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.
100 Nights of Hero (Julia Jackman)
Arabian Nights, an expansive collection of Islamic folktales, is as influential to contemporary literature and pop culture as the works of Shakespeare—an expansive text whose storytelling innovations have proved formative far beyond the fantasy genre. But instead of dozens of stories told across One Thousand and One Nights, how about a single tale across a hundred, acted out by a distractingly miscast Charli XCX as interludes between a half-baked regal love triangle which feels straight out of some budding teenage author’s Wattpad drafts? 100 Nights of Hero is adapted from a 2016 graphic novel of the same name by Isabel Greenberg, and writer-director Julia Jackman’s interpretation feels less like a radical reimagining of a foundational work of literature than a post-Bridgerton romance that lazily riffs on the many tropes it initiated, with an overarching feminist message obvious to the point of being condescending to its audience. – Alistair R. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)
After dabbling in dystopian fantasy (The Lobster) and period comedy (The Favourite), shocking us along the way with original creations (Dogtooth) and fanciful adaptations (Poor Things) alike, Yorgos Lanthimos has proven time and again that there’s not a single uncreative bone in his body. Remaking the criminally underseen Korean sci-fi comedic thriller Save the Green Planet!, he succeeds in honoring the original while putting his unique stamp on it. The result is a sleeker (if slightly paler) version of a truly bonkers film. – Zhuo-Ning Su (full review)
Where to Stream: Peacock
Cover-Up (Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus)
Three years after Venice welcomed (and awarded the Golden Lion to) Laura Poitras’s documentary about artist and activist Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, another filmic portrait by the Academy Award-winning director graces the Lido. Cover-Up, co-directed by Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, revolves around legendary journalist Seymour (Sy) Hersh and his career spanning from the 1960s to the present day. A title card announces that Poitras first approached Hersch some 20 years ago, and after having worked with Obenhaus on a few documentaries, he has finally agreed to participate in the project that is now Cover-Up. – Savina P. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay)
Near the climax of Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, two assassins––one well-dressed but dying, the other ragged but definitely alive––laid together on a kitchen floor, their hands lightly touching as Charlene’s “Never Been to Me” drifted in from a nearby radio, the lyrics barely escaping the wounded man’s mouth. That shock of counterpoint elevated what was, until then, a clinically well-executed revenge picture into something approaching the sublime. Ramsay plays that card again with less-convincing results in her long-awaited follow-up Die My Love, a visceral, coiled film about a woman in the throws of a mental breakdown. As ever, Ramsay’s soundtrack choices are equal-parts fun and unpredictable, not least David Bowie’s “Kooks” on a car radio or the director herself warbling an acoustic cover of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” over the closing credits––fitting choice for a work of toxic love and the things we do to our better halves, with little joy in the division. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI
Eden (Ron Howard)
On paper, there are few filmmakers who seem less-suited to the rigors of a project like Eden than Ron Howard. This is the grim story, after all, of real-life individuals in the late 1920s who were so troubled by the state of humankind that an escape to the Galápagos Islands seemed like the only sensible way out. This is a tale replete with deception, murder, tooth-extraction, one of the more ridiculous childbirth scenes in cinema, and, in what may be a first for Howard, male frontal nudity. (Though my memory of Cocoon is fuzzy.) – Christopher S. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Eternity (David Freyne)
How do you want to spend eternity? That’s the primary question at the heart of David Freyne’s Eternity, a high-concept relationship comedy (which he co-wrote with Patrick Cunnane) that envisions the afterlife like a never-ending theme park vacation. Instead of knocking on the pearly gates or falling into the pits of hell, the recently departed all chug into a giant, purgatorial train terminal and must decide where to live next. The choices seem overwhelming––there are beach resorts and mountain cabins, along with “Smoker’s World” or “Man-Free World”––but each soul receives an Afterlife Coordinator to help them decide. Imagine the hereafter as one big travel convention in the sky. – Jake K-S. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
French Lessons (Kyle Garrett Greenberg, Anna Maguire)
Following their paranoia-infused short Hi! You Are Currently Being Recorded, filmmakers Kyle Garrett Greenberg and Anna Maguire are back with the humorous, mixed-format French Lessons, along with an inventive way to access. Following a film executive and a desperate independent filmmaker who connect for a French lesson ahead of Cannes Film Festival, it’s an amusing take on the differing preoccupations when it comes to a life dedicated to creativity versus business pursuits. Following a festival tour including New/Next, SXSW Sydney, Miami, Chattanooga, Santa Fe International, MUBI Fest, NOAM, New Hampshire, OFF-VIFF, and more, to find out how to stream the new short film from Stupid Co, you’ll need to dial +1-833-LRN-FRNC or email [email protected]. – Jordan R.
Goodbye June (Kate Winslet)
If you read the headline of this review and are shocked that this is the first time you’re hearing that not only did Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet direct a movie, but it’s being released right now and in two weeks will be streaming globally on Netflix, you’re likely not alone. An actor with a pedigree such as Winslet making their first move into the director’s chair would normally come with enough pomp and circumstance to achieve a big film festival premiere, likely at a Sundance or TIFF—or if you’re Scarlett Johansson, Harris Dickinson, or Kristen Stewart earlier this year, the loftiest of positions at Cannes. At worst, if you’re an actor of even the most marginal acclaim, you can at least count on a premiere at Tribeca before your film maybe gets a general release two years later. – Mitchell B. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Nuremberg (James Vanderbilt)
Stanley Kubrick, in one of the most famous director disses ever, remarked that the failing of his friend Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List was that the Holocaust was six million people being killed, while the film decided to make it about the 600 who didn’t. Though placing moral rules on film, to this writer, doesn’t always make for either an interesting conversation or cinema, one can’t help thinking of Kubrick’s line a little when looking at Nuremberg, the new film about the post-WWII tribunals that held accountable the highest-ranking, still-living Nazi commanders. Judging by the conflict between crowd-pleasing instincts and a wannabe-chilling finale, one feels the filmmakers aren’t even sure what they think the atrocity was about in general. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
Over a delicately structured, Mike Mills-ian montage of Nora Berg’s (Renate Reinsve) personal heritage––30-odd years of an Oslo native’s existence relayed in a sparse collection of seminal moments, feelings, and thoughts, then layered into the lives and characteristics of those that preceded her––the wizened voice of a grandmother ushers us into Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier’s intergenerational drama about processing (if not healing) family trauma through art. – Luke H. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Sinners (Ryan Coogler)
It’s a testament to a story that bellows about the power of art and originality that it should exist, in itself, as one. Sinners is a paragon of letting a master cook—an old-fashioned triumph of the studio system, even if that system didn’t fully believe in it. Ryan Coogler’s vision broke through all the noise and resonated with a moviegoing public that Hollywood underestimates (and ultimately misunderstands) all too often. The De Niro to his Scorsese, Michael B. Jordan’s dual-role performance is impressive, especially for all the illusion-building trickery Coogler throws his way. But what’s most dazzling is an audacious oner that compresses the history of Black American music to a mesmeric sequence. In years to come, when outlets and movie theaters (or what’s left of both) prepare their decade retrospectives, Sinners will undoubtedly stand among crowning achievements. — Kent M. W.
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (Scott Cooper)
The line “you did the best you could” is spoken at a crucial moment in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. It’s a platitude often used as a band-aid to cover up all manner of sins. But here, in writer-director-producer Scott Cooper’s Bruce Springsteen biopic (based on Warren Zanes’ book Deliver Me from Nowhere), it feels genuine. The film centers on the making of The Boss’ 1982 masterpiece Nebraska, and positions this process as a reckoning-of-sorts for the New Jersey legend. Following the stratospheric success of Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and The River in a row, we meet Bruce (a very strong Jeremy Allen White) with little left to give. His manager and producer Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong, sparsely used but great) serves as his lifeline and trusted confidante. – Dan M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Where to Land (Hal Hartley)
Much like the great slapstick auteur Preston Sturges, indie stalwart Hal Hartley has always been able to tap into the contradictions, uncertainties, and swooning emotions of a specific era much sooner than any of his contemporaries. Where to Land, Hartley’s great new film about a famed rom-com filmmaker who has reached a philosophical and moral crossroads, does just that for this stressed-out moment in history. Mixing Hartley’s patented machine-gun banter with a deep sense of empathy and surprise, the film seamlessly critiques modern America’s culture of assumption and opportunism that threatens to derail us from seeing what matters most in our daily lives. Where to Land is a true marvel of a movie: equally enthralled by wind in the trees and a momentary pause in conversation, patiently rediscovering a calm power that resides in-between the chaos of 21st-century existence. – Glenn H. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
Kino Film Collection
I Am Cuba
VOD
Fackham Hall