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.
The Amusement Park (George A. Romero)
Created as a PSA to raise awareness about elder abuse, George A. Romero’s 1973 film The Amusement Park, long considered lost and recently restored by Romero’s widow Suzanne and the George A. Romero Foundation, arrives on Shudder as a time-capsule oddity. Produced by the Lutheran Society at a point in Romero’s career post-Night of the Living Dead and pre-Dawn that saw the infamous horror director in a period of commercial and critical decline, The Amusement Park is a damning, if not exactly horrifying, condemnation of the ways in which society marginalizes and others its elderly. – Christian G. (full review)
Where to Watch: Shudder
City Hall (Frederick Wiseman)
In the opening shot of Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, a man polishes the floor in a room walled with masterpieces. Writing about the scene for MUBI recently, the critic Joseph Owen noted that “the politics of this institution exist in a subterranean passage: between its low-paid maintenance jobs and its disreputable oil sponsorships.” Petrodollars aside, it’s an observation that speaks in some way to any number of Wiseman’s films: that the souls of the institutions he so dedicatedly depicts are neither the heads on top, the public face or the multitude of working parts below but something malleable and indefinable in the middle. The director’s latest is documentary epic, a sprawling 4.5-hour study of Boston’s City Hall and its various satellite entities, that once again goes in search of that middle—although for once with an uncharacteristic scent of subjectivity. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
La Dosis (Martín Kraut)
Despite being a film about euthanatizing ICU nurses at a provincial hospital in Argentina, Martín Kraut’s directorial debut La Dosis actually begins with a miraculous attempt to revive a patient after doctors declared her dead. That’s the kind of man Marcos (Carlos Portaluppi) is, though: on the job for two decades and counting, he knows when someone is beyond help and when their time has yet to arrive. He therefore grabs the paddles, shocks her two more times while everyone else looks on with confusion, and is rewarded by the beeping of her heartbeat. Was it worth it? Maybe. The doctors say it bought her another week as they decide to stop her treatment anyway. That means another week of pain. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Holler (Nicole Riegel)
You can only hide so many eviction notices underneath the porch flowerpot before a bank official finds and tapes them all onto the front door. This is where we meet Ruth (Jessica Barden) and Blaze Avery (Gus Halper). What choice do they have, though? With their mother (Pamela Adlon’s Rhonda) in jail because of a refusal to go to rehab for a pain pill addiction and family friend Linda (Becky Ann Baker) already over-extending herself to help, these two siblings are waking up at dawn to sell soda cans for pennies at the local scrap heap owned by Hark (Austin Amelio). Blaze works nonstop to keep them from going hungry and Ruth misses so many classes that her high school teachers have given up on even considering college. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Watch: VOD
In the Heights (Jon M. Chu)
There’s a casual decadence to the films of Jon M. Chu, an energy about them that is irresistible to watch. Whether the director is indulging in absurd magic tricks, grandiose weddings, riveting action, or exquisitely choreographed and performed song-and-dance numbers, there is an almost effortless extravagance to his work as a filmmaker. Having been suited to spectacle from the get-go, his adaptation of In the Heights is proof that the movie musical isn’t dead––it simply needed a little flavor. – Juan B. (full review)
Where to Watch: HBO Max
Night of the Kings (Philippe Lacôte)
Writer/director Philippe Lacôte looks to tell a tale of the Ivory Coast and its most recent two decades of civil war and strife with his latest film Night of the Kings. With that also comes a necessity to speak about the youth who’ve recently taken up residence within the confines of his setting: La MACA. This prison—whose under-thirty population is currently hovering around eighty percent—shifts between the horrors of its inherent violence and the magical fantasy conjured when Lacôte was a boy visiting his mother (a political prisoner) in its open courtyard traversed by inmates, guards, and outsiders alike. He thought then that it reminded him of a kingdom. To a child its social ladder would seem more fairy tale than feudal. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
The Power of Kangwon Province (Hong Sang-soo)
“I always make mistakes,” says the emotionally vulnerable Jinsook (Oh Yun-hong) toward the end of Hong Sangsoo’s The Power of Kangwon Province. While her confession relates to a series of messy indiscretions with dead-end men, it also sums up the cyclical calamity that has befallen most of Hong’s protagonists over the last two decades. And we can’t just blame it on the Soju. – Glenn H. (full review)
Where to Watch: Virtual Cinemas
Queersighted: Breaking Taboos
The fourth edition of Michael Koresky’s Queersighted series is now being presented during Pride Month, featuring special guest K. Austin Collins. Along with an extensive new conversation, the duo present works from Marlon Riggs, William Friedkin, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and more, including Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Olivia (1951), Victim (1961), Teorema (1968), Cruising (1980), Freak Orlando (1981), Personal Best (1982), Tongues Untied (1989), Poison (1991), and O Fantasma (2000).
Where to Watch: The Criterion Channel
Take Me Somewhere Nice (Ena Sendijarević)
Ena Sendijarević’s gorgeous debut feature Take Me Somewhere Nice is a tale of fractured identities, a Bildungsroman that zeroes in on a teenage girl traversing two irreconcilable worlds, each demanding her undivided allegiance, none close enough to be called home. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Watch: Virtual Cinemas
Tragic Jungle (Yulene Olaizola)
Fluid and far-reaching, the Rio Hondo snakes between Mexico and what was once British Honduras (now Belize). Terrain on both sides is dominated by the dense Mayan rainforest, rendering moot any notion of borders or nation-states. Yulene Olaizola’s mysterious and confounding Tragic Jungle takes place in the year 1920 when this hostile region played host to a bustling gum trade spurred in equal parts by colonialism and capitalism. –Glenn H. (full review)
Where to Watch: Netflix
Also New to Streaming
The Criterion Channel
MUBI (free for 30 days)
Where To?
Oswarts
Three Adventures of Brooke
Letters Home
Last Year at Marienbad
The Deep Blue Sea
Paramount+
Infinite (