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 Boys in the Boat (George Clooney)
This is, from start to finish, an underdog sports picture. Edgerton puts a welcome spin on the gruff-but-caring coach archetype, and Turner does the same with his lead character. Soft-spoken, stern, and handsome, this is a role someone like Ronald Reagan would have excelled at bringing to the screen some 80 years ago; Turner, luckily, is more interesting to look at and a better actor. Alexandre Desplat’s score is maybe the most playful thing about this film, and it works when it needs to. The race sequences are unquestionably Boys‘ highlight, Clooney making use of zoom lenses and well-placed cameras to capture the speed and fluidity of each competition. There is a real tension mined in these scenes, which feels like something the director has not really achieved before. – Dan M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Color Purple (Blitz Bazawule)
Blitz Bazawule’s adaptation of the musical inspired by Alice Walker’s novel, first adapted by Steven Spielberg, has all the flash and style one might expect from a translation from the stage, yet one not befitting the material at hand when it comes to a cinematic retelling. While the performers are up to the task, conveying all the necessary pain, heartbreak, and brief windows of joy, there’s a distancing effect when it comes to the sterilized production design and flat cinematography, as if pulled from a How to Make a Hollywood Studio Film 101 handbook. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: VOD
Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki)
Throughout Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, the audience hears radio news updates on the Ukraine War. That devastatingly large-scale conflict adds an air of despair to the small-scale tensions at the heart of Fallen Leaves. The performances of Alma Pöysti as Ansa and Jussi Vatanen as Holappa are a perfect match for this mix of emotions. The characters’ lives are full of heartbreak and modest joys, resulting in an ending that feels both magical and refreshingly ordinary. Not every filmmaker can pull off that blend. Kaurismäki can, making Fallen Leaves a film to be treasured. – Chris S.
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Foragers (Jumana Manna)
In her inventive blend of fiction, documentary and archival footage, artist-filmmaker Jumana Manna looks at a Palestinian community’s local practice of foraging native za’atar and ‘akkoub plants in defiance of Israeli laws.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Invisible Beauty (Bethann Hardison, Frédéric Tcheng)
With every step she took on the catwalk, Bethann Hardison broke new ground. She did it while strutting in Chester Weinberg’s A-line skirts across the private showrooms of Manhattan’s garment district, where clients believed her to be “out of line.” She did it while dazzling audience members in Versailles in 1973, where she showed Europeans that girls of color brought personality to the runway and were not just human clothes-hangers. She did it ferociously, defiantly, and as shown in the documentary Invisible Beauty, she did it without ever planning to. – Jose S. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers)
For all its finely considered dread, the reason Robert Eggers’ ungulate-deifying debut The Witch made such a cultural mark had far more to do with its sense of mischief. Sure, puritan religious life is fine, Eggers seemed to say, but have you ever tried living deliciously? His second feature, The Lighthouse, brilliantly confirms that taste for devilry and narrative subterfuge. It’s a ghost story drenched in gritty, saltwater-flecked period accuracy and anchored in cautionary maritime fables, but one with a boozy, amorous, and darkly comic edge that made me think of everything from The Birds to Ben Wheatley’s similarly trippy A Field in England. Needless to say, it rules. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: Tubi
The Nest (Sean Durkin)
One of Sundance’s most stunning break-outs in the past decade was Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sean Durkin’s remarkably crafted, psychologically deft exploration of an upstate New York cult starring Elizabeth Olsen. After nearly a decade, the director finally returns to the festival with his feature follow-up The Nest, another exquisitely mounted drama that revels in letting minute character details slowly become elucidated as Durkin puts trust into his audience to pick up the pieces along the way. In peeling back the layers of a fractured family and the soulless drive for wealth, the emptiness underneath is patiently revealed, so much so that it backs itself into a heavy-handed corner. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Next Goal Wins (Taika Waititi)
Taika Waititi had two goals when approaching Next Goal Wins: one was to make sure people who looked like him found their way onto mainstream screens; two was making sure they were depicted taking the piss out of each other. He joked, after the world premiere, that Pacific Islanders are always shown playing majestic music and looking regal when reality was an infinite wealth of good-natured ribbing. And who better to embody that lack of self-satisfied pretension than arguably the worst soccer team to ever hit an international pitch: the American Samoa national football team, which lost to Australia 31 to nil in 2001. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Sunset Song (Terence Davies)
The most beautiful picture of 2015 for both its aesthetic and emotional range, Sunset Song is a grand, sweeping romantic epic the likes of which are otherwise absent in filmmaking today. The director I’m perhaps most thankful has never compromised his style — a notion to be repeated next year with the magnificent A Quiet Passion — Terence Davies ravishingly adapts Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel, and with all of its charm and heartache. One could write books on the dissolves employed here — after they are finished discussing Agyness Deyn’s tremendous performance, of course. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Also New to Streaming
Netflix
Freaks
The Kitchen
Prime Video
Barking Dogs Never Bite
Burn After Reading
Fast X
VOD
Under the Fig Trees