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.
Drift (Anthony Chen)
Singaporean director Anthony Chen’s English-language debut follows a West African refugee, Jacqueline (Cynthia Erivo), who washes up on a Greek island homeless, cashless, and friendless. She doesn’t speak until ten minutes into Drift, taking in her surroundings, plagued by a fear that’s nestled deep within her. Understandably, she’s scared of everyone and everything, living in a cave, eating whatever she can find, making money by washing tourists’ feet on the beach. – Michael F. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
A Drifting Up (Jacob Lee)
Coming off antidepressants for the first time, young London-based filmmaker Jacob Lee decided to dance his way through it and record the process. This BAFTA-nominated short documentary captures his joyful interactions with passersby in an uplifting portrait of recovery.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)
In The Grand Budapest Hotel we can sense both a progression and summarizing of the entire Wes Anderson canon: an immediate, overriding narrative and stylistic conflation of The Royal Tenenbaums’ literary qualities and Moonrise’s storybook leanings; the bandit antics of Fox; Bottle Rocket’s rabble-rousing spirit; the looming ghosts of never-to-be-recovered loved ones which so significantly drove Rushmore; The Darjeeling Limited’s always-searching eye for foreign landscapes; even, at its climax, The Life Aquatic’s gun fight. Yet despite the clear consistency in form, structure, theme, tone, and sensibility which run through them all, The Grand Budapest Hotel has the quality of being often overstuffed, at once emotionally devastating in a manner few outside his corner have seemed to master and, yet, the slightest bit slack in fulfilling much of a cogent throughline. – Nick N. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Lousy Carter (Bob Byington)
What a year it’s been for David Krumholtz. In 2023, the actor has added a Tony-winning play (Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt) and a box-office sensation (you know which one) to his resumé. In both cases that affable face, so often in the margins, nudged toward center stage. Krumholtz goes one further with deadbeat comedy Lousy Carter, a premiere in competition at the Locarno Film Festival wherein the actor plays a graduate lecturer who learns he has six months to live and decides to try seducing a student. It’s less creepy than it sounds and, at its best, it’s all his. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Mambar Pierrette (Rosine Mbakam)
Cameroonian filmmaker Rosine Mbakam uses familiar spaces as microcosms of society. After capturing her subjects in one setting, such as a mall in Chez Jolie Coiffure (2018) and the protagonist’s home in Delphine’s Prayers (2021), her narrative-feature debut Mambar Pierrette foregrounds the eponymous tailor (portrayed elegantly by Mbakam’s cousin, Pierrette Aboheu) and love for her complex family while attempting to make ends meet in Douala. She asserts a determined work ethic in her sewing, attracting a breadth of customers just large enough for Pierrette and co. to get by. – Edward F. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Peasants (DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman)
After 2017’s Loving Vincent and Toronto International Film Festival world premiere The Peasants, it is clear that DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman have developed a gorgeously distinct, personal, ludicrously involved style of filmmaking. Loving Vincent, a clever biography of Vincent Van Gogh, was sold as “the world’s first fully painted feature film,” and indeed it was. The painting process returns in The Peasants, an adaptation of Władysław Reymont’s early 1900s, Nobel Prize–winning novel. A staggering 40,000 frames of film were painted to bring The Peasants to life. – Chris S. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Settlers (Felipe Gálvez)
The barbaric, bloody sins of the past come to define what entities govern certain land today, carried out by conquistadors and colonizers who hide behind righteous religious falsities to denigrate an indigenous population. With his directorial debut, a hauntingly conceived Chilean western The Settlers (Los Colonos), Felipe Gálvez localizes an origin story of this horror vis-a-vis the brutal genocide of the now-extinct Selk’nam people, who were native to the Patagonian region of southern Argentina and Chile. While spare early passages are narratively opaque and formally ornate to a distancing fault, the riveting second half––including a chilling reckoning with others occupying the desolate land and a well-executed structural gamble––brings profound expansion to this chilling story of atrocity. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme)
Perhaps the greatest concert film of all time, Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense recently received a much-deserved 4K 40th-anniversary theatrical release, where it amassed nearly $7M worldwide, more than during the film’s original run. Released in 1984, the film was shot in December 1983 over three nights of Talking Heads‘ performances at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater and now the new restoration has arrived digitally––the perfect entertainment to play on repeat for your next party.
Where to Stream: VOD
The Taste of Things (Trần Anh Hùng)
One of the most purely pleasurable films of last year, Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things brings Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel together one of the best culinary cinematic experiences since Babette’s Feast. Rory O’Connor said in his review, “Last time Benoît Magimel appeared in the Cannes competition, a vision in Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, he played a foreign diplomat who stalked an island of French Polynesia like a trashy king. If Serra’s otherworldy film told a cautionary tale about feckless Euro-decadence, Magimel’s latest is more like a revelry. Adapted from Marcel Rouf’s 1924 novel The Passionate Epicure, The Taste of Things is a film about the pleasures of preparing food and consuming it, the idea of cooking as an act of giving and even of love––if a leitmotif exists in this film’s script, it is the sigh of ecstasy.”
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
Hulu
Montana Story
Paint
She Came to Me
Kino Film Collection
Hold Me Tight
MGM
The Boys in the Boat
Netflix
When You Finish Saving the World
Prime Video
Beetlejuice
The Fugitive
Tubi
Experimenter
The Guilty
Tangerine
VOD
Earlybird