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.
Age of Panic (Justine Triet)
In her feature debut, recent Palme D’Or Winner Justine Triet charts a young French couple’s marital drama against the backdrop of 2012’s presidential election. Fusing fiction and vérité filmmaking tactics, it stars beloved French actors Vincent Macaigne and Laetitia Dosch, as well as Arthur Harari, Triet’s parter and co-screenwriter on her latest film Anatomy of a Fall, which took the top prize at Cannes this year and is arriving in U.S. theaters, courtesy NEON, today.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (Kelly Fremon Craig)
Like Judy Blume’s treasured young adult classic, Kelly Fremon Craig’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret begins in 1970 with 11-year-old Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson) getting the worst news any New York City-raised child can get: her family is moving to New Jersey. It’s not only that Margaret will have to leave behind her wise-cracking grandmother Sylvia (Kathy Bates) or her friends or school, but that being 11 years old often means everything is the end of the world. The crushing despair that makes adolescence feel like a rueful eternity is Fremon Craig’s specialty. – Fran H. (full review)
Where to Stream: Starz
Deception (Arnaud Desplechin)
One of the most curious developments in world cinema the last handful of years is a general dismissal of Arnaud Desplechin here in the United States. His Cannes opener Ismael’s Ghosts came and went without much fanfare and his follow-up, the entertaining procedural Oh Mercy!, didn’t even get distribution. After premiering at Cannes, his riveting Philip Roth adaptation Deception, starring Léa Seydoux and Denis Polydalès, marks the best cinematic translation of the author’s work and has now finally seen the light of day here courtesy of a MUBI release. Nick Newman recently caught up with Desplechin to discuss this latest project, and you can read the full interview here.
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Fremont (Babak Jalali)
In Fremont, Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is often alone. She lives in a small apartment in Fremont, California, commuting each day to her job in a fortune cookie factory in San Francisco. She has a single friend that works there with her. Donya splits time between her apartment, the factory, and a therapist’s office, in hopes of receiving sleeping pills. Donya is an Afghan refugee, once a translator for the U.S. Army and now living among a community of other Afghans in the Bay Area. She’s reserved, and Zada plays this isolation with a shy smile easily formed on her face. The government discarded Donya, left without much money, insurance, or the necessary means to make any sort of meaningful change to a somewhat limited, isolated existence. Director Babak Jalali’s fourth feature is sly, droll, finding humor in the darkness surrounding Donya. When she meets with her therapist – a curious, sad Gregg Turkington – he spends the majority of their sessions talking about his favorite immigrant story, White Fang, a book which only grows in their shared estimation by the film’s end. When Donya is given a promotion as a fortune writer, she takes this as an opportunity to meet someone new, to possibly give more of herself to another person. – Michael F. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Immigrant (James Gray)
Set in 1921 New York, The Immigrant is writer-director James Gray‘s sprawling tale of an American dream gone awry. Immaculate production design and stunning cinematography by Darius Khondji evoke the era-appropriate atmosphere in a manner not at all dissimilar from Gordon Willis‘ design of The Godfather Part II. The final effect is a film laden with nostalgia that feels ripped right from the past, making way for its own unique examination of a transformative period in American history. Known for his character-rich stories, Gray weaves a compelling yarn of two Polish sisters who encounter unforeseen complications when trying to immigrate at Ellis Island: a parable about what makes the United States a complex paradox of capitalist dreams and hopes held both by everyday citizens and those aspiring to become one. – Raffi A. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
It Follows (David Robert Mitchell)
A teenage girl, captured through a static wide shot, runs through a quaint Detroit suburb, her body dwarfed by its trees and middle-class homes. The sense that something is not as it seems becomes realized quite quickly. This prologue, while one of the most formally well-executed sequences in the film, sets up a certain expectation, and luckily It Follows isn’t so much interested in that now-tired the-evil-that-lurks-under-the-surface-of-small-towns brand, but rather its invasion onto the iconography of it. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (Christophe McQuarrie)
As table-setting goes, it’s all just as sweaty as the film’s lengthy title, even for the relative lunacy of this franchise. Despite that, Dead Reckoning Part One acquits itself incredibly well––not only in the fact that it’s doling out exposition for two films, but also how it rewards the hulking setup with a breezy, exhilarating payout at each of its globetrotting locales. This series has always championed and thrived on the variety of its aesthetics, wearing as many masks as its superspy hero. Much like he did between Rogue Nation and Fallout, returning director Christopher McQuarrie does well to continue that tradition here with perhaps the most unlikely muses: Studio Ghibli. Despite some heavy, world-ending stakes, there’s a cartoonish playfulness to this Mission not seen since Ghost Protocol. Where Brad Bird evoked Wile E. Coyote, McQuarrie calls upon Castle of Cagliostro’s yellow Fiat and the early 19th-century wardrobe of Howl’s Moving Castle before building up to a coal-fired locomotive that echoes Castle in the Sky. It’s all wrapped in brightly lit framing with splashes of color that sell the far-out MacGuffin even more, and it delivers on a tender, oddball energy that could’ve been the work of Hayao Miyazaki, the Wachowskis, even Hideo Kojima. – Conor O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Starling Girl (Laurel Parmet)
Laurel Parmet’s The Starling Girl finds the first-time feature director treading well-worn terrain. Starring Eliza Scanlen and Lewis Pullman as Jem Starling and Owen Taylor, a 17-year-old and her youth pastor, respectively, the film looks at the very-Christian idea of guilt, blame, and sexual desire. Parmet, who also penned the script, crafts a young woman who wants to explore, without the best role models, the struggle to reconcile her actions with her God. – Michael F. (full review)
Where to Stream: Paramount+, Showtime
Also New to Streaming
AMC+
Lakota Nation vs. the United States
Hulu
Dalíland
A Lot of Nothing
Prime Video
The Burial
Crawl
Delicatessen
Mister America
Renfield
VOD
It Lives Inside
The Origin of Evil