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.
Anniversary (Jan Komasa)
Jan Komasa’s Anniversary should be in the running for least-subtle movie of the year. It should also be in the running for most terrifying. This ruthlessly effective thriller rarely beats around the bush with what it’s trying to say, nor does it ask its famous actors to rein in their performances––despite occasionally needing to––but it certainly hits its mark with unnerving accuracy. Watching it at the opening of the Warsaw Film Festival on Friday night (the Polish director’s home turf), I was reminded of Michel Franco’s New Order, a similarly brutal totalitarian nightmare. As well as, better yet, Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-winning novel Prophet Song: another fable about a nation’s slide into fascism, and another story told from the POV of a disbelieving mother. Anniversary might be overacted and blunt to the point of preaching, but I could never quite work out where it was going, and I was never not locked-in. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Bodycam (Brandon Christensen)
Last year saw The Perfect Neighbor utilizing police bodycam footage to examine real-life horrors, and now Brandon Christensen takes on the formal conceit to deliver B-movie genre thrills. Following two police officers who receive a domestic disturbance call and end up shooting a father and his baby, Bodycam initially has compelling ideas on its mind about police misconduct. That it mostly forgets all of that to focus on terrifying imagery may disappoint some, but the sequences of what lurks in the darkness are chilling enough to haunt one’s nightmares for some time. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: Shudder
Ghost Elephants (Werner Herzog)
What opens Werner Herzog’s Ghost Elephants, even before we hear the German filmmaker’s distinctive cadence, is the National Geographic logo. While production credits are far from noteworthy in most cases, this one may stand out to the viewer by implying a certain documentary paradigm––call it “mainstream,” or simply: formulaic and easy-to-digest––at odds with Herzog’s streak of mysticism. A director so devoted to the most abstract and obscure parts of life, nature, and history, Herzog has nevertheless excelled in securing funding from sources like the French ARTE, BBC, and History Channel to tell the stories he finds fascinating. His documentaries are rooted in an innate, unadulterated fascination with people’s dreams and aspirations––in Ghost Elephants, National Geographic explorer and wildlife researcher Dr. Steve Boyes. – Savina P. (full review)
Where to Stream: Disney+, Hulu
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (Gore Verbinski)
From the moment Sam Rockwell busts into a full diner clad in what can only be described as a do-it-yourself time-travel outfit comprising steampunk gadgets covered with a filthy clear raincoat, it’s clear you’re not in for a movie made by committee. What begins as a possible hostage situation quickly turns into a quest to save all of humanity from a rogue AI that is on the brink of total human takeover––if you can believe a word coming out of Rockwell’s mouth, among them a complicated scenario involving resetting the timestream with a very specific combination of companions pulled from this very diner. If he picks the right group of people, perhaps humanity can be saved. If not, he’ll just have to try again and again and again until he gets it right. – Eric V. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Islands (Jan-Ole Gerster)
Sam Riley stars as Tom, a washed-up tennis-pro-turned-coach at a luxury island hotel on the Canary Islands, in Islands, the English-language debut of A Coffee in Berlin director Jan-Ole Gerster. He is the protagonist, but we know little about a man seems to avoid any sort of introspection; living night by night, Tom takes a swig of a stashed bottle of something (tequila? vodka? rum?) between the training sessions he is so obviously bored by. He shows up late to work, coffee from the buffet in-hand, and hopes to skip a class whenever possible. It’s a life of leisure, in some ways, but most of the mornings he wakes up hungover from a crazy party out with that week’s tourists. Yet it doesn’t take long before he notices a rather beautiful blonde woman getting off the shuttle bus, or when she notices him too. – Savina P. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold)
Doomed to be marketed as “a musical by The Brutalist team,” The Testament of Ann Lee asserts itself by treating its Great-Awakened, chest-thumping, celibate subject with patient observation rather than campy ridicule. Mona Fastvold’s version of the Shaker story invites comparisons to other messianic, inward-directed, intermittently Dionysian religious movements that have lots of opinions about sex—like, say, the Pentecostals, the New Agers, or Silicon Valley’s Burners. But it ultimately depicts the United States—famously a safe haven for mild heretics and the weirdest Christian variants—as a nation born of ecstatic figures like Ann Lee. It also certainly helps that, when we finally get to all the Shaking, Testament‘s songs are pretty damn good. — Z. W. L.
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
Disney+
Zootopia 2
Kino Film Collection
Chichinette: The Accidental Spy
Churchill and the Movie Mogul
Netflix
Nuremberg
VOD
Midwinter Break