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.
The Bikeriders (Jeff Nichols)
Using photographer Danny Lyon’s iconic The Bikeriders’ imagery as a jumping-off point, Jeff Nichols’ latest feature imagines a fictionalized Chicago motorcycle club, the Vandals. Motorcycle club culture might be a distinctly American phenomenon, but Nichols casts two Brits in the lead, with varying returns: Jodie Comer as Kathy narrates the story in a clear Goodfellas conceit, adopting a Midwest accent flashy (and divisive) enough to ensure sustained awards-season chatter; Tom Hardy is Johnny, a truck driver who gets the idea to start a motorcycle club while watching Marlon Brando’s The Wild One. This low-stakes “why not?” starting point for founding the club works early in the film, until, following the Goodfellas trajectory, it all comes crashing down. Without Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing prowess, The Bikeriders’ rise-and-fall narrative ultimately plays too conventional. – Caleb H. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes (Kathryn Ferguson)
Considering his stature in Hollywood, it’s remarkable it’s taken nearly seven decades after Humphrey Bogart’s death to recieve the first official feature documentary on the indelible screen presence. Thankfully, the humanizing, entertaining Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes does the actor justice, featuring narration of Bogart’s own words, read by Kerry Shale, and a well-mounted journey of archival materials, including a generous amount of film clips to show what he did best. Recounting his rough childhood and subsequent difficult road to stardorm before breaking through, it also explores his vices (including drinking an ounce of a beer an hour to keep a buzz, because that’s what the body can process, of course) and dives deeper than expected into his marriages, most notably his relationship with Lauren Bacall. It’s certainly not reinventing the wheel, but, like the stellar Listen to Me Marlon, one comes away with a much greater inner sense of an icon. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: VOD
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: VOD
Carry-On (Jaume Collet-Serra)
Bruce Springsteen’s “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” plays out as we pan down from the sky to find a mysterious man we’ll know only as Traveler (Jason Bateman) arriving to make a deal for an ominous suitcase, murdering everyone on sight before he acquires it. Within moments, Jaume Collet-Serra establishes the new Netflix action thriller Carry-On as festive fanfare that doesn’t fuck around. Having spent the last half-decade navigating the studio blockbuster minefield with Jungle Cruise and Black Adam, Collet-Serra’s latest sees the director return to what he does best: a mid-budget programmer with genuine, everyday characters in drastic situations and a little more on its mind than you’d expect. – Mitchell B. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Conclave (Edward Berger)
The twisty political thriller Conclave wastes little time getting right into it: the Pope is dead, and after a three-week time jump, the world’s most powerful cardinals gather in Vatican City, their mission to elect a new leader from among their ranks. Our window into this closed world is Cardinal Lawrence, portrayed in characteristically sturdy fashion by Ralph Fiennes. Dean of the College of Cardinals, Lawrence is in charge of this conclave, and while he takes his duties very seriously, they’re complicated by a recent request to the (now-dead) Pope to resign his post and be sent elsewhere so that his faith might be reignited. Request denied––perhaps because the former pope knew he needed him to run this forthcoming conclave––Lawrence finds himself in a position of immense power. As a reluctant leader with deep convictions (but still capable of missteps), he is a relatable window into this foreign world. – Caleb H. (full review)
Where to Stream: Peacock
Dahomey (Mati Diop)
In 1953, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Cloquet produced Statues Also Die, one of the fiercest and most lucid indictments of white imperialism ever captured on film. Commissioned by the magazine Présence Africaine, it sought to dissect Western attitudes toward African art. The 30-minute short did not begin as an anti-colonial project but became one along the way, informed by the belittling treatment that antiquities from the continent had received across French cultural institutions since their plundering under colonial rule. Why, for a start, was African art routinely confined at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris––an ethnographic museum––while Greek or Assyrian pieces found their place at the Louvre? An arresting montage of statues and their visitors swelled into a much larger critique of the systematic oppression of Black culture and Black bodies, with a third act considering the exploitation of Black athletes and musicians in the States. That you might have never heard of it is hardly surprising. The short was swiftly banned upon release, then shipped back out in a truncated version, and finally approved by the censor in its unabridged cut in 1995––a staggering 42 years since it first screened. (It’s now available on YouTube.) “An object dies when the living glance trained upon it disappears,” Jean Négroni’s voiceover prophesied at the start, “and when we disappear, our objects will be confined to a place where we send black things: to the museum.” – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Elton John: Never Too Late (David Furnish, R. J. Cutler)
With over six decades in the music business and countless hit records, Elton John recently concluded his epic, years-spanning farewell tour, the basis of which is the foundation of Elton John: Never Too Late, an entertaining if by-the-numbers new documentary by R. J. Cutler and John’s husband David Furnish. Leading up to his final North American concert at Dodger Stadium, we weave through his life story, complete with struggles of broken relationships and substance abuse as we see his unparalleled success and star power. Swiftly edited to the point of never diving too deep into any one subject, resulting in an arms-length distancing from the man himself, it’s particularly worth a view to gain more insight into his frenzied, cocaine-fueled relationship with John Lennon, and their final collaboration. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: Disney+
Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross)
The breakthrough photographer-and-filmmaker behind this year’s inventive literary adaptation Nickel Boys, co-written with Joslyn Barnes, first broke onto the film scene with his intimate documentary about Black families in central Alabama. The Oscar–nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening is an impressive feat of portraiture — mostly shot in first-person and informed by Ross’ experience living and working in the region.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Heretic (Scott Beck and Bryan Woods)
Missionary work has always fascinated me. Not when it’s performed abroad as a means of indoctrinating people who might otherwise be unaware. I mean here, in America, where anyone fascinated with religion could simply walk up to a church, synagogue, or mosque and ask to learn. Yes, there’s a degree of marketing at play and companies have advertising budgets to spend in ways that also serve their flock by providing them a façade of purpose, but to have a door opened with a resident genuinely saying “you’ve converted me” is insane. It happens, though. People are impressionable. People are lonely. That’s where Scott Beck and Bryan Woods leave us at the start of Heretic. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
In Our Day (Hong Sangsoo)
Like other Hong Sang-soo films, In Our Day passes, on the surface, for simple fare. The prolific South Korean director layers weighty themes amidst naturalistic filmmaking, almost documentary-style in his willingness to let the camera sit without needing any extra flourishes. Cutting between two scenes––both playing out over a single afternoon––Hong focuses his energy on the dialogue between his characters, on the rapid intergenerational misconceptions. In doing so he muses on the pessimism of art, the somewhat meaningless nature of life, and how we interpret the actions and words of our fictional heroes. – Michael F. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Maria (Pablo Larraín)
After the detour of El Conde, Pablo Larraín returns with a study of opera singer Maria Callas, thus closing out a triptych of films on glamorous women, gilded isolation, and lingering death that began with Jackie in 2016 and continued via Spencer five years later. Maria stars Angelina Jolie, back with her meatiest performance in years as a prodigal artist whose gifts began to fade long before they should have. Working again from a script by Spencer‘s Steven Knight, the film imagines Callas’ final days in Paris leading up to her death in 1977, then just 53 years old. Using a fictional filmmaker (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to structure the story, Larraín skips back and forth: we see the singer’s early years (moving from New York to Athens on the eve of WWII), experience some iconic performances, and learn of her romantic regrets. This includes two separate occasions when Jackie Kennedy came into her orbit––though, alas, no cameo from Natalie Portman. Some universes just aren’t made to be expanded. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Music (Angela Schanelec)
Thirty or so minutes into Angela Schanelec’s Music, a character makes a startling discovery. We’re inside a prison on the outskirts of an unidentified Greek town, where Jon (Aliocha Schneider) is to spend a manslaughter sentence. And we’re watching him bathed in the cell’s cold light when he suddenly opens his mouth and starts to sing. It’s a moment that shatters the film, one of the loudest in a tale otherwise marked by wistful silences. Jon’s stuck a grocery list of classical composers to the wall, and he intones an aria from Vivaldi’s Il Giustino, “Vedrò con mio diletto.” It’s the first time we hear him sing and it amounts to an otherworldly revelation, both for the young man crooning and those of us who listen: a human being waking up to a superpower. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Resynator (Alison Tavel)
The search for the story behind a unique synthesizer titled Resynator forms the basis for an emotional journey of personal discovery in Alison Tavel’s moving documentary. Invented by her late father, Don Tavel, in the 1970s, this piece of equipment is the gateway for the filmmaker to uncover more about his past struggles. The film becomes an exploration of the lies we tell ourselves (or the truth we omit) and what it means to find genuine healing. A fitting double feature with Chris Wilcha’s Flipside from this year, it also eloquently examines noble ambitions and frustrating false starts in the creative world. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: VOD
Scénarios + Exposé du Film annonce du film “Scénario” (Jean-Luc Godard)
Befalling the same fate that afflicted Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Chime earlier this year, Jean-Luc Godard’s final film Scenarios, and the accompanying making-of documentary, Exposé du Film annonce du film “Scénario,” is now available worldwide digitally, but only via the NFT site Roadstead. A gift of a swan song (unless more secretive works will see the light of day), Scenarios was completed a day before Godard’s death and marks another deeply expressive, forward-thinking work from the filmmaker. Of equal artistic import is the accompanying film, made with longtime collaborator Fabrice Aragno, which gives cherished insight into Godard’s hand-crafted filmmaking process. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: Roadstead
Sugarcane (Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie)
It’s impossible to overstate the trauma that is explored throughout Sugarcane, Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie’s harrowing documentary on the sins of St. Joseph’s Mission in British Columbia and the Canadian Indian residential school system as a whole. Spurred by the discovery of over 200 unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in May 2021, NoiseCat and Kassie speak with investigators and survivors of the schools, one of them Julian Brave NoiseCat’s own father: Ed Archie NoiseCat. – Dan M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu, Disney+
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story (Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui)
Directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story recounts and examines the incredibly compelling, tragic, redemptive story of actor and activist Christopher Reeve. He was made famous playing the superhero Superman in Richard Donner/Richard Lester/Sidney J. Furie’squartet of films in the ’70s and ’80s. In 1995, Reeve was paralyzed from the neck down after being thrown from a horse during a competition. That terrible accident eventually sparked the creation of the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, a non-profit whose goal is to cure spinal-cord injury and improve the quality of life for those with paralysis. – Dan M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Max
Also New to Streaming
Hulu
The Convert
Coup!
Kino Film Collection
Russian Ark
When Eight Bells Toll
Max
Joker: Folie à Deux
Netflix
It Ends With Us
Shiva Baby
Prime Video
The Cotton Club
VOD
The Goldman Case