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.
Afire (Christian Petzold)
Writing recently about the introduction of video umpires in baseball, of all things, Zach Helfand was skeptical: “accuracy is not the same as enjoyment,” he wrote, “baseball is meant to kill time, not maximize it.” The best films of German director Christian Petzold do both, though you sense his heart might belong to the latter. Petzold’s latest, Afire, unfurls with all the page-turning seduction of a gripping novella. It stars Thomas Schubert as a struggling writer who travels with a friend to a secluded house near the Baltic Sea. Their car breaks down. They encounter a beautiful woman. Somewhere in the distance, a forest fire rages. Soon, inevitably, another burns inside. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniels)
A general rule film students learn the first few weeks of their intro class is that a film teaches you how to watch it within the first five minutes. Well, most. The latest outing from Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) throws everything it’s got against the wall and, if it doesn’t stick after a minute, turns itself on its head and shoots its characters into the next parallel universe. Marvel opened up this can of worms and if there can be countless Spider-Men, why can’t Evelyn Wang, a Chinese-American laundromat owner and collector of random hobbies, also have a parallel existence she’s just starting to tap into? – John F. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Evil Dead Rise (Lee Cronin)
Like the latest Scream installment, Evil Dead Rise takes its horror into an urban landscape, grappling with demonic forces––e.g. motherhood––that are sometimes just as horrific as the kills in Lee Cronin’s twisted black comedy. If not without a few false notes on the dramatic side, its horror delivers all the bodily fluid you’d expect in a rousing crowd-pleaser that makes a mostly worthy follow-up to Fede Álvarez’s stylish, ultra-violent 2013 edition. That film took the franchise in a new, perhaps too-cruel direction from Rami’s more playful B-movie style. The latest installment reframes its humor as much darker, with a take on caregiving and the evil mother in the vein of Carrie. Cronin elevates the material into something newer and edgier than Rami’s campy, handmade-looking originals. Perhaps there’s no going back once studios are involved, and Evil Dead Rise’s production design by Nick Bassett is nearly as elaborate as any Oscar nominee. – John F. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Little Boy Loon (Kevin Bay & Julia Thompson)
At the edge of the woods in rural Maine, a young boy communes with loons. This ten-minute documentary offers a window into the life of George Ellis, who has an unusual talent for bird calls. Filmmakers Kevin Bay and Julia Thompson linger in the unique quality of George’s entrancing voice before he transitions from being a child into a teenager, capturing a fleeting moment that will imminently change once he hits puberty.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Little Richard: I Am Everything (Lisa Cortés)
Little Richard: I Am Everything is positively bursting with unforgettable anecdotes, so much so that choosing one standout is virtually impossible. So perhaps offering a personal favorite is more sensible: it was the late ’60s and Richard was performing in the States on a bill that included Janis Joplin. The latter appeared first and destroyed the audience with her passion and verve. Richard, watching from the side of the stage, told a cohort to get to the hotel and retrieve his “mirror suit.” Challenge accepted: when his performance began the lights reflected beautifully off the suit. He was a living mirror ball, resplendent, transcendent. Joplin, watching from the wings, could only utter “Oh my God.” – Chris S. (full review)
Where to Stream: Max
Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)
This film’s bait-and-switch, Oppenheimer’s (and Oppenheimer’s) moment of reckoning, might immediately be christened the single greatest sequence Christopher Nolan has ever directed. Chalk this response to experience, the ease with developing certain doubts after spending most of your life knowing his films and noting consistent soft spots or judgmental lapses––his overly expository dialogue, his great insistence on musical bombasity, a too-telegraphed emotional thrum against which his outstanding gifts for pacing, stakes-setting, clockwork plotting mechanics can chafe. It’s the muddying of this exact alchemical tension that briefly, brilliantly blows Oppenheimer off a manicured axis; it’s why I didn’t think Nolan had in him this moment positioned so precisely between horror and awe, a flash of great psychic terror, a momentarily stunning realization of one man’s mind grafting violence and barbarity onto the human race. Had Oppenheimer stopped there (about an hour before its conclusion) its victories would’ve been less contested. – Nick N. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Master Gardener (Paul Schrader)
There is a paradox at the heart of Master Gardener. In their respective worlds—one of abstinence and iconography; the other of money and risk—priests and gamblers are kind of sexy. In their own ways, so are gigolos, drug dealers, porn stars, sex addicts, even taxi drivers. Gardeners? For all their charms, maybe less so. The latest from Paul Schrader rounds out an idiosyncratic trilogy: without breaking the mould, and for three films in a row, the director has placed his man-in-a-room archetype into the fraught, divided milieu of contemporary America. With First Reformed and Card Counter, Schrader could bank on audiences already being attuned to the quasi-culty vibes of his characters’ extreme callings. Master Gardener, the story of a diligent horticulturist, has a bit more heavy lifting to do;
Where to Stream: Hulu
Moon 66 Questions (Jacqueline Lentzou)
Consider an odd occurrence: my generation––the millennials––are really feeling tarot and astrology at the moment. There are many pop-psychological interpretations for this: trying to distinguish ourselves from the stricter religious beliefs of our elders, or growing up amidst an economic decline that has made our futures foggier and more provisional-seeming. But there’s an aesthetic explanation that chimes with the influencer-driven social media landscape of TikTok and Instagram, and which rising Greek filmmaker Jacqueline Lentzou’s debut feature Moon, 66 Questions seems one of the first to properly capture. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: Film Movement+
Minari (Lee Isaac Chung)
There is no shortage of films that depict the pains of assimilation and the pursuit of the American Dream for a more promising future. It’s been customary for these stories to tell of journeys from another country to a metropolis somewhere across the land of the free. When it comes to the family of Minari, however, they’ve already been living the United States for some time, carving out a life for themselves on the West Coast. Yet Jacob (Steven Yeun) has dreams beyond separating chickens into male and female bins as a cog in industrialized farming and so he moves his Korean-American family to the rural outskirts of Arkansas where he and his wife Monica (Yeri Han) continue the same job, all while attempting to build a more fruitful living with their own farm featuring Korean produce. All the joys and struggles of this journey are captured with a keen, warm tenderness by Lee Isaac Chung, whose carefully-considered drama deserves to be a breakthrough for the writer-director, who now has five features to his name. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Stamped from the Beginning (Roger Ross Williams)
If your education was only gleaned from the American public school system, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks may be the only Black historical figures you know. The limited overview of the Civil Rights movement and slavery is at stake when schools, government, and other authoritative bodies whitewash dark annals of the country’s foundation in today’s direction of banning the passage of the past to future generations. Yet Academy Award winner Roger Ross Williams inhibits America’s violent chapters, taboo portions, and past Presidents from being forgotten in his newest film, Stamped From the Beginning. – Edward F. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
What Comes Around (Amy Redford)
What Comes Around is a tricky film to talk about without massive spoilers unless, of course, the eventual marketing campaign decides divulging its secrets will help them sell it. I’m hoping they ultimately choose to keep its twists and turns under wraps because going in blind adds a dimension that I’m sure playwright Scott Organ (who adapts his own “The Thing with Feathers”) intended and director Amy Redford matches. As she mentions in the press notes, What Comes Around is about provocation. It’s about telling us one thing only to transform it into another thing and spark a conversation that many of us still might not want to engage in. It’s about exploiting one’s power over another and falling prey to theirs. It’s about double standards. It’s about control and debilitating shame. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: AMC+
Also New to Streaming
Hulu
Bone Tomahawk
Brawl in Cell Block 99
Kandahar
Mandy
PBS
20 Days in Mariupol
Prime Video
The Lighthouse
Memento
VOD
Joan Baez: I Am a Noise
Mister Organ