With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit the interwebs. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.
Aferim! (Radu Jude)
Leave it to a Romanian director to make a movie that best expresses the dangers of the dyed-in-the-wool mindset of modern America. Culled partly from historical documents, Aferim! is a twisted history lesson whose messages transcend its insular time period of 19th-century Romania. Its story concerns Constable Costandin (Teodor Corban) and his son, Ionita (Mihai Comanoiu), who chase after a wanted Gypsy slave for a large bounty offered by Boyar Iordache Cîndescu (Alexandru Dabija), a local noble. But even embedded in a timeline that’s centuries away, the story is strikingly relevant in showing how people maintain blinders in the face of inhumanity. – Michael S. (full review)
Where to Stream: iTunes
Demolition (Jean-Marc Vallée)
Almost all of Demolition feels like filling time on the way from the set-up to the conclusion. It’s somehow supposed to shepherd Gyllenhaal’s character, Davis, to self-realization and closure. This is an entity without a purpose, the actors putting in valiant effort that amounts to thrashing against a torrent of non-meaning. The movie doesn’t pass before your eyes — it goes clear through your head. And the oddest part is that it doesn’t even seem to be trying anything else. The visuals are as sterile as an IKEA diagram of all the parts that come in the box, except even those have a satisfyingly organized sort of beauty to them. This is the very definition of put-the-camera-wherever and well-now-I-guess-we-have-to-cut direction. It’s extraordinarily possible that literally no one will remember this film’s existence a year from now. – Dan S. (full review)
Where to Stream: Amazon, iTunes, Google
Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater)
Near the end of his essay for the Criterion release of Dazed and Confused, Kent Jones writes, “[Richard] Linklater has a keen, poetic memory for exactly how we did nothing.” Like the best American directors, Linklater understands that the roots of Americana are in a formless wandering, one that was as often about bullshit as transcendence. Everybody Wants Some!!, the spiritual sequel to his 1993 feature, is another rumination on transition, following the residents of a baseball house the weekend before classes at an unspecified college in 1980. It’s a weekend bacchanalia filled with rule-breaking parties, masculinity endurance tests, hotboxed bedrooms, closed-door hookups, and the flickers of a romance that could be about more than getting off. – Michael S. (full review)
Where to Stream: Amazon, iTunes, Google
Fantastic Planet (René Laloux)
Nothing else has ever looked or felt like director René Laloux’s animated marvel Fantastic Planet, a politically minded and visually inventive work of science fiction. The film is set on a distant planet called Ygam, where enslaved humans (Oms) are the playthings of giant blue native inhabitants (Draags). After Terr, kept as a pet since infancy, escapes from his gigantic child captor, he is swept up by a band of radical fellow Oms who are resisting the Draags’ oppression and violence. With its eerie, coolly surreal cutout animation by Roland Topor; brilliant psychedelic jazz score by Alain Goraguer; and wondrous creatures and landscapes, this Cannes-awarded 1973 counterculture classic is a perennially compelling statement against conformity and violence. – Criterion.com
Where to Stream: Amazon, iTunes, Google
The Fundamentals of Caring (Rob Burnett)
Films centered around disabled people often focus on the inevitable demise of their main characters. Not so in the bracingly optimistic road movie The Fundamentals of Caring, a witty and at times very funny bromance between Craig Roberts’ wheelchair-bound teenager and his carer, a perfectly-cast Paul Rudd. Writer-director Rob Burnett, adapting Jonathan Evison’s The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, finds nuggets of comedy in the blindspots in your typical accounts of degenerative diseases. – Ed F. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
James White (Josh Mond)
In the five months found within James White, our title character is at the most difficult chapter of his life thus far. He’s grieving the loss of his father and attempting to assist his ailing mother, and the drama authentically depicts the brutality of that process. After producing the gripping Sundance dramas Martha Marcy May Marlene and Simon Killer, Josh Mond diverts in some ways with his directorial debut. While providing yet another intimate character study of a fractured individual, James White also has a perhaps unexpected, enveloping warmth.While lesser, perhaps more commercial films might shy away from the actual process of decay and loss, Mond displays no fear in vividly walking us through the bleak events in James White’s journey. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
The Phenom (Noah Buschel)
I admittedly didn’t think too much on The Phenom after watching its trailer. There was a good cast, its look behind the curtain of fame seemed intriguing, and there’d probably be some darkly honest depictions of sports abuse at the hands of over-zealous parents. But then I saw who the writer/director was and suddenly all I could do was think. Noah Buschel is the man behind a wonderful little character piece from a few years back called Sparrows Dance and seeing his name as the creator of this baseball movie had me scratching my head. It looked run-of-the-mill: prodigy gets the “yips” and must face his past to overcome. It didn’t seem like something the author of Sparrows Dance would tackle. And to a point I was right. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Amazon, iTunes, Google
Spotlight (Thomas McCarthy)
One of the best movies about journalism since All the President’s Men, Thomas McCarthy’s Spotlight bears all the earmarks of an old-fashioned ensemble entertainment from another era while capturing enough wistful, crucial details to serve as a reminder and warning to the current media-saturated climate we live in. McCarthy scales back his style in a way similar to his best film, The Visitor, and Spotlight houses a similar moral outrage beneath a veneer of the day-to-day grind belonging to everyday people. What is specifically powerful about Spotlight is the way it eschews the intimate details of the Catholic Church’s individual molestation cases, instead focusing on this issue from the eyes of survivors and the community. We are not goaded into complicity with these newspaper men and women, but drawn into their fight through an experience as immersive as any this year. The cast, led by Michael Keaton, is one of the strongest 2015 had to offer, and they inhabit these people in a way that draws this struggle from the recent past in clear, immediate lines. – Nathan B.
Where to Stream: Netflix
Theeb (Naji Abu Nowar)
If the impetus behind many feature debuts — great and terrible alike — is to proclaim a helmer’s talents for all who might bother listening, Theeb‘s greatest distinction lies in its reliance on the misunderstood. The impression left by Naji Abu Nowar, credited as a co-writer alongside Bassel Ghandour, is a greater interest in what we must presume and concede than what we can understand and apply, instead trusting that his collaborators will utilize their own strengths — strengths often secondary to the logic or understanding that might go into a single moment — for harmonizing a vision of dangerous lands. – Nick N. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Valley of Love (Guillaume Nicloux)
From Sophie’s Choice to My Sister’s Keeper, child loss has been the subject of everything from prestige Oscar pictures to YA drivel. It’s an understandable focus, for there are few more intrinsically emotional narrative foundations than parents coping with the loss of a child. And whether those characters are together or separated, that loss serves as both a shared crucible and a uniting force. Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love pares this scenario down to its most elemental sediments, brings in two international superstars with a loaded onscreen history, and the rest nearly takes care of itself. Valley of Love lives and dies on the caliber of its actors, and the film is certainly in good hands with Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu, two performers who haven’t been together since Maurice Pialat’s Loulou but have careers that, together, span every major auteur constellation across the globe. – Michael S. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Also New to Streaming
Amazon
Hollywood In Vienna: The World Of James Horner
Septembers of Shiraz
Amazon Prime
Southbound (review)
Stand Up Guys (review)
Netflix
Sin City: Dame to Kill For (review)
MUBI
The Crossing
Where The Green Ants Dream
Fear City
Sin City
Call Me Kuchu
Cobra Verde
Let’s Get Lost
L’inhumaine