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.
32 Sounds (Sam Green)
Filmmaker Sam Green captures something so specific here: he makes audio the star of a motion picture. It’s a lovely inclination and a worthwhile escapade. There are funny moments, clever moments, plenty that are heartfelt. Sound can do so many different things! This is an exceedingly well-produced work, its perfect length and the audible narrative it designs building succinctly to a lovely finale. Toss on those headphones and get lost in 32 Sounds for a while. – Dan M.
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Babes (Pamela Adlon)
Transitioning the naturalistic comic sensibilities that made Better Things a success, Pamela Adlon’s feature debut Babes manages to co-opt the rhythms of a romantic comedy to explore the relationship between two best friends at opposite points of their lives. – Christian G. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Beekeeper (David Ayer)
It’s the time of year for smooth-brained relaxation. Moviegoers can recover from the holidays with the comfort of knowing Gerard Butler, Liam Neeson, or Jason Statham will be here to satisfy their mid-budget, action-programmer needs. Is it really the new year if one of those cherished Kings of January doesn’t appear on the release slate? There’s no Gerry or Liam, but the ever-reliable Statham dons a trucker hat and blue jeans to grit his way through David Ayer’s The Beekeeper, an overall valiant, occasionally fun attempt to take us out of Q1 doldrums. – Conor O. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Cowboy In Sweden (Torbjörn Axelman with Lee Hazlewood)
This month, Le Cinéma Club is hosting their fourth annual Summer Music Festival to celebrate uncompromising musicians whose work constantly challenged social norms. Iconoclastic pop idol Lee Hazlewood croons his way through Sweden in his rarely-screened ‘70s visual album. Filmed by Swedish innovator Torbjörn Axelman, Cowboy in Sweden embodies Hazlewood’s playful attitude as he contends with old and new love affairs, celebrates Midsommar, and spends time with polar bears in the land of the midnight sun.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Family Portrait (Lucy Kerr)
One of our favorites from last year’s Locarno Film Festival, where it picked up the Boccalino d’Oro for Best Director, Lucy Kerr’s directorial debut Family Portrait finds Deragh Campbell searching for the family matriarch in an elusive portrait that has drawn comparisons to the films of Antonioni. Savina Petkova said in her review, “Family Portrait deals with inexplicable loss, but one that is contained, repressed, inarticulate. If Katy has not literally lost her mother, the absence is strong enough to become the film’s driving force. But what keeps creeping up in conversation is the actual loss of a relative to an unknown virus. Without exposing too much of the COVID reality that gripped the whole world not so long ago, Kerr alludes to the fact that we still haven’t learned how to talk about such traumatic passings. What’s omitted is also left offscreen, sharing is a whisper, mutuality is hard to reach. If the photographic medium fascinates us by giving reality its own image––one that’s separate from reality––cinema re-animates its stasis and shows us life in flux.”
Where to Stream: Metrograph at Home
Firebrand (Karim Aïnouz)
Few would have imagined that Brazilian-Algerian director Karim Aïnouz––whose The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão won the top prize in Un Certain Regard four years ago––would make his Competition debut with a Tudor period drama, Firebrand. For his English-language debut, Aïnouz was handed a script penned by Henrietta Ashworth and Jessica Ashworth (writers of Tell It to the Bees and Killing Eve), the feminist tone of which is quite obvious. Even if one can easily tell that Aïnouz was attached to the project rather than seeking it out himself, his outsider perspective brings a certain freshness to this loosely historical retelling of the last months of King Henry VIII’s (a tyrannical Jude Law) reign. Yes, the one who beheaded his wives. – Savina P. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Free Time (Ryan Martin Brown)
Free Time opens on an office meeting between Drew (Colin Burgess) and his boss. Drew is dissatisfied with his data-analysis position because it’s too much data entry and too little analysis. “The computers do all of the analysis for you now. It’s really just… data,” he laments. The meeting ends unexpectedly with Drew surprising himself (and his boss) by putting in his two-week notice. It’s a savvy cold open that clues us into Drew’s lack of self-awareness being a source of amusement in the narrative to follow. – Caleb H. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Hummingbirds (Silvia Del Carmen Castaños and Estefanía “Beba” Contreras)
A vibrant coming-of-age documentary, Silvia Del Carmen Castaños and Estefanía “Beba” Contreras’ Hummingbirds is a self-portrait of the directors, friends who grew up on the Texas-Mexico border. Though brief in runtime, the film tackles a number of pertinent topics through a movingly personal, expressive lens, exploring identity, sexuality, and friendship with a kaleidoscopic vision that brings an extraterrestrial feel as we see our subjects basked under neon lights. Vignettes of dancing in the grass and playing guitar as the sun sets reveal a different kind of social issues documentary: one that invites the viewer to glean a sense of personality before emphatically introducing day-to-day struggles.
Where to Stream: PBS
The Imaginary (Yoshiyuki Momose)
Adapted by director Yoshiyuki Momose (a former animator at Studio Ghibli) and screenwriter Yoshiaki Nishimura (a former producer at Studio Ghibli) from a popular British children’s novel of the last decade, the Studio Ponoc production The Imaginary undermines much of its breathless talk of imagination by transparently and schematically tracing the footsteps of children’s entertainment titans. Its opening act introduces us to a pastel-colored, Ghibliesque English city where a lonely yet free-spirited little girl named Anna (voiced by Rio Suzuki in Japanese, Evie Kiszel in English) lives with her hardworking single mother in an adorably quaint family-run bookshop. She is quite imaginative: we know this because we see literal magic emanate out of her CD player when she puts on her favorite song, before flashily animated fantasy sequences literally morph her real-world surroundings into colorful (if generic) fantasy settings. First off: a Christmas land with reindeer, sleds, and yetis in the attic. – Eli F. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Kidnapped (Marco Bellochio)
A story once in the hands of Steven Spielberg to adapt, 84-year-old Italian director Marco Bellocchio’s latest film follows Edgardo Mortara, a seven-year-old Jewish boy who was taken from his family in Bologna to be raised Catholic in the actual arms of Pope Pius IX. Conveyed in sweeping operatic fashion, Kidnapped is a feat of production design and compelling study of both political and religious power, even when certain stagnant passages leave something to be desired. Read Luke Hicks’ Cannes review for more.
Where to Stream: VOD
The Monk and the Gun (Pawo Choyning Dorji)
There is very little written in the English language about the cinema of Bhutan, with only the broadest overviews of this still-emerging industry to be found at a glance. Not producing its first feature until the 1990s––and not producing one shot entirely within its borders until 2003––means that Bhutanese cinema is still finding a distinct voice. The biggest hits from this era have barely been seen outside the country for this reason; many were direct remakes of films from neighboring India, with any original efforts hampered by an overreliance on copying a perceived Bollywood “formula.” – Alistair R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Neonoir
Heat up your summer with a stellar selections of neonoir titles on The Criterion Channel, featuring Big Sleep (1978), Absence of Malice (1981), Blow Out (1981), Eyewitness (1981), Blood Simple (1984), Crimes of Passion (1984), Cop (1988), Blue Steel (1990), Bad Lieutenant (1992), The Last Seduction (1994), Blood and Wine (1996), L.A. Confidential (1997), Out of Sight (1998), The Deep End (2001), The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009).
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus (Neo Sora)
In a heartbreaking work that feels like a private personal home movie that the world is being graced with, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s son, filmmaker Neo Sora, captured one of his father’s final performances. Shot in beautifully austere black-and-white, Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus focuses solely on the music, capturing a man contending with his physical limitations in what amounts to one of the final offerings of his astounding talent. It’s a treasure. – Jordan R.
Where to Watch: The Criterion Channel
This Closeness (Kit Zauhar)
Following a premiere at last year’s SXSW, writer-director-star Kit Zauhar’s acclaimed second feature This Closeness is arriving this summer after an extensive festival tour. Following a couple who rent a room in a stranger’s apartment for a high school reunion, the film takes an idiosyncratic look at the messiness of relationships, intimacy, trust, and pleasure. Using her small-scale canvas, Zauhar shows herself adept with mining tension and discomfort in expressing one’s true emotion––until the inevitable boiling point.
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Also New to Streaming
The Criterion Channel
Black God, White Devil
Chicken for Linda!
Columbia Screwball
Directed by Nicolas Roeg
Heisei-Era Godzilla
Nowhere
Perfumed Nightmare
Pop Shakespeare
Thelma & Louise
Times Square
Film Movement Plus
Art Talent Show
Kino Film Collection
Casablanca Beats
Max
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
Metrograph at Home
The Apple
Blow for Blow
Laurence Anyways
Paranoid Park
A Season in France
Summer at Sea
Three by Manoel de Oliveira
Twentynine Palms
I Was at Home, But…
MGM+
Snack Shack
MUBI (free for 30 days)
The Canyons
Dog Eat Dog
Shrooms
Blaze
The Sound of Silence
Queen of Earth
Boyhood
Teenage
Crossing the Bridge – The Sound of Istanbul
Paramount+ with Showtime
Memory