost of progress and profit motive’s denial of the human factor. And it being the first Mann film you could accurately call “operatic” since the ’90s only further enhanced what could be a dual directorial swan song with Heat 2, if it ends up being made. – David K.

Where to Stream: Hulu

Les Amis de Ninon (Rosette)

The mononymous French actress-turned-filmmaker Rosette, who was known for her regular appearances in the films of Éric Rohmer, started making short comedies on Super 8 in the ‘80s and ‘90s that Rohmer shot and produced. Les Amis de Ninon was among them and showcases Rosette’s carefree attitude toward filmmaking, centering on two friends who decide to invite a bunch of old flings to a birthday party. We present this screening in collaboration with Mezzanine, an LA-based independent and revival film series.

Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club

Stress Positions (Theda Hammel)

Between The Sweet East and, to some extent, American Fiction, cinephiles seem to be increasing their appetite for politically incorrect commentary. Even if you are not one such moviegoer, Stress Positions, the feature debut from Theda Hammel, does not fucking care. That’s an asset before it’s a problem, but its aimless narrative and discordant visual styles undercut this film’s sharpness. – Lena W. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

The Tuba Thieves (Alison O’Daniel)

Watch an exclusive clip above.

A film that rewards patience, The Tuba Thieves, despite its title, is not a quirky heist picture but rather a meditation on the presence and absence of sound framed by both recent and further-removed history. It’s directed by d/Deaf visual artist Alison O’Daniel, who crafts a rich visual and auditory project that’s probably best experienced in an acoustically perfect environment. One might at least need a high-end pair of noise-canceling headphones to simulate the optimal screening venue. Open-captioned by default, The Tuba Thieves is an immersive journey that perhaps approximates the trials of limited hearing with a structure that is either a cinematic meditation or frustrating for those seeking to impose some sense of order over the raw material we’re presented. – John F. (full review)

Where to Stream: PBS

Also New to Streaming

Disney+

The Beach Boys

Film Movement+

The Sales Girl

Prime Video

The Batman
The Blue Angels
The Ghost in the Shell
Kes
The Red Shoes
The Third Man
The Wedding Banquet

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