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.
Dead Man’s Wire (Gus Van Sant)
Gus Van Sant returns with Dead Man’s Wire, a movie shot in the same late-70s hues as Kelly Reichardt’s recent gem The Mastermind, and likewise concerned with unlawful men and the paradox of a decent criminal. Van Sant’s movie, however, is far more willing to deliver on genre tropes than Reichardt’s marvelous subversion. Bill Skarsgård eats great swathes of scenery as the very real Tony Kiritsis, a man who kidnapped his mortgage broker in 1977 after failing to make payment on a potentially lucrative plot of land. Van Sant imagines this tale in a way that echoes Dog Day Afternoon: an unhinged and stranger-than-fiction fable about good intentions gone wrong. It’s kind of a hoot. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Fuze (David Mackenzie)
David Mackenzie gets the opening credits out of the way as soon as we sit down to watch his latest film Fuze. A majority of the 98 minutes which follow are akin to a feature-length cold open surging at breakneck speed to its own climax. When the discovery of a WWII ordinance during construction in a residential English community sends everyone running around, it takes half that time before there’s even a brief pause in the action. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Kontinental ‘25 (Radu Jude)
“The id grows tedious,” art critic Jackson Arn wrote recently, “when left to speak too freely.” The Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude keeps his in check by grounding flourishes in pure mundanity. Near the end of Kontinental ’25, an ex-professor, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), and her former student, Fred (Adonis Tanța), sit by an anti-communist resistance monument in Cluj and watch a horrific video of a drone attack on a Russian soldier. Having found the dead body of a man she evicted earlier that day, Orsolya, who now works as a bailiff, is looking to blow off some steam. They move uphill and Fred––whose delivery bag is plastered with Romanian flags, so as not to be confused with immigrant gig workers––serenades her. Next, they have sex in the bushes. The film up to this point has been awash with ideas and vaguely apocalyptic images: Roman ruins, a robot dog, a dinosaur park, zoomed-in footage of the Hindenburg disaster, a scene from Robert Aldrich’s atomic-era nightmare Kiss Me Deadly. This should all be a lot, but somehow Jude keeps it together. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Last Viking (Anders Thomas Jensen)
“The world is full of people,” states the anonymous narrator of Anders Thomas Jensen’s The Last Viking as an opening, hand-drawn animation tells a rather disturbing tale: there once was a viking prince who lost his arm in battle; his father, the king, decreed that everyone’s right arm also had to go. A quirky myth where disability becomes the norm sets the tone for what is now the sixth film directed by the Oscar-nominated Danish screenwriter, promising a wholesome arc to his typical brand of dark comedy. The animation is just a detour, the scene quickly shifting to the aftermath of a heist thriller with Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) stashing a bag of money in a locker and asking his shy younger brother Manfred (Mads Mikkelsen) to swallow the key. Minutes later, police sirens drown out the frightened screams of their sister Freja (Bodil Jørgensen from The Kingdom: Exodus) amidst the tons of clutter the three siblings call their home. – Savina P. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Moment (Aidan Zamiri)
The Moment finds Charli xcx at a unique moment in her career. After years toiling as a niche artist with a devoted fanbase, the album brat catapults her to global stardom. But with her brat summer tour over, what’s the next move? Charli’s team, which seems to be growing by the day, all seem to have separate answers. Does she try continuing brat summer indefinitely, cashing in at the risk of damaging the brand she spent so long cultivating? Some tell her she would be dumb not to. These evergreen artistic questions—LCD Soundsystem wrote a song about this—are pondered earnestly throughout The Moment. But as a proper mockumentary from a mostly British team, a bevy of jokes and inspired gags keep the proceedings from ever feeling too self-indulgent. – Caleb H. (full review)
Where to Stream: HBO Max
One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Like all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, his tenth feature One Battle After Another is a rich text. A deeply-layered narrative that’s as funny as it is moving, the movie jumps from the U.S.-Mexican border to Baktan Cross—and from drama to comedy and back again—with breakneck speed. The story itself is fairly straightforward, especially compared with the other entries in Anderson’s filmography: Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson, an ex-revolutionary who must protect his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) after an old nemesis (Sean Penn) reappears. Read Cory Everett’s full feature.
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa)
When Donbass arrived in 2018, sandwiched between the start of the 2014 Russian-backed conflict in the titular eastern Ukrainian region and full-scale invasion of the country four years since its release, the world Sergei Loznitsa trained his camera on was a surreal, decaying wasteland. It’s not that the film was necessarily prophetic about the atrocities that would later spread across Ukraine. But it spoke to concerns that now feel especially of-the-moment, the same that have long served as a cornerstone of the Belarus-born, Kiev-raised director’s oeuvre. While Donbass was a work of fiction, its preoccupations with the way truth can be manipulated also haunt the archive-based documentaries for which Loznitsa is arguably best known. From Blockade (2006) to The Kiev Trial (2022), the director hasn’t exhumed USSR-era footage as a sort of time machine, but a means to reappropriate history from the regime’s official narratives. Which is why to salute Two Prosecutors as the filmmaker’s “return to fiction,” as the Cannes Film Festival did upon welcoming Loznitsa’s latest to its Official Competition, is both technically accurate and somehow misleading. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Two Women (Chloé Robichaud)
If, by and large, American cinema has taken a puritanical view on sex, leave it to our neighbors up north to craft a refreshingly frank, hilarious comedy of manners about seeking erotic pleasure when life has hit a dead end. Scripted by Catherine Léger from her own stage play Home Deliveries, itself inspired by Claude Fournier’s 1970 feature Two Women in Gold, Canadian director Chloé Robichaud’s Two Women is playful, raucous, and wholly heartfelt, a film not afraid to explore the dark corners of life when it comes to depression, infidelity, and the dullness that can set in during new motherhood. Its comedy-first approach comes with a comforting sense of tenderness and fleetness, shot on 35mm with a lively warmth by cinematographer Sara Mishara. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
Apple TV
Propeller One-Way Night Coach
Fandor
Death Does Not Exist
Kino Film Collection
Legend of the Mountain
Macunaíma
Netflix
Ferrari
VOD
Desert Warrior
Over Your Dead Body