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.
2025 Sundance Film Festival
While Sundance Film Festival kicked off last week in Park City, those across the country can now experience the festival from home through this Sunday with online offerings. As of this publishing, there’s still online tickets available for some of my favorites of the festival, including BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, The Perfect Neighbor, Two Women, Zodiac Killer Project, OBEX, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, Cutting Through Rocks, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, and Predators. Check out all our coverage here and we’ll be sharing much more in the coming days.
Where to Stream: Sundance.org (through Sunday)
Babygirl (Halina Reijn)
Premiering with much fervor at the Venice Film Festival, Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies follow-up Babygirl finds Nicole Kidman playing a high-powered CEO who puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much-younger intern (Harris Dickinson), and which earned her Best Actress at the festival. Savina Petkova said in her review, “It’s not too early in the festival to say Reijn wrote and directed one of––if not the––most compelling films of this year’s Venice selection and deserves full praise for landing a project of this caliber while making a third feature that is as close to perfection as can be. Babygirl is billed as an erotic thriller and doesn’t waste any precious time before stating it; the very opening scene sees Romy (Kidman) climaxing, her face held in a tight close-up until she collapses on her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas).”
Where to Stream: VOD
Charli XCX: Alone Together (Bradley & Pablo)
It’s a shame pop musician Charli XCX wasn’t quarantined with anyone with formal film training during the pandemic. Alone Together, her debut feature as co-cinematographer, resists documenting a creative process she had already chronicled live on Instagram: writing, producing, and recording her new album How I’m Feeling Now with a self-imposed six-week deadline when we didn’t know exactly how long the COVID would last. Cobbled together by music video directors Bradley & Pablo, who have the task of imposing order on previously-shot footage taken from Zooms, live feeds, and Charli’s primitive “Charli Cam” (a DV camera she carries around the house like Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet), Alone Together is the ultimate act of fan service for her most devoted core, known as the Angels. As might be obvious, this is a film that is probably not for casual fans. – John F. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte)
While watching the latest take on Alexandre Dumas’ literary classic, this time by directors Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte (who just adapted Dumas’ The Three Musketeers in 2023), I wondered if I was enjoying myself for the wrong reasons. With a high budget (making it the most-expensive French film of 2024), a starry cast, and all the grandeur of a full-blown cinematic epic, The Count of Monte Cristo is big, blockbuster filmmaking of the French kind. And while these large-scale productions typically get the life taken from them by committee in Hollywood, this film’s stone-faced commitment to executing such silly spectacle makes for an uneven, mostly good time. – C.J. P. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (Christian Gudegast)
Ah, what a relief after the year-end self-importance of The Brutalist and Nosferatu to have some good January pulp in our filmgoing lives again. Seven years in the making, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera finally brings us back into the world of weary, hard-drinking cop Big Nick (Gerard Butler) and aspirant master-thief Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr.). A film that even its biggest fans gave the backhanded compliment of “douchebag Heat,” the original Den of Thieves strangely endured––if partly due to a mixture of ambition and sleaze, almost like the grizzled anti-heroes at its center. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Here (Robert Zemeckis)
Far and away the most unfairly maligned film of the year, Robert Zemeckis’ Here finds the director in this modern era at the apex of his technological fascinations and storytelling showmanship. Conveying millions of years (but primarily a stretch of a hundred or so) through a single fixed camera angle, the adaptation of Richard McGuire’s astounding graphic novel takes a bittersweet look at both the moving and mundane of everyday life. Breathtaking in how the various time jumps will cause reflection in one’s own ambitions and failures, here’s a film that I imagine will not only become more resonant as time goes on, but will speak greater to one the more time they’ve had on this Earth.
Where to Stream: Netflix
Humane (Caitlin Cronenberg)
To paraphrase former White House Chief of Staff Tom Card, whispering in the ear of George W. Bush: a second Cronenberg offspring has made a movie. Whereas her older brother Brandon Cronenberg has more openly sought to replicate the visceral, satirical body horror of their father’s earliest work, offering some delightfully nasty thrills with the likes of Antiviral and Infinity Pool––even as he remained comfortably within his dad’s shadow––Caitlin Cronenberg couldn’t be accused of simply conforming to the expectations that come with her family’s brand-name recognition. The biggest surprise with her directorial debut Humane might be just how comfortably this could sit alongside Blumhouse and Screen Gems shlock at your local multiplex: a well-engineered, single-location thriller that prioritizes bloody, gut-punch twists and turns over the more thoughtful introspection that typically accompanies this in a Cronenberg effort. – Alistair R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
The Plains (David Easteal)
The year’s most astonishing exercise in world-building did not take place in some faraway planet but in the confines of a Hyundai Elantra. For over three hours, David Easteal invites us to eavesdrop as two co-workers share a journey home. Well, several. A montage of car rides (eleven total) recorded over the course of a year, the camera placed in the backseat so that all we see of the two is a slanted reflection in the rearview mirror, The Plains is a soul-replenishing road trip that turns us from spectators into passengers. A richly textured portrait of a life, epic in size and probing in scope. – Leonardo G.
Where to Stream: OVID.tv
Saturday Night (Jason Reitman)
Studio 60 has become an easy joke, but watching Saturday Night, the hagiographic origin story (or Air-like IP-biopic entry) about the comedy institution’s first night on air, I found myself yearning for the manic, unearned liberal sanctimony of Sorkin’s show. The takeaway from Jason Reitman’s new film is, to quote Peter Griffin, “Oh my God, who the hell cares?” – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
ing Sing (Greg Kwedar)
“We are here to become human again.” This is the mantra of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, founded in Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a prison just north of New York City, and the subject of Greg Kwedar’s emotionally restorative new feature. While led by a stellar Colman Domingo with an equally great supporting turn from Paul Raci, the majority of Sing Sing‘s cast knows the program all too well, either as alumni or currently going through it. That authenticity in casting carries through every frame and every line, as if Kwedar has walked these halls and been in these rooms, an observer to the intimate conversations he’s scripted alongside Clint Bentley. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
Kino Film Collection
Four Adventures Of Reinette & Mirabelle
Max
Goodrich
VOD
Extremely Unique Dynamic
The Fire Inside