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.
Close Your Eyes (Víctor Erice)
Eríce’s latest is the ultimate cinephile catnip: the triumphant return of a director known to only make masterpieces, a film filled with in-group references and nods to cinema history (including a lengthy performance of a song from a Howard Hawks film), and an ending that hinges on the literal power of cinema itself. Thankfully, these qualities are hardly gimmicks; there’s real pathos in this story of a missing director that’s aided by these loving reminders of what makes the seventh art so important to so many. Close Your Eyes commands a secular, cynical audience to remember that art was born out of religion and miracles can still happen if one believes. – Z.W. L.
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Creature Comforts (Nick Park)
Before Wallace & Gromit, the British animator Nick Park directed Creature Comforts, an Academy Award-winning short film in which animals air out their frustrations about living in a zoo. Park used interviews with people living in small homes and care facilities as his creatures’ monologues, exemplifying the cinematic wit he has expanded upon throughout his career at Aardman Animation.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)
A Different Man sees Sebastian Stan giving the performance of his career as Edward, an actor with neurofibromatosis who undergoes a radical facial transformation to try enhancing his life. Only the more time we spend with the man, the more we see how this surface procedure can’t alter who he is deep down. Aaron Schimberg presents a multi-faceted look at not only disability, but identity at large, how these superficial alterations mean nothing when we don’t actualize change from within, and how much of our lives are rooted in perception––our perception of others, our perception of self, and our assumptions about how other people are perceiving us. – Mitchell B.
Where to Stream: Max
Plan 75 (Chie Hayakawa)
The alternate present of Chie Hayakawa’s debut barely registers as a dystopia, despite its plain and obvious darkness. Japan has the world’s fastest-aging population; birth rates continue to plummet, which has plunged the country into a quiet existential crisis for the best part of a decade. The first-time filmmaker explores this via proposing the most extreme conceit, a voluntary euthanasia program for anybody over 75, but despite fixating on the soulless bureaucracy tasked with carrying out the scheme––making the bleakest reality into one that’s strikingly mundane, like an inversion of Kore-eda’s After Life––it very easily finds humanity in the face of despair. Perhaps this is why it never feels like a dystopian narrative; it’s haunting, but never hopeless. – Alistair R.
Where to Stream: OVID.tv
Queer (Luca Guadagnino)
Building on the strength of Justin Kuritzkes’ script, which takes bold creative leaps to map what’s left unsaid in William S. Burroughs’ feverishly enigmatic novella, Guadagnino crafted a film adaptation that not just does justice to but unlocks and expands an iconic text. By turns goofy, erotic, and transcendently sad, it’s a tonal and emotional shapeshifter that taps into the bottomless solitude of queer love. Drew Starkey gave a star-making performance while Daniel Craig disappeared into the role of a tragic everyman, cursed with an unquenchable need to connect. A hallucinatory, revelatory piece of cinema that touches on something real. – Zhuo-Ning Su
Where to Stream: VOD
A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)
From one angle, A Real Pain has all the features of a classic road-trip buddy comedy. On a Jewish heritage tour through Warsaw while visiting their recently deceased grandmother’s home, cousins David (a familiarly straight-laced Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (a familiarly squirmy, glib Kieran Culkin) butt heads, break rules, and reassess their relationship across the city. From another, Eisenberg’s perceptive second feature functions as a somber meditation on family history and generational trauma––the kind that produces fractured, unfiltered conversations about purpose, grief, and death that enlighten and enrage in equal measure. “I love him. I hate him. I want to be him. I want to kill him,” David says about Benji at one point. It’s only natural for a trip like this to inspire ambivalence. The movie makes it a special gift. – Jake K-S.
Where to Stream: Hulu
Red Rooms (Pascal Plante)
Part-subversive courtroom thriller, part-Demonlover-inspired satire on how technology has fed our most taboo addictions, all-parts irresistible, I don’t think any film will see its cult following grow in size by the end of the decade quite like Red Rooms. I was initially confused by widespread comparisons to David Fincher, beyond this being an icy take on the serial-killer genre, but in the months since my first viewing, it’s dawned on me: much like the audiences who have Mandela effect-ed themselves into believing you see Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box in Se7en, this is a movie which gets its power from affording the viewer space to illustrate the most gruesome images for themselves. Without a clearer view of those to anchor the story, the worldview and sympathies of Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) remain impenetrable, her every action––from a friendship with a serial-killer “groupie” to the most ill-advised fancy dress costume in history––an act of violence. Without a single drop of blood, Red Rooms still feels destined to be described as one of the most depraved thrillers in history; I haven’t been able to shake it since seeing it, and quite frankly I don’t want to. – Alistair R.
Where to Stream: Shudder
Also New to Streaming
AMC+
Memoir of a Sail
Hulu
Petite Maman
Kino Film Collection
The Divine Order
Taking Venice
MUBI (free for 30 days)
Buddy
Los Reyes
The Watchman
Netflix
Back in Action
Hereditary
Prime Video
B’twixt Now and Sunrise – The Authentic Cut
The Brothers Bloom
The Immigrant
Unstoppable
VOD
Ernest Cloe: Lost and Found
In the Shadow of Beirut
My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock