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.
After Yang (kogonada)
I had the pleasure to speak with filmmaker kogonada about his stirring treatise on mortality, After Yang, and the moment from that conversation I return to most is him saying that “what makes art so invigorating is that you’re pursuing the ineffable.” This is a notion seeded throughout his gentle, transcendent sophomore feature. We can never truly know another person. In some ways, we will never fully know ourselves or our relationship with the world. But the search for it, the mystery, the endless pursuit—that’s the beauty of life. – Mitchell B.
Where to Stream: Prime Video
A Disturbance in the Force (Jeremy Coon and Steve Kozak)
The question asked back in the ’80s and ’90s was never, “Have you seen The Star Wars Holiday Special?” It was always, “Have you heard of The Star Wars Holiday Special?” We’re talking about a 1978 air date, after all. Someone must have owned a VCR, since bootleg copies of the maligned variety show do exist on the Internet (George Lucas has vehemently denounced the project and even Disney has refused to release a “clean” copy beyond putting the animated segment “The Story of the Faithful Wookiee” on Disney+.) But its existence was akin to legend back then. Just knowing was enough to be cool with details being learned rather than experienced. So it’s shocking that it’s taken until 2023 to finally receive a “definitive” look at its creation and eventual lambasting. – Chris S. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)
In First Cow, Kelly Reichardt carves out space for friendship and generosity amidst an otherwise selfish landscape. Set in the 1820s Pacific Northwest, a familiar realm for the Oregon-loyal Reichardt, the film’s twin protagonists are atypically sensitive souls, both towards each other and their environments, and yet they remain hyper-conscious of the cruelty that enervates within their community. Reichardt probes at the limitations of self-preservation as a life philosophy, even though it’s basically required to survive such a hardscrabble existence. What’s the purpose of survival if life doesn’t incentivize assisting your fellow man? – Vikram M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)
Wolves are not subtle creatures. It’s a rhetorical question: “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” Who couldn’t spot wolves among humans? They’re much smaller than people, much growlier. They have a vicious appetite and care only about satisfying it. What they lack in tact they make up in blunt aggression, tearing their victims apart limb-by-limb and leaving a blood-stained trail of evidence to prove it. They’re indignant, not the most intelligent, and they don’t speak the language. But that’s where William Hale differs: he speaks the language. Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon makes no mistake about who is at the center of its tragedy: the Osage Nation. – Luke H. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Mission (Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine)
When does a sense of adventure turn into madness? The Mission, a new documentary from Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, attempts to ask and answer this question in telling the tragic story of John Chau. In 2018, the young missionary was killed by arrows on North Sentinel Island, a place he traveled to illegally in an attempt to convert the inhabitants of the remote island to Christianity. Via a mixed medium aesthetic (animation, in-person interviews, and voiceover that recounts Chau’s personal diaries), Moss and McBaine try to understand what brought their subject to the conclusion that he needed to go to where he was not wanted and attempt to “save” these indigenous people. – Dan M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Présages (Joanna Hogg)
In this collaboration with the Centre Pompidou’s “Where do you stand today?” film series, one of Britain’s leading directors reflects on her approach to filmmaking and Los Angeles’ cinematic past while prepping a new movie. Her images of flickering lamp posts, empty freeways at night, and lone palm trees swaying with the wind, capture the strangeness of spending the holidays in an unfamiliar setting. The dialogue she creates between these eerie images and her musings results in a profound and otherworldly Christmas postcard.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Retrograde (Adrian Murray)
One of the strongest independent features of the year also has one of the simplest premises: Molly Richmond (Molly Reisman) is charged with reckless driving but every fiber of her being aims to fight it. Through a series of pitch-perfect, dryly hilarious, and ultimately soul-sucking interactions, the 74-minute gem charts Molly’s journey to fight the system to dispiriting ends. Premiering alongside Jordan Tetewsky & Joshua Pikovsky’s Hannah Ha Ha and Clay Tatum’s The Civil Dead at Slamdance 2022, the three films would make an excellent triple feature about modern malaise and the mundane frustrations with the various economic and bureaucratic roadblocks of daily life.
Where to Stream: Prime Video, Tubi
Revoir Paris (Alice Winocour)
While she had been working for two decades, Virginie Efira received much-deserved wider acclaim leading Benedetta and Sibyl a few years back. She’s back this year with a pair of staggeringly great performances, in Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children and Alice Winocour’s Paris Memories. The latter, for which Efira earned the César for Best Actress, follows her character trying to pick up the pieces of her life after experiencing a terrorist attack in Paris. Also starring Pacifiction‘s Benoît Magimel and Claire Denis regular Grégoire Colin, the drama is another example of Winocour’s mastery for immersing her audience in the headspace of her character with stellar sound design and precise cinematography.
Where to Stream: Prime Video
The Sacrifice Game (Jenn Wexler)
Set during Christmas of 1971, The Sacrifice Game concerns a gang of violent halfwits who go on a killing spree with a view to summoning a demon that is said to reside in a local girls’ school. Their plan, however, goes wildly and unexpectedly awry when they come up against two precocious teens who are staying at the school over the holidays. The director, Jenn Wexler, has tried hard to lighten the atmosphere by making her villains inept and insecure, but these efforts are rather hard to appreciate when people are being skinned and gutted like fish. Recommended to those who enjoyed X and Pearl. – Oliver W.
Where to Stream: Shudder
Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt)
Two years after First Cow, which we collectively named our favorite film of 2020, Kelly Reichardt returns with a work like a line drawing: neat, lean, evocative. Showing Up is about art, how art is made, and the people who use their time to make it. It stars Michelle Williams, an actress who has always been at home to the quiet rhythms of Reichardt’s filmmaking, appearing over the years as a down-on-her-luck drifter in Wendy and Lucy (2008), a settler on the wagon trail in Meek’s Cutoff (2011), and as a woman burdened by a belittling man in the director’s anthology Certain Women (2016). – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: Paramount+ with Showtime
Waikiki (Christopher Kahunahana)
Offering a literal behind-the-scenes glimpse of the iconic tourist spot, Christopher Kahunahana’s splendid debut feature, Waikiki, is a succinct emotional dive into the complex intergenerational trauma that plagues many Native Hawaiians. Foregrounding the stark economic divide between the resorts and the city, Kahunahana’s film is purportedly the first film written and directed by a Native Hawaiian. A marvel of economic storytelling, Waikiki spotlights the social and spiritual erosion of colonial tourism on the indigenous population. – Christian G. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Walk Up (Hong Sangsoo)
If one thing of late really sets Hong Sang-soo apart, it’s his unglamorous depiction of the film director. Appropriate to the small-scale of his corpus, these artists live far from the fantasy of 8½ (or, if you prefer, Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths), but instead in the mundanity between projects. Hong’s avatar in Walk Up is Byungsoo (Hae-hyo Kwon), who’s visiting an apartment building owned by Ms. Kim (Lee Hyeyoung) with the company of his estranged daughter Jeong-su (Park Mi-so). – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
Kino Film Collection
Close to Vermeer
Songs My Brothers Taught Me
Netflix
The Commuter
Leave the World Behind
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Prime Video
Little Joe
Strawberry Mansion
Tubi
Lola
VOD
Everyone Will Burn
The Persian Version
Raging Grace
Subject