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.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Nia DaCosta)
In 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the Jimmy gang is back, led by Jack O’Connell in a role that oddly mirrors his Irish vampire villain in last year’s Sinners. They’ve taken Spike (Alfie Williams), the pre-teen protagonist of the previous entry, now separated from his parents, under their wing. They ended the last film saving Spike’s life from the infected, but it’s soon revealed they have nefarious means to install themselves as new leaders of a post-apocalyptic society, among them the brutal torture of any other survivors who won’t conform. The rather unpleasant violence in these sequences is a different beast than all the goofy spine-ripping (still here) of Boyle’s predecessor. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Avatar: Fire and Ash (James Cameron)
James Cameron closes a chapter on big filmmaking at a time when his maximalist spirit is in increasingly short supply. Few filmmakers have the dexterity to juggle a kitchen-sink approach with clarity of storytelling; even fewer manage the level of care and precision he’s hellbent on preserving. With two films’ worth of pixel-perfect world-building, this outing to Pandora trades table-setting for character depth. Shockingly frank examinations of grief, assimilation, and cyclical violence are woven into the eye-popping spectacle, with performers old and new feeling fully comfortable in their own blue skin. Cameron remains steadfast that more is more. – Conor O.
Where to Stream: VOD
Blazing Fists (Takashi Miike)
It’s hard to say what’s more endearing about Takashi Miike these days: that the director of Audition and Ichi The Killer is still out there producing work at the same, alarming rate (his last release, a TV movie remake of the long-running series Unfettered Shogun, released four weeks ago) or the clear sense that he’s still enjoying himself. Miike’s one-hundred-and-somethingth film, Blazing Fists, is a story about honor and loyalty that opens on Ikutu (Danhi Kinoshita), a youth punching another through a glass door. We’re in a juvenile detention center, and this showdown will lead Ikutu and the man he’s defending, Ryoma (Kaname Yoshizawa), on the road to becoming best friends. This relationship will continue in the outside world, where a shared dream of competing in a televised UFC style event called Breaking Down awaits. Yagura is the film’s sometimes narrator. He is also, unbeknownst to his new pal, serving time for holding up Ikutu’s dad with a flick knife. If that’s not good, honest pulp, I’m not sure what is. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Little Trouble Girls (Urška Djukić)
This enchanting debut by director Urška Djukić follows introverted 16‑year‑old Lucija and her fellow Catholic school choir members as they navigate their emerging identities and sexual impulses within a traditional, somewhat out‑of‑time society. Told from a distinctly female perspective, the film resists judgment in favor of quiet observation. – Lucia S.
Where to Stream: Kino Film Collection
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (Christopher McQuarrie)
“I’m going to miss being disreputable,” Ving Rhames’ Luther Stickell grumbles to Tom Cruise’s now-iconic superspy after their first of many impossible missions. It’s 1996 and these brazen upstarts sip beer outside a pub, preparing to part ways forever. “Well, Luther,” Ethan assures with a smirk, “if it makes you feel any better, I’ll always think of you that way.” It’s a lovely, quiet moment, germinating the earnest warmth that makes Mission: Impossible endure. That endurance, longevity, and the ever-increasing scope they persist under both fuel and plague Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. In its aims, director Chris McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendersen’s script serves as a capstone to this monumental action franchise. – Conor O. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow (Julia Loktev)
Recipient of the 2025 IFSN Advocate Award, Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow is an intimate, intricate documentary capturing Putin’s assault on independent journalism in Russia, which was only exacerbated by his full-on attack on Ukraine. The film captures Loktev documenting a group of her friends fighting the good fight running TV Rain, Russia’s last remaining independent news channel. Read Luke Hicks’ review from the NYFF world premiere here and Nick Newman’s interview with Loktev here.
Where to Stream: MUBI
Natchez (Suzannah Herbert)
Suzannah Herbert’s Tribeca-winning, Oscar-shortlisted documentary Natchez surveys a small Mississippi town that was once a major fixture on the slave trade route and is now a stopping ground for antebellum historical tours. Capturing the complicated divide between those trying to tell a white-washed, quaint view of history and others aiming to tell the full picture, a riveting, immersive portrait of excavating the darkest corners of the past emerges.
Where to Stream: VOD
Pillion (Harry Lighton)
Dogs Don’t Wear Pants finally has a companion piece. Harry Lighton tackles the duality of sexual attraction head-on in a gay sub-dom debut that shocks, tickles, delights, and devastates in equal measure (but not without pulling viewers out of the emotional quicksand it creates). In his edgiest career turn, Harry Melling plays Colin, a hushed, soft-smiling, barbershop-quartet-singing submissive who’s yet to find a man that really gets him—a bad biker clad in tight black leather that holds him by the thick chain around his neck and gives the dog the open couch seat while making him sit on the floor. Enter: Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), the tall-walking, rarely talking epitome of sizzling-hot dominance. The desired degradation opens Colin’s world as wide and willfully as his mouth, offering a deeply romantic enlightenment angle on the BDSM lifestyle that few films have deigned to take. – Luke H.
Where to Stream: VOD
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Quay Brothers)
Timothy and Stephen Quay have developed an entirely unique style in the world of stop-motion animation: vigorously kinetic yet meticulously controlled; balletic in its interweaving of aural and visual rhythms; full of the sort of trivia and esoterica that fascinated Borges and Pessoa; and given to looped sequences of pure, sensual, cinematographic abstraction. Their latest production, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, which draws generously from Bruno Schulz’s novel of the same name, adds yet more stylistic oddities to the foregoing list, albeit in a more conventional, narrativized context. – Oliver W. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Sinners (Ryan Coogler)
Yet Sinners mainly feels so refreshing when this richness of text can easily be overlooked for enjoyment of an unholy hybrid of period drama and horror freakout, Coogler showing as much reverence for the genre as he does the centuries of music which guide this story (and Ludwig Göransson’s excellent score). Most importantly, he remembers that the archetypal vampire tale is an inherently horny one, and he pulls some tricks from Luca Guadagnino’s book for making sexually explicit stories which play even more erotically from what they withhold. Every sex scene features fully clothed actors, but all contain dialogue, or specific kinky details, which serve to remind us that, Dracula onwards, the best vampire stories are carnal ones where characters’ lust is baked into the premise. – Alistair R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Small, Slow But Steady (Shô Miyake)
What drops of cinema are still to be wrung from boxing? The new Japanese drama Small, Slow But Steady is about as calm and modest as its title suggests, but there are surprising swings within those margins. Aesthetically it takes some cues from certain films of the 1960s, notably those of the late Yasujirō Ozu, but its drama could hardly be more contemporary. Gleamed, if not quite ripped, from the headlines, it partially tells the true story of Keiko Ogasawara, a female boxer who went pro in 2009, becoming the first hearing-impaired person in Japan to ever do so, then won her first fight with a shock first round knockout. Can’t say I’ve seen that one before. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Suspended Time (Olivier Assayas)
The memes won’t let you forget, but 2019 was half a decade ago. That was also the year Olivier Assayas’ Wasp Network––an odd return to the realm of his TV series Carlos, and subsequently picked up by Narcos-era Netflix––premiered at the Venice Film Festival. That was Assayas’ last feature, making the intervening period (Irma Vep for HBO aside) the longest dry patch of his 38-year career. The dexterous director returns this week to the Berlinale with the aptly titled Suspended Time, a personal essay wrapped up in an effortless comedy that shows no signs whatsoever of long gestation. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI
The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold)
Doomed to be marketed as “a musical by The Brutalist team,” The Testament of Ann Lee asserts itself by treating its Great-Awakened, chest-thumping, celibate subject with patient observation rather than campy ridicule. Mona Fastvold’s version of the Shaker story invites comparisons to other messianic, inward-directed, intermittently Dionysian religious movements that have lots of opinions about sex—like, say, the Pentecostals, the New Agers, or Silicon Valley’s Burners. But it ultimately depicts the United States—famously a safe haven for mild heretics and the weirdest Christian variants—as a nation born of ecstatic figures like Ann Lee. It also certainly helps that, when we finally get to all the Shaking, Testament‘s songs are pretty damn good. – Z. W. L.
Where to Stream: Hulu, Disney+
The Voice of Hind Rajab (Kaouther Ben Hania)
In January 2024, the Palestine Red Crescent Society received an emergency call from Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl traveling in a car with her aunt, uncle, and cousins in Gaza City. The Israeli army fired upon their vehicle and killed everyone but Rajab, who managed to call for help while pinned between the corpses of her relatives. After spending hours on the phone, the Red Crescent was able to coordinate an ambulance to rescue her, which was then destroyed once it arrived. Rajab and the two ambulance workers sent to save her were found dead 12 days later, after Israeli forces withdrew from the area. – C.J. P. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Weapons (Zach Cregger)
For as long as we’ve known about Weapons, writer-director Zach Cregger’s hotly anticipated follow-up to his 2022 blackly comic splatter sensation Barbarian, we have heard endlessly that it’s the supernatural horror genre’s epic equivalent to Magnolia––not exactly the most marketable elevator pitch, but one designed to make the average cinephile sit up and take notice. Cregger himself has done little to dissuade such comparison, citing PTA’s operatic Los Angeles drama as his biggest inspiration, and thanks to a mysterious marketing campaign, it’s arriving on screens shrouded in secrecy, coupled with only the vague promise of a bold vision from an emerging auteur. If knives do fittingly come out for Weapons, then it’s because Cregger has only nailed the sprawling, ambitious, genre-hopping nature of that ensemble drama without ever getting to grips with the emotions driving his flawed characters while, wherever possible, shying away from exploring their moral murkiness. It’s an entertaining film, but not a particularly resonant one considering the charged subject matter; it’s structured like a parlor trick, keeping one at a deliberate remove until working out how its constituent pieces fit together rather than caring about the people within them. – Alistair R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Wuthering Heights (Emerald Fennell)
Is the sight of the human tongue really so shocking? Were 1996 audiences ducking in their seats à la L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat when Matthew Lillard kept jutting his out like a jackass in Scream? Judging from Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, we’re meant to react like so to the sight of Jacob Elordi’s tongue in many of the film’s erotically charged scenes. That is perhaps a microcosm of this new adaptation’s failed transgression. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
The Criterion Channel
Antitrust
Arbitrage
Bad Day at Black Rock
Berlin Express
Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps
The Devil’s Advocate
Disclosure
The Elephant Man
The Firm
Harold and Maude
High Noon
The International
Jane by Charlotte
King Kong
Lingua Franca
The Man Who Fell to Earth
Michael Clayton
Nightfall
No Ordinary Man
Out of the Past
Primal Fear
Queens of Drama
Return to Reason
RoboCop
So Pretty
Still Processing
Stranger Eyes
Underground
Wall Street
Yeast
Hulu
Pizza Movie
Metrograph at Home
Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued
MUBI
Bamako
Bye Bye Brazil
Clifford
Dear Diary
See You Next Tuesday
Showgirls
Something Wild
State of Grace
Thank You Very Much
UHF
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Prime Video
Crime 101