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 Assessment (Fleur Fortune)
The “old world” is a wasteland. People still live there, but not for very long. Those in the “new world” live hundreds of years thanks to a drug that slows aging. It’s groundbreaking technology that comes at a price: the combination of scarce real estate on which to live safely and figurative immortality means less to go around for a populace that never decreases. The compromise was thus to take China’s now-defunct “one-child policy” to the nth degree and render the conception of all children illegal. Unless you’re granted a waiver by the government, but that permission is understandably not easily won. You must prove yourselves worthy as a couple via a seven-day evaluation. This is the sci-fi backdrop to Fleur Fortune’s The Assessment. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Dangerous Animals (Sean Byrne)
With Jaws celebrating a 50th anniversary, it wouldn’t be the summer movie season without a shark picture. With his first feature in ten years, The Loved One‘s Sean Byrne delivers the best of its kind since at least Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Shallows, all while mixing in a serial-killer movie to boot. Dangerous Animals thrives on the intensely villainous performance from a never-better Jai Courtney, who finds novel ways to offer up his victims to the treacherous waters. If it doesn’t add up to much more than a 90-minute thrill ride, the direction is sharp enough to feel like you are in the hands of an accomplished entertainer, pulling the strings to deliver pure summer fun. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: VOD
Daniela Forever (Nacho Vigalondo)
When Nicolás (Henry Golding) wakes from his dream, Daniela (Beatrice Grannò) is gone. It wasn’t some crazy adventure or anything, either. Just the two of them remembering the first time they met. The playback is imperfect. Or, at least, he thinks it is. How can we ever truly remember every little detail anyway? Or that what we thought was cool and funny didn’t actually come off as cruel? All we have is the sense of what we had. The bad times made worse and the good times made better. Our emotions are not quite clouding reality; perhaps protecting us from it. Because the memory is what lingers. It’s what we hold dear. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Eephus (Carson Lund)
If the perfect sports movie illuminates the fundamentals that make one fall in love with the game, there may be no better movie about baseball than Carson Lund’s Eephus. Structured solely around a single round of America’s national pastime, Lund’s debut feature beautifully, humorously articulates the particular nuances, rhythms, and details of an amateur men’s league game. By subverting tropes of the standard sports movie––which often captures peak physical performance in front of legions of adoring fans––Lund has crafted something far more singularly compelling. Rather than grand slams and no-hitters, there are errors aplenty and no shortage of beer guts and weathered muscles amongst the motley crew. Lund is more interested in examining the peculiar set of social codes that only apply when one is on the field, unimpeded by life’s responsibilities and entirely focused on the rules of the game. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Great Absence (Kei Chika-ura)
It could be argued that the closest relative to films about dementia is the murder mystery. There are certainly many common features: a victim and an enigmatic killer; false memories and red herrings; clues from which an identity must be pieced together; and a (usually jubilant) resolution in which said identity is revealed, if only briefly. In this sense, Kei Chika-ura’s latest feature, Great Absence, is not natural and convincing in spite of its thrilling (if not always successful) blend of Florian Zeller’s The Father and Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder, but because of it. – Oliver W. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Little Buddha (Bernardo Bertolucci)
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha returned to theaters this past spring in a 4K restoration. The film follows Jesse, a 10-year-old American boy believed to be the reincarnation of the revered Buddhist monk Lama Dorje. His story is intertwined with that of Siddartha, charting his journey to enlightenment. Bertolucci and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro filmed the two narratives using 35mm and 65mm, respectively. We spoke with Pietro Scalia, the film’s editor, who has earned two Academy Awards for his work on JFK and Black Hawk Down. Scalia has worked on a diverse range of films, from the intimate drama of Good Will Hunting to the epic scale of Gladiator. His extensive credits also include Hannibal, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Martian, and Ferrari, among others. Scalia’s approach to editing emphasizes rhythm, emotional impact, and narrative pacing. Read Lucia Senesi’s full interview.
Where to Stream: VOD
Materialists (Celine Song)
Materialists is a film with a classic screwball setup: a young, beautiful matchmaker meets the charming, rich man of her dreams on the same night she runs into her broke, handsome ex-boyfriend. But Celine Song’s sophomore feature takes a more dry, dramatic approach to explore dating in the modern world. Channeling Jane Austen, Materialists discusses relationships like a numbers game where height, income, and age are the key factors to dating success. Every moment we spend with our heroine Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is dominated by the most clinical judgments of men, women, and especially herself. When wealthy finance guy Harry (Pedro Pascal) takes her out to dinner, Lucy describes herself as a failed actress and college dropout with debt and an $80K salary (before taxes). Why be with her when he could be with someone ten years younger who doesn’t need to work for a living and has way more time to have children? This isn’t just her attitude. Nearly everyone in the film shares her point of view: men are commodities and women must fight for them, with their value decreasing each passing day. Being single is a curse on women that gets even worse once they pass the age of thirty. – Jourdain S. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Monk (Christian and Michael Blackwood)
Renowned sibling documentarians capture jazz legend Thelonious Monk in between recording sessions and after late-night gigs. An electric portrait of an enigmatic pianist, the Blackwoods’ vérité documentary zeroes in on the unpredictable actions that informed Monk’s freewheeling compositions.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Northern Lights (John Hanson and Rob Nilsson)
One of the most remarkable discoveries I witnessed at last year’s New York Film Festival was the Revivals selection Northern Lights. John Hanson and Rob Nilsson’s overlooked 1978 drama, recently revived in a gorgeous 4K restoration, captures the plight of immigrant Dakotan farmers. While its shared release year and similar logline may have one recalling Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Northern Lights makes for a fascinating counterpart as it eschews a certain sense of rapturous beauty to take a more sobering look at the reality of daily life and necessity of collective action. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: VOD
The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)
We begin with music that’s uncharacteristically tense for a Wes Anderson film––chugging cellos leading a full orchestra that’s more Mission: Impossible than Moonrise Kingdom––and opener à la Nolan blockbusters: an assassination attempt. It’s an exhilarating launch into a story that starts petering out soon after. Renowned criminal mastermind Zsa Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) sits before a gorgeously designed train car much like the off-white, wooden, burgundy, and plaid train car that will take him and his associates around Phoenicia for the rest of the movie. An unfortunate associate is crammed into the back corner. Without warning, a bomb obliterates any semblance of said corner, and we launch into The Phoenician Scheme, never to take a breath. – Luke H. (full review)
Where to Stream: Peacock
Toxic (Saulė Bliuvaitė)
It’s a shame Toxic wasn’t around for the recent excretions of body-horror discourse. Saulė Bliuvaitė’s debut feature, winner of the Golden Leopard at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, does at least as much to turn the stomach with its tablet of tapeworm eggs than either of The Substance or A Different Man‘s Faustian cures. The rub in Bliuvaitė’s film is that such a pill exists, if only for those willing to wade onto the dark web––even Googling its side effects, as the protagonist discovers, should be done with some degree of caution. The anatomical anxieties and queasy professional demands that create a market for such horrors are the subject of Bliuvaitė’s film, which follows two teenage girls living in the shadow of a Lithuanian power station whose best hope for escape––a dubiously dangled carrot of catwalk fame in Tokyo or Paris––rests on their willingness to stay matchstick-thin. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
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