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 Adamant Girl (P. S. Vinothraj)
While rural stories have become a topic du jour across the many industries within Indian cinema, P.S. Vinothraj has carved a unique place for himself with Koozhangal (Pebbles) and his follow-up Kottukkaali (The Adamant Girl). He structurally breaks down family and community dynamics in rural areas with disquieting observation, his camera constantly tracking and intersecting movements of events. There are explosions of dialogue and emotion wrapped around long sequences of contemplation where just a glance can prove revelatory. Both Soori and Anna Ben, two well-established performers in Tamil cinema, are perfect ciphers for gender dynamics at play. Vinothraj refreshingly eludes sermons or obvious pleas, and The Adamant Girl respects its audience enough to let them unpack what they’re watching on their own time. – Soham G.
Where to Stream: VOD
Black Dog (Guan Hu)
In the derelict, scraggly city in northwest China where Guan Hu’s Black Dog is set, human life has all but disappeared and canines have replaced their masters. The year is 2008, a few weeks before the kick-off to the Beijing Summer Olympics, but the capital feels so distant in time and space that when a mural honoring the event pops up, the paint is so sun-bleached you’d be forgiven for thinking the Games were over by a few decades. Oil was tucked deep under the nearby hills until the reserves dried up and workers left––one of many migration waves that turned this unnamed corner at the edge of the Gobi Desert into an arid ghost town presided by the pets its former residents left behind. Dogs are everywhere you look; from the barren expanses that ring the city down to its maze of abandoned buildings, they roam this place as silent and sinister sentinels, a vision closer to a post-apocalyptic nightmare like Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later than a fantasia à la Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Broken Rage (Takeshi Kitano)
Split into two chapters, the film kicks off as a crime thriller before switching tones altogether and revisiting the first part scene-by-scene in a more delirious light. Kitano stars in both as a gun-for-hire. Infallible in the first and hopelessly clumsy in the second, he’s “Mouse,” a hit man whose murderous routine is upended once cops recruit him to infiltrate a drug ring. Tonally distinct as they may be, humor permeates both parts. Even in the ostensibly more “serious” first, Kitano’s script moves with a childlike logic: it only takes Mouse a couple of punches in a staged brawl with another mole to ingratiate himself with the mobsters he’s been asked to spy on. His killing-machine loner is a comic riff on the other unbeatable assassins he played in the past (think of Otomo, the thug of his Outrage saga). But the commitment to poking fun at his onscreen personas is something I hadn’t seen him do since 2005’s Takeshis’, a comedy that nonetheless spiraled into self-indulgent flights of fancy. Nothing farther from Broken Rage’s spirit. This isn’t just a wildly funny film––the kind that sent people around me at the press premiere into convulsed laughter just a few scenes in––but a pointed rebuke to the discourse that saw the director’s two impulses (popular comedy and artful seriousness) as opposite poles in a magnetic field. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)
Being a pet owner, depending on your personality, comes with a fair level of anxiety. For example: after leaving my apartment to go see the film I’m writing about, the thought crossed my mind that maybe I hadn’t shut my bathroom door. If so, my two beautiful senior cats could potentially get inside and consume flowers toxic to them. For some people this is just the anxiety they have regarding, I don’t know, leaving the oven on whenever they head out in public, but for a certain kind of animal-loving softie, intrusive thoughts will be bound to hover. After reassuring my anxiety about whether my cats got into the bathroom, it transferred to the pixelated critter at the center of Flow. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: Max
From Ground Zero
From Ground Zero is a film that, in an ideal world, would not exist, and cannot be written about as if it were a normal production. This anthology of 22 shorts is Palestine’s submission for the Best International Film Oscar and has deservedly made the 15-title shortlist. Like any anthology film, it suffers from certain pieces being better-realized than others, though it’s difficult to critique this in all good conscience; when making art in a war zone, there’s an inherent urgency that outweighs dramatic shortcomings. As the title reminds us, these are dispatches from a living hell unfathomable to any viewer, and the fact that several filmmakers have been able to keep creating under such circumstances is a miracle––one anybody with a heart would trade for both an end to the bloodshed and these directors being able to create art on their own terms. – Alistair R. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)
The legendary Mike Leigh’s latest stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste as a woman whose intense anger––at her family, the people she sees during her errands, the world itself––is both hysterically funny and devastatingly sad. Hard Truths might be the first truly great film to deal with the lingering impact of COVID on our collective consciousness. While the pandemic is only mentioned in passing, the air of malaise, discontent, and simmering rage many felt (and still feel) is evident in every frame of Hard Truths. Leigh’s filmography is so strong and so full of masterpieces (Life Is Sweet, Naked, Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy) that ranking Truths is tricky. But that can be pondered down the road. For now, Hard Truths can be acknowledged as one of 2024’s greatest, most-impactful films. – Chris S.
Where to Stream: VOD
Longlegs (Osgood Perkins)
Perkins’ previous films, such as The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, worked because they eschewed the very pretense of a story that would otherwise drag them down. By living and dying on tame procedural, Longlegs fails to evoke any strong emotion. Perhaps that’s partially by design: Perkins seems intent, if not particularly careful, to emulate his protagonist in style and form. Harker is quiet and attentive, and the mise-en-scène invites audiences to follow suit. The issue is the degree to which the script introduces and discards portions of itself. Those Zodiac-type letters? Solved way too quickly, and out of the movie they go. – Matt C. (Hulu
Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)
RaMell Ross––the Brown University film professor and writer-director behind 2018’s stunning impressionist portrait of rural Alabama life, Hale County This Morning, This Evening––made a splash with his second film and fiction debut Nickel Boys. This adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel is a tender, enchanting movie that quickly develops a mood-defining dread stemming from America’s ugly history with abusive juvenile centers for Black boys. Innovatively shot in first-person to gripping effect, it follows Elwood Curtis, a young man wrongly detained at the Nickel Academy, as he develops a life-changing friendship and navigates the nightmares of Nickel, where the unmarked graves of rule-breaking children haunt the kids who still have to walk its grounds. Bouncing back and forth between Elwood’s days at Nickel and his adult life researching its crimes, Ross submerges us in what feels like a lifetime of beauty and trauma. – Luke H.
Where to Stream: VOD
One of Them Days (Lawrence Lamont)
In today’s Hollywood where comedies, when they are made at all, are mostly shunted to straight-to-streaming, Lawrence Lamont’s One of Them Days is a breath of fresh air. While not rewriting the rules, it rather comfortably settles into a structure affectionately calling back staples of the genres from the 90s and the early aughts. Following Keke Palmer and SZA as friends who have one day to get enough money to cover rent, it’s an eminently likable adventure with sight gags that actually work and, most important of all, a central friendship we actually believe thanks to the charisma of the two leads. With it already making three times its budget theatrically, here’s hoping Hollywood finally learns some lessons that audiences are starving for more in the dormant genre. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: VOD
Rounding (Alex Thompson)
Following Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s deeply moving drama Ghostlight last year, one of Thompson’s prior features, the psychological thriller Rounding––which premiered back at Tribeca Festival in 2022––is now finally getting a release. Following a medical resident who starts a new job at a rural hospital as his anxiety and past trauma start to haunt him, the film is an interesting genre experiment for Thompson. However, it’s the more grounded explorations of his everyday duties, which render harrowing to anyone not in the medical field, that have more impact than the thinly sketched horror elements. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: VOD
The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof)
Here’s a film that asks, in the vein of another’s title: did you wonder who fired the gun? Yet in Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which is set concurrently against Iran’s Jina (Women, Life, Freedom) protests, the question’s sarcastic rather than interrogative. This gun is not literal and corporeal, but metaphorical and deadly, its firer the collective will of hundreds of women who cannot abide the country’s theocratic regime and morality police. There’s no doubting the film’s own cogently didactic thrust, either. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) (Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson)
Four after his Oscar-winning documentary Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson returns with another documentary capturing Black music history. This time focusing in on the rapid rise and subsequent decline of one artist, Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) explores Sly Stone’s indelible contributions to the funk genre as frontman of Sly and the Family Stone. While the lineup of talking heads is no doubt impressive, from André 3000 to D’Angelo, one wishes the director probed a bit deeper into the thesis of his title rather than hitting the more conventional notes of the tried-and-true bio-doc form. Nonetheless, he honors Stone’s music in all the right ways and this one deserves to be played as loud as possible. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: Hulu
Timestalker (Alice Lowe)
Nearly a decade after her directorial debut Prevenge, Alice Lowe’s ambitious second feature Timestalker is finally arriving stateside after a festival tour and U.K. release last year. Spanning hundreds of years set across a handful of distinct time periods, the film follows Agnes (Lowe) as she repeatedly falls in love with the “wrong man” and upon doing so dies and becomes reincarnated in a new time period, doomed to repeat her past mistakes. While it’s a compelling idea and entertaining in the various extremes Lowe pushes the deaths and male depravity through the ages, there’s the sense with a proper budget her vision would be better realized––or at least the script needed to have a bit more weight and structure to patch the production holes. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
Apple TV+
The Gorge
Hulu
Omni Loop
Kino Film Collection
Keep the Change
Possession
Netflix
Two Lovers
Peacock
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
VOD
Better Man
Flight Risk
God Help the Girl