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.
Anyone But You (Will Gluck)
If anything, Anyone But You‘s spirit is encapsulated in having a running joke about “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield (gags involving that artist’s back catalog seeming to be the Will Gluck auteurist touch) as if the movie’s wholly bland pop soundtrack puts it above that at-least-memorable 2000s ditty. Slight self-awareness with no effort to actually do anything new is the definition of unearned arrogance. This is why it fails as a romcom: too much smarm and not enough charm. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Garrett Bradley: Devotion
If you’ve only seen Garrett Bradley’s staggering, Oscar-nominated documentary Time, it’s prime time to catch up on a pair of her earlier work. To mark MIT Press and Lisson Gallery’s publication of Devotion, an extensively illustrated new book-length study of the socially engaged, formally trailblazing, beautifully nuanced docufiction cinema of Bradley, Metrograph is presenting her shorts Alone (2017) and America (2019) for a limited time online alongside an in-theater series.
Where to Stream: Metrograph at Home
Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass)
This is a Rose Glass movie, which means it packs a killer, multi-faceted punch and resists easy classification. Her second feature after St. Maud is a stylized neo-noir love story, a drama about addiction, an athletic underdog tale, and a bloody thriller compounding genres and narratives that overlap and blend into each other without any wrinkles. It takes place in rural New Mexico circa 1989, where Lou (Kristen Stewart) helps manage a warehouse gym, plunging toilets and defending the advances of a co-worker named Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov). Lou has a bad smoking habit, a chopped-up mullet, and some dark secrets from her past. But her life changes when Jackie (Katy O’Brian) rolls into town from Oklahoma and starts maxing-out on weights. She’s looking to get to Las Vegas to compete in a bodybuilding competition and needs some money and a place to bulk before the big day. Jackie has a certain look and quiet demeanor that attracts Lou, who quickly gifts her new friend a bottle of steroids to gain a little edge. It’s not long before the pair start up a feverish romance that Glass portrays sensitively and seductively, then ferociously. – Jake K.S. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Monkey Man (Dev Patel)
With a premise that is as simple or as complex as you’d like it to be, Monkey Man anoints Dev Patel as a new action director and star. Filmed on location in Mumbai and Indonesia in the height of the COVID pandemic and saved from a Netflix direct-to-streaming deal by Jordan Peele and Universal, this film about reinvention bursts with the same frenetic energy of a Danny Boyle or John Woo picture, with Patel––co-writer, director, star, and sometimes camera operator––throwing everything he has at the screen, and then some. – John F. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
My Morning with Magic Magic Mike (John Wilson)
After completing his popular HBO series How To, John Wilson found that he wanted to shoot on a DV-camera again, so he booked a ticket to San Francisco to spend a day with a living legend that he’s long admired, underground icon Mike Kuchar. The result is a charming interview with a benevolent American artist discussing his worldview, his brilliant homoerotic illustrations, and the films he made with his brother George, a big influence on Wilson.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Omen (Baloji Tshiani)
When considering a film, it can be healthy to have some skepticism, no matter what genre or subject matter is at hand. With regards to Omen, we have a Belgian-Congolese co-production, a highly intriguing contradiction to consider between the colonizer and the colonized that is itself part of the film’s text. Seeing a bevy of Western names in the end credits didn’t do much to ease these concerns about playing into the assumptions of a, say, European festival audience. Yet Omen is a respectable work all the same, an assured first feature by rapper-turned-actor Baloji Tshiani that never falters in ambition or surprise. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Our Father, The Devil (Ellie Foumbi)
One of last year’s most difficult films, not from a standpoint of onscreen depictions of violence––which are may be the movie’s only major flaw––but from its depictions of forgiveness. Director Ellie Foumbi approaches the difficult task of trying to both understand the burning, reactionary nature of vengeance and the life of an immigrant refugee. Marie Cissé (Babetida Sadjo) recognizes the pastor of her elder care home as the man who raped and pillaged her village in Africa. In planning and executing her revenge, we get the initial thrills of a pulpy “boss girl” revenge thriller, but Foumbi has much more on her mind and twists the film into a Dostoyevskian tale of guilt, regret, and religious contemplation. One of the most unique “vigilante” films you may ever see. – Soham G.
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky)
Andrei Tarkovsky’s penultimate film, 1983’s gorgeously haunting Nostalghia, also marked new territory for the director. His first film made outside the USSR, the Cannes Best Director winner (a prize he shared with Robert Bresson for L’Argent), was also a unique collaboration with writer Tonino Guerra, frequent collaborator of Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Francesco Rosi. Now restored in 4K in 2022 by CSC – Cinetecanazionale in collaboration with Rai Cinema at Augustus Color laboratory, from the original negatives and the original soundtrack preserved at Rai Cinema, the restoration is now available digitally after a theatrical run. For more, read our interview with cinematographer Giuseppe Lanci.
Where to Stream: VOD
Pratfall (Alex Andre)
As a main collaborator of the anarchically grungy films of Joel Potrykus, we’ve long been impressed by the talents of actor Joshua Burge. He now gets another leading showcase in Alex Andre’s feature directorial debut Pratfall, in which Burge plays Eli, an insomniac of neurotic anxiety who comes across Joelle (Chloé Groussard), a French tourist, as they set off on an adventure of drifting souls amidst a bustling NYC landscape. While the performances are equally impressive in their seemingly improvisational nature, bouncing off the rhythms of each other as well as passersby, the narrative and aesthetic can often feel aimless, searching for the meat of a movie that’s never quite found. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: VOD
Red Moon Tide (Lois Patiño)
Framed as a series of tableaux, in which the residents of a seaside town on the Galician coast appear to be stuck in time–unmoving against the changing scenery, yet constantly thinking through voiceover–writer/director Lois Patiño’s gorgeously trippy Red Moon Tide oscillates between fairy tale and visual essay creating an uneven narrative that is often overshadowed by the film’s compositional beauty. – Christian G. (full review)
Where to Stream: Film Movement+
Tótem (Lila Avilés)
The characters of Tótem don’t just appear onscreen; they take it over. From the top there’s the patriarch Roberto (Alberto Amador), who speaks using an electrolarynx and, when not dryly cajoling his flock, enjoys pruning a handsome Bonsai. There are his daughters Alejandra (Marisol Gasé), who we meet mid-phonecall, mid-ciggie, and covered in hair dye, and Nuria (Montserrat Marañon); their children, the young Marthe (Saori Gurza) as well as a gamer and a stroppy teen whose names I lost track of. There is Alejandra’s brother, an artist named Tona (played by the screenwriter Mateo García Elizondo), and his partner Lucia (Iazua Larios), with whom he has a daughter, Sol (Naíma Sentíes). This lively ensemble are joined here and there by a mystic, a party of friends, a cat named Monsi, two dogs, three snails, a parrot, a scorpion, enough plants to fill a modest botanical garden, and a pestering drone. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
What Happened Was… (Tom Noonan)
If often considered a cult figure for roles in Manhunter, Last Action Hero, RoboCop 2, and The Monster Squad (among sundry similar), Tom Noonan is perhaps most deserving of praise for his fiercely intelligent, emotionally lacerating, masterfully composed work as a writer-director. 1994’s What Happened Was…, in which he is also lead actor, is a paramount achievement, making all the more shameful its relegation to relative obscurity for more than 25 years. A remarkable 4K restoration has now arrived, to which I can pay the finest compliment one might afford: as a longtime fan I simply did not think the film could look this nice. – Nick N. (full interview)
Where to Stream: OVID.tv
Also New to Streaming
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Alam
Hulu
Little Women
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OVID.tv
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VOD
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I Am Cuba