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 Childhood of a Leader (Brady Corbet)
While Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist slowly starts to expand its theater count, you may be looking to catch up on his directorial debut. Tommaso Tocci said out of its Venice premiere in 2015, ” Before you picture a regular tale of domestic discomfort, however, it should be mentioned that Corbet is aiming for something far sharper and gutsier. Tightly packed in its 35mm, 1.66:1 aspect ratio, every element of the film is dialed up to eleven, with the aforementioned soundtrack making the person next to me curl up in the seat with her ears covered by the film’s unhinged final scene, or DP Lol Crawley’s dark setups making the most of the crumbling chateau’s creepy atmosphere.”
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve)
This is less a movie that feels incomplete than one that has achieved its questionable goals––a diligent follow to a diligent adaptation, a brilliant build upon a brilliant physical manifestation. By my count, though, that makes two projects––maybe, possibly a bit hack to lean on this point, but just for the sake of context: about $300 million––spent in debt to another’s work or promise of some other film. A strange instinct for notoriously burdensome material. Myriad allusions to Dune Messiah, Villeneuve’s promised adaptation of Herbert’s far smaller follow-up, yield promise: flashforward images are stark, and Part Two’s climax finds its actors already selling the pieces set in motion. I can’t pretend I don’t want to see it, that it won’t look and sound great. But enthusiasm’s turning a tad dry. – Nick N. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller)
It’s a deafening roar of a film, full of the same improbable vehicles and breathless pursuits through the director’s signature dystopian outback, though now told through a lens that can feel a bit slick at times. It tells the story of how Imperator Furiosa (immortalized by Charlize Theron in 2015 and gamely reinterpreted here by Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy) came to be, tracking her journey from childhood and the Place of Abundance––an Edenic oasis of renewable energy and worrying red apples––to hardened warrior in the wastelands of Bullet Farm, Gastown, and The Citadel of Immortan Joe. The concerns that met the trailer––suggesting Miller had traded in his predecessor’s practical effects for CGI––are, I’m sorry to say, not entirely unfounded. But Furiosa can still boast moments to take the breath away. Did we need it? Probably not. Are the chase scenes still phenomenal? Absolutely. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross)
While RaMell Ross’ staggering narrative debut Nickel Boys begins to expand, it’s prime time to catch up on his Oscar-winning documentary. Dan Schindel said in his review from the Sundance premiere, “The doc has a special interest in repetition, like a basketball team going through its drills or a toddler running back and forth across a room playing some game that makes sense only to them. Chronology and specific geography are purposefully difficult to discern (one woman goes through a pregnancy during the film, but its timeline is even longer than that), though the 2017 solar eclipse makes an appearance. Joys (childbirth) and tragedies (an infant succumbing to SIDS) are given equal quiet weight, and always filmed around rather than focused upon. The doc is more invested in mourners after a burial than in immediate reactions or big events. This is a story made of the in-between pieces of stories.”
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 (Kevin Costner)
Everything that emerged in the lead-up to Horizon––the project’s scale, its runtime (181 minutes), the colon and hyphen in its title––has been pointing to one word; but calling something ‘epic’ has less to do with quantity than some movies would like us to think. In the most sweeping sequences of Dances with Wolves, Costner left the character all alone on the plains, dwarfed by the landscape and increasingly aware of his own place in it. Horizon, by contrast, seldom takes that kind of time to think. There’s a distinct lack here, too, of cinematic urgency, the sense that, regardless of length, there is somewhere the film needs to get to. The resulting feeling of watching Horizon will be familiar to anyone who’s ever binged a prestige show; but if that is a snag the viewer’s willing to overcome, Costner leaves plenty to enjoy. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik)
A film that more than delivers on the promise of its title, the plot of Hundreds of Beavers couldn’t be simpler: an applejack salesman attempts to outsmart, yes, hundreds of pesky critters to break into the fur-trapping game. That simplicity makes for a sandbox of endless imagination as we witness escalating hijinks that often find our lead on the losing side of the battle in hilariously agonizing ways. With an enduring love for silent-era slapstick comedy set against a homespun landscape that could be pulled from a Guy Maddin feature, it’s rather remarkable that the aesthetic only wears slightly thin. Rather, one comes away from the adventure with an invigorating sense that with enough creativity, the time-worn tricks of classic cinema can feel new again.
Where to Stream: YouTube
It’s Not Me (Leos Carax)
Packing more ideas into its 40-minute runtime than almost any feature I’ve seen this year, Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me is far more than just a facile Jean-Luc Godard homage. While the cine-memoir does indeed honor the late French New Wave legend’s avant-garde essayistic style, Carax uses the format to not only interrogate his own filmography, but candidly contend with the most troubling developments in the last century-worth of humanity. For a work that wouldn’t have existed if not commissioned by a major art institute (France’s Centre Pompidou), there’s no sense Carax was under any sort of directive; it’s one of the most encumbered, expressive films of 2024. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Mothers’ Instinct (Benoît Delhomme)
It wouldn’t take much to convince an unsuspecting audience member that Mothers’ Instinct is the latest dispatch from the Don’t Worry Darling cinematic universe. The directorial debut of cinematographer Benoît Delhomme initially appears to be a surface-level rendering of a bygone era, a vaguely defined late 1950s or early 1960s, in which the women are talked out of career prospects and encouraged to stay at home to be wives and mothers, first and foremost, kept at a distance from their husbands’ lives. But, of course, nefarious secrets are discovered to be closer to home and far lower in concept within this stylish melodrama, which hews far closer to the “women’s pictures” of the period depicted in both style and substance than the campier thriller it’s being presented as––though those looking for the latter will still get what they ordered courtesy of Anne Hathaway’s brilliantly rendered turn as grieving mother Céline. – Alistair R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)
From one angle, A Real Pain has all the features of a classic road-trip buddy comedy. On a Jewish heritage tour through Warsaw while visiting their recently deceased grandmother’s home, cousins David (a familiarly straight-laced Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (a familiarly squirmy, glib Kieran Culkin) butt heads, break rules, and reassess their relationship across the city. From another, Eisenberg’s perceptive second feature functions as a somber meditation on family history and generational trauma––the kind that produces fractured, unfiltered conversations about purpose, grief, and death that enlighten and enrage in equal measure. “I love him. I hate him. I want to be him. I want to kill him,” David says about Benji at one point. It’s only natural for a trip like this to inspire ambivalence. The movie makes it a special gift. – Jake K-S.
Where to Stream: VOD
Starring Nicole Kidman
With her latest role now in theaters, Criterion Channel is putting the spotlight on the eclectic career of Nicole Kidman with a series featuring Dead Calm (1989), To Die For (1995), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), The Hours (2002), Birth (2004), The Stepford Wives (2004), Margot at the Wedding (2007), and The Paperboy (2012).
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (Nick Park)
While Aardman creations Wallace and Gromit have seen their universe expanded with Shaun the Sheep films and even videogames, they haven’t been prominent in a proper feature film since 2005’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. This has now changed with Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, a wonderfully rollicking stop-motion adventure that finds our heroes up against an army of nefarious garden gnomes, acting under kingpin Feathers McGraw. Full of nifty inventions and genuinely hilarious gags, it’s the rare sequel that delivers on all fronts, particularly as its scope expands to a pulse-pounding finale.
Where to Stream: Netflix
Wicked (Jon M. Chu)
“Are people born wicked? Or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?” The conundrum of theodicy has long plagued humanity, just as it’s plagued the Ozians of Munchkinland. Like the source novel and Broadway musical, Jon M. Chu’s film adaptation of part one of Wicked (penned by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox) doesn’t dig into the existential nitty-gritty of the question. But it makes its position on the matter as blunt as the theatrics are dazzling: no, people are not born wicked. It’s thrust upon them by circumstance or, more specifically, the powers that be. – Luke H. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
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An Alternate Cinema: Four Films From the Deutsche Kinematek Archives
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