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.
Army of the Dead (Zack Snyder)
For the first time since his Dawn of the Dead retread, Snyder livens up the frame with a more expansive color palette and localizes his stakes to a group of diverse mercenaries lacking any superhuman skills. He even follows the early blueprint of his 2004 adaptation, which opens with a frantic zombie attack and quickly pivots into a montage explaining the origins and scope of the epidemic. After all those years building out worlds of comic-book proportion, Snyder’s latest tribute to the undead feels like an emergence from hibernation. – Jake K. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Drunk Bus (Brandon LaGanke and John Carlucci)
Watch an exclusive clip above.
Set in a time before Uber, smartphones, and mass social networking, Brandon LaGanke and John Carlucci’s Drunk Bus is a nostalgic look at college life in small-town Kent, Ohio. Set largely on a bus that makes the rounds between the Greek houses, dorms, and bars, Drunk Bus is far from an original film but it’s the kind of cinematic comfort food that you might invite a few friends over to watch in your cramped dorm room. If you ever had that kind of college experience, especially in dead of winter with some friends and some snacks, this movie will probably make you nostalgic for those kinds of nights. – John F. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Dry (Robert Connolly)
Aaron Falk (Eric Bana) wasn’t ever planning on coming back. Leaving wasn’t his choice, but at a certain point the present replaces the past. Hearing that his best friend from high school killed his wife and son before turning the gun on himself wasn’t therefore going to change his mind. If anything, knowing that truth and the fact that Luke was gone might have been the final nail as far as never returning at all. But that’s when the card came with a cryptic message more or less blackmailing Aaron into attending the funeral. It was sent by Luke’s father and stated that he knew they lied twenty years ago. What was the lie? We don’t yet know. Whatever it was, though, it worked. Aaron was heading home. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Last Days (James Moll)
Executive produced by Steven Spielberg, James Moll’s 1998 Best Documentary winner The Last Days has been remastered and is now on Netflix. The Holocaust documentary intimately and harrowingly recounts the stories of five Hungarian survivors through talking head interviews, archival footage, and trips back to their homes, ghettos, and concentration camps. Considering we’re now three-fourths of a century removed from the horrors of WWII yet fascism still pervades, the personal access to its subjects makes the documentary an essential time capsule. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: Netflix
MLK/FBI (Sam Pollard)
MLK/FBI shows the lengths J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI went to “neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader,” according to a bureau memo from 1963. Sam Pollard’s concise new documentary wrestles with King’s legacy as a Black Christian-pacifist freedom fighter and philanderer. If the last noun makes you tense up, the documentary is doing its job. The FBI’s ruthless campaign to discredit MLK Jr. with dirt on his affairs is at the center of Pollard’s story. It poses two questions: do King’s affairs discredit his legacy? And was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI acting outside the bounds of the law, or as an apparatus of the political order? Using research from David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Dr. King, testimonials from King’s inner circle, and recently declassified FBI documents, MLK/FBI shows––despite the FBI’s best efforts––the substance of King’s legacy is not his affairs, but his righteous cause for equality. – Josh E. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
The Personal History of David Copperfield (Armando Iannucci)
David Copperfield (Dev Patel) has a story to tell. It begins with his cute, precocious little self (Jairaj Varsani) making mom laugh and nanny Mrs. Peggotty (Daisy May Cooper) laugh even harder. He’s a headstrong boy with dreams of joy thanks to the overflowing love shown to him by everyone but his aunt (Tilda Swinton’s Betsey Trotwood) … for now. Like most widowed women of thirty with an estate in the Victorian Era, however, remarrying is a foregone conclusion for Ms. Copperfield. Enter the viciously domineering Mr. Murdstone (Darren Boyd) and his sister Jane (Gwendoline Christie), an untenable atmosphere for David, and the first layover on a memorably arduous life by way of child labor in a bottling factory. It gets worse before better and then worse still.- Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: HBO Max
Riders of Justice (Anders Thomas Jensen)
Anders Thomas Jensen’s entertaining rollercoaster of a film Riders of Justice follows a soldier named Markus (Mads Mikkelsen) who risks it all to take revenge on the criminals that may or may not have had something to do with the untimely death his beloved wife. Although this film is neither genre-defying nor age-defining, its touching message is executed methodically. – Tim B. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Some Kind of Heaven (Lance Oppenheim)
The draws of living inside The Villages, the largest over-55 retirement community in the country, are readily apparent. For the nearly 115,000 veterans planted within the insulated Floridian suburban sprawl, there is no reason to be bored with life. Its complex contains golf courses and pickleball courts, swimming pools and volleyball beaches, acting and dance classes and plenty of tricked out golf carts. The sherbert sunset backdrops each night suggest this place is paradise. – Jake K. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Spring Blossom (Suzanne Lindon)
It takes great maturity and confidence to make a film about the emergence of a young woman’s sexuality that also dares to ask complex, provocative questions while understanding there are no simple answers. Suzanne Lindon is such a filmmaker, and her brisk, entertaining debut Spring Blossom is such a film. Lindon directed, wrote, and stars in this remarkably assured story of a 16-year-old Parisian who falls for an older man. Though Blossom is a bit slight at just 73 minutes and sometimes prone to posing too many questions, this TIFF entry heralds the arrival of a major international talent. – Chris S. (full review)
Where to Stream: Virtual Cinemas
State Funeral (Sergei Loznitsa)
Prolific Ukranian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa, continuing the found footage documentary style of latest efforts Maidan, The Trial, and The Event, composes a chronology of the four days of mourning that followed Stalin’s death. Composed of rarely seem archival footage–shot for Soviet film effort The Great Farewell, that would be banned before release by members of the new government–Loznitsa resurfaces the ambience of despair shared by the leader’s subjects. In doing so, he immerses the audience in an ephemeral moment of collective trauma and separates the funeral from its immediate history, in turn allowing for modern interpretations of Stalin’s regime and its eventual legacy in Soviet history. – Jason O. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Supernova (Harry Macqueen)
Death feels like an inevitability in the road trip the English director depicts here, whether that is the physical reality of no longer being alive or gradually losing all the memories that define one’s personhood. Centered on Sam (Colin Firth) and Tusker (Stanley Tucci), we follow their journey through the English countryside en route to a piano recital that Sam has been invited to perform at. Over the course of their road trip in an old RV, they celebrate their years of love together, reunite with family members for a party and, most importantly, confront the inescapable reality of Tusker’s dementia getting worse. – Logan K. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Also New to Streaming
The Criterion Channel
Festivals
Human Rights Watch Film Festival
MUBI (free for 30 days)
Virtual Cinemas
VOD