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.
Am I OK? (Stephanie Allyne and Tig Notaro)
A romantic comedy that functions best as a fable of friendship and self-reflection, Am I OK? is the kind of lightweight, amiable movie that just barely earns the emotional beats at the heart of its story. Set in Los Angeles, it follows the converging life events of two best friends, Lucy (Dakota Johnson) and Jane (Sonoya Mizuno), soul sisters with opposite personalities who tell each other everything—except for the big secrets they’ve been harboring from each other. How they respond to hearing them fuels Stephanie Allyne and Tig Notaro’s gentle and wobbly feature debut. – Jake K-S. (full review)
Where to Stream: Max
Dad & Step-Dad (Tynan DeLong)
Following the stellar comedy Free Time, one of Colin Burgess’ prior features, Dad & Step-Dad, is now coming to streaming. If you have yet to be acquainted with this self-deprecating, character-driven style of humor, these two features provide the ideal entry point. Shot over just four days for around $18K, DeLong’s comedy proves that with the right cast and dedication to pushing the joke to its most hilarious limits, a sketch-style set-up can in fact flourish in feature form. Following Jim (Burgess) and Dave (Anthony Oberbeck) as the competitive title characters vying for the attention of their son/step-son Branson (played perfectly by the thirtysomething Brian Fiddyman), Dad & Step-Dad is a hysterical battle of one-upmanship wrapped in ego and fatherhood.
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Directed by Paul Schrader
Following the Cannes premiere of his latest feature Oh, Canada, the films of Paul Schrader get the spotlight on the Criterion Channel this month, featuring Blue Collar (1978), Hardcore (1979), Cat People (1982), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Patty Hearst (1988), The Comfort of Strangers (1990), Light Sleeper (1992), Affliction (1997), Touch (1997), Auto Focus (2002), The Canyons (2013).
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Falcon Lake (Charlotte Le Bon)
Every cinematic cabin in the woods suggests a place out of time. If you believe the movies, they’re either a) a dread-inducing home to all manner of spirits and masked killers which directly tie the cabin back to its haunted past; or b) an idyllic getaway for a teenager during a formative coming-of-age experience. The directorial debut of Canadian actress Charlotte Le Bon is an unusual, immediately arresting combination, grounding its deeply sincere account of first love within the realm of gothic horror––here the urban myth of a girl who drowned in the nearby lake many summers prior. – Alistair R. (full review)
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Four by Tsai Ming-liang
One of the world’s greatest directors gets a much-deserved spotlight this month on Metrograph’s streaming service, featuring four of his finest films: The Hole (1998), Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), Stray Dogs (2013), and Days (2020). Writing on his 2003 feature, Ryan Swen said, “From title on down, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the greatest films in the history of cinema, construes itself not as the simple paen to a dying artform as which it is often perceived, but a constellation of complex, aching desires; it is both wholly in keeping with Tsai’s oeuvre and stands starkly apart from it. The timing of the long-awaited restoration now seems almost too on-the-nose, given that theaters across America remain shuttered and spectatorship in its ideal form has temporarily ceased. But Goodbye is above all resolutely present-minded, less concerned with the future of theatergoing than with the material longing and mystery that its inhabitants experience.”
Where to Stream: Metrograph at Home
Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki)
For much of Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, Toho Studios’ 33rd film in the beloved kaiju franchise, the iconic monster exists as an abstraction. After a brief, brutal rampage to start, he is kept offscreen, a shadow in the mind of our hero Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki). To a certain extent, this entirely symbolic usage is nothing new: the deeply ingrained allegory for nuclear annihilation that Ishiro Honda’s 1954 original presented has persisted, and often been adapted to fit the times: the most recent Japanese live-action predecessor, Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s ferociously incisive Shin Godzilla, tackled the tangled bureaucracy ill-equipped to deal with the Fukushima disaster head-on. – Ryan S. (full review)
Hit Man (Richard Linklater)
What Hit Man lacks in technical craft, it compensates for in allure, the most organically sexy movie you’ll see this year. Almost too sexy at times (this is not a problem). As in: there’s no way you watch this with someone you’re into and get through more than 20 minutes without pausing or abandoning it for another night (or another; it might take a few tries). That’s one of the strengths in hiring two of the hottest people on the planet. – Luke H. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Lumberjack the Monster (Takashi Miike)
Arriving with no promotion from Netflix, not even a meager tweet, the latest film from the ever-prolific Takashi Miike has landed on their service. Based on a novel “Kaibutsu no Kikori” by Mayusuke Kurai, the Japanese director’s new feature is Lumberjack the Monster, a serial killer vs. psychopath thriller that arrived in his native country this past December and now gets a streaming-only bow stateside.
Where to Stream: Netflix
The Mattachine Family (Andrew Vallentine)
Arriving at the start of Pride Month, Andy and Danny Vallentine’s The Mattachine Family is the kind of uncynical, heart-tugging dramedy that feels perfectly in line with the tastes of its executive producer Zach Braff. While your mileage may vary depending on your interest in such a tone, there’s something refreshing in seeing a rather well-worn cinematic approach grafted onto an inherently queer perspective. Following a couple, Thomas (Nico Tortorella) and Oscar (Juan Pablo Di Pace), who are coming to the end of their year-long fostering of a young both, the former is unsure about the next steps in his life. As he questions what family and relationships truly mean, the Vallentines bring some broad comedy and well-earned heartache to the journey. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: VOD
Monster (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Few stories are as gratifying as the narrative jigsaw. How to fool the viewer into believing one thing without lying about what happened? It’s difficult enough to execute on the page, but much more can be hidden in writing. With film it’s a matter of obscuring the context of what we both see and hear, which requires some trickery. Like any sound cinematic tool, it can be misused and abused (see: the MCU), but with tasteful restraint it can be the backbone of a masterclass in mystery. See: Monster. – Luke H. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Nowhere Special (Uberto Pasolini)
There’s not a lot of time left, but the adoption agency working with John (James Norton) is doing their best to maintain his belief that they will find the right place for his four-year-old son Michael (Daniel Lamont). Why is it so important? Because John isn’t simply leaving the boy behind. He’s dying of a terminal disease. And with Michael’s mother already having left him at six months old, the last thing John wants is to leave him alone. This is therefore as much a gift for the child as it is for the father. To give Michael a home means giving him the chance at a life John never had himself as well as a necessary peace of mind for him to eventually let go. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Old Oak (Ken Loach)
In The Old Oak, an English man and a Syrian woman become unlikely friends on one side of a simmering culture war. It’s the latest from Ken Loach and, if reports are true, it will be the 86-year-old director’s last. The Old Oak is, of course, a timely story about modern Britain, immigration, and xenophobia. It’s also a parting statement from Loach––one last rallying cry for solidarity––and a fitting coda to his six-decade long career. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Pacific Club (Valentin Noujaïm)
Franco-Lebanese filmmaker Valentin Noujaïm digs into the forgotten history of a basement nightclub that doubled as a refuge for Paris’s Arab youth throughout the ‘80s. Winner of the New Vision Award at CPH:DOX in 2023, this sixteen-minute short is the first part of a trilogy about Paris’s business district, La Défense, a place “where concrete has erased traces of the past.” Mixing music composed by the Manchester-based duo Space Afrika with testimonials and transfixing digital renderings, Pacific Club uncovers a history buried by capitalist development.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Perfect Days (Wim Wenders)
Every work day, Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) wakes, waters his plants, washes up, dresses in his coveralls, and leaves his house before the sun fully rises. He buys a coffee can from the vending machine next door and hops in his van, which is filled to the brim with cleaning products. Before turning on his vehicle and going to the various public toilets in Tokyo he thoroughly, he puts a tape in the cassette player. The Animals, Patti Smith, the Velvet Underground fill the air as we witness Hirayama’s Perfect Days. Maybe the best representation of “mono no aware” this decade so far. – Jaime G.
Where to Stream: Hulu
Piaffe (Ann Oren)
When singled-out within a purely visual medium, sound becomes intrinsically linked to the theme of obsession: a mystery the eyes can’t see that the protagonist needs to solve. From John Travolta’s Jack Terry unwittingly stumbling into a murder conspiracy when recording foley effects for a slasher flick in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out to Tilda Swinton’s Jessica trying to find the source for the “rumble” that haunts her every waking moment in Memoria, the inability to define a sound’s origin becomes a gripping enigma within a medium that thrives on showing, not telling. Much like De Palma’s film, the latest from visual artist Ann Oren takes as its starting point a recording studio––albeit a makeshift one, set up solely to record the sound effects for a bizarre TV commercial––but follows a much less conventional path to untangle an artist’s growing fixation on the noises they have stumbled into capturing. – Alistair R. (full review)
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
A Prince (Pierre Creton)
A Prince, the second narrative feature from French director Pierre Creton, is rather strange. There is a chorus of narrators for a quiet film. This movie is obsessed with sex, yet almost frighteningly unsexy. A Prince defies comprehensible storytelling and the laws of nature. And despite all of Creton’s formal efforts to make this film nearly unwatchable, A Prince is also quite beautiful. – Lena W. (full review)
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
The Promised Land (Nikolaj Arcel)
After his 2012 film A Royal Affair received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, Danish writer-director Nikolaj Arcel did what probably seemed logical at the time: go to Hollywood. But like many directors before him who walked that same path, the results were less than ideal––his being 2017’s disastrous Stephen King adaptation The Dark Tower. Six years later, Arcel returns to his home country and reunites with A Royal Affair star Mads Mikkelsen to make The Promised Land, a brutal, entertaining period piece and another showcase for Mikkelsen’s stone-faced magnetism. – C.J. P. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Suburban Birds (Qiu Sheng)
Something is causing the ground to shift underneath a new Chinese suburb in writer-director Qiu Sheng’s intriguing, adept debut feature. High-rise towers are listing to the side, and residents are being evacuated. As Suburban Birds begins, a team of engineers is on-site to investigate the cause—ideally quickly, without disrupting the planned subway tunneling, so that this little part of China’s development boom can proceed. Make way for tomorrow! It’s left to Qiu to survey the restless earth around the foundations of the future, via a subtle structural gambit that marks his voice as one worth listening to. – Mark A. (full review)
Where to Stream: Metrograph at Home
Also New to Streaming
Apple TV+
Brokeback Mountain
Collateral
The Departed
Goodfellas
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Saving Private Ryan
The Wolf of Wall Street
You’ve Got Mail
The Criterion Channel
Directed by Jean Grémillon
Directed by Miryam Charles
Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi
Duelle
Ensemble Casts
Girlfight
I Am Cuba
LGBTQ+ Favorites
Lilies
The Magic of Milford Graves
Melvin Goes to Dinner
Queersighted: The Queer and Now
Synth Soundtracks
Three by Céline Sciamma
Hulu
Fight Club
Freddy Got Fingered
It Follows
MUBI (free for 30 days)
Air Doll
Casa Roshell
Certified Copy
The Duke of Burgundy
How to Survive a Plague
Kaboom
Lady
Ross Brothers
Simon Barbes or Virtue
Tyrel
Netflix
Ali
Burn Afte Reading
Dune
The Quick and the Dead
Miami Vice
Tangerine
Under Paris
Peacock
Housekeeping for Beginners
Prime Video
Tangerine
VOD
Lost Soulz
Typhoon Club