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.
All You Need Is Kill (Kenichiro Akimoto)
The new All You Need Is Kill—director Kenichiro Akimoto and Studio 4°C’s animated reimagining of the time-loop novel that inspired Doug Liman’s Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow—asks: what makes this day different from all others? Its response, as a work with two decades of alternate versions in other mediums hanging over it, is to stake out an identity for dazzling visual style and extra video-gamey structure, with conventional drama taking on the mechanical quality of something already experienced a thousand times. – Eli F. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Alpha (Julia Ducournau)
Julia Ducournau has turned 180 degrees since Titane, the gritty and bizarre thriller that Spike Lee’s Cannes jury awarded the Palme d’Or in 2021. There’s no doubt that all eyes are on her newest, Alpha, in a way they weren’t on Titane after Raw. Her first and most horrific film by a landslide (too much to ever gain a wide audience) was a cannibal movie about a teen girl starting veterinary school. Here, no bodies are eaten or impregnated by a fire-hood car. But almost everyone’s is crumbling. – Luke H. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Atropia (Hailey Gates)
In the fictional country of Atropia, everything is played for real. Nestled into the southern California desert, the U.S. military-built training ground looks, acts, and even smells like an Iraqi city, populated by a plethora of actors pretending to be insurgents and merchants. The town––colloquially called “The Box,” one of 200 mock villages throughout the country––is meant to be an immersive, role-paying environment, a sophisticated warfare simulation for soldiers before they’re deployed to the Middle East. Upon entering this facsimile, the mission is clear to those preparing for combat: complete objectives, learn the culture, and stay alive. – Jake K-S (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI
The Chronology of Water (Kristen Stewart)
As a director, Kristen Stewart takes words and embodies them, carving each into the flesh of her filmmaking like scars. You can’t breathe underwater. The transfiguration of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir is a suffocating experience, keeping one under even as you think you might briefly come up for oxygen. By the halfway mark, Chronology may have induced dissociation. But you don’t look away, you don’t leave. You kick forward, stretching ahead. You reach the wall, break the surface, and breathe the air. Stewart’s staggering debut is more than catharsis—it feels and understands everything that leads to it. — Blake S.
Where to Stream: VOD
Magellan (Lav Diaz)
With a Western star at the center and a breezy runtime of 163 minutes, it’s easy to label Magellan Lav Diaz’s most “accessible film.” If you’re a diehard, however, it’s clearly the thing he’s worked towards his entire career. Amidst a corpus dedicated to excising the demons of a country without an identity and brutally colonized many times over, he finally turns his attention to the Philippines’ original sin. Ever the shit-stirrer, Diaz spits on the myth of Ferdinand Magellan and paints him as he was: a weak, pathetic man who stumbled his way into destabilization, all the while castigating us for wanting to see it. It’s no accident that Magellan begins with an indigenous woman being startled by an offscreen noise, staring into the camera, screaming, and running away: even the prying eyes of “compassion” are complicit, and Diaz lets you know it. –– Brandon S.
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason)
Imagine an Icelandic Sally Mann early in her career, desperate for attention from the high-art community. She lives off the land in a remote countryside and relies heavily on her five-person family to make her art. But instead of capturing her life with a camera, Anna writes with the extended duration of the sun; instead of silver-screen prints, she cuts and produces metal art that gestates spontaneously outdoors across entire seasons. Now, with all of that in the background, imagine a heartwrenching separation unfolding over a year’s time, one with three children at the center, clashing ideologies in tow, and well over a decade of resentment and remorse wrought by the laziness of a fisherman husband who hasn’t held up his end of the bargain in existential ambition or self-care. Hlynur Pálmason’s magnum opus (to date) is about exactly what it sounds like: the love that remains between ex-partners––in its shredded, preserved, bitter, adoring, simple, altogether impossible complexity––and the possible futures that can emerge. — Luke H.
Where to Stream: VOD
The Running Man (Edgar Wright)
Edgar Wright has mostly stayed in the pocket of action cinema since Hot Fuzz paid loving homage to the bombastic genre in 2007. But because subsequent projects like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Baby Driver maintained the same comic self-awareness about how divorced the genre was from anything approaching reality, The Running Man suggests his first pure action vehicle––the kind of brainless, trigger-happy adventure Nick Frost’s bumbling cop in Fuzz would have thrown on between rewatches of Point Break and Bad Boys II. It’s perhaps the first film of his that you couldn’t describe as a genre-comedy hybrid. Which isn’t to say he’s made something humorless, but that he’s consciously trying to retreat from making an “Edgar Wright film” with a joke-heavy screenplay that would threaten to diffuse tension. What a shame, then, that the most spectacular sequences here are when he allows himself to let loose, working towards his instincts rather than against them. – Alistair R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
undertone (Ian Tuason)
undertone (stylized all-lowercase) writer-director Ian Tuason staged his debut feature entirely in his Toronto childhood home with only two on-screen actors, with the other performances playing out in audio form only. After a Fantasia premiere last summer nabbed it an audience award, A24 scooped it up and reopened the edit, not unlike NEON’s recent handling of Shelby Oaks. Undertone joins a host of the distributor’s titles that have found great success in playing the Sundance Midnight category, whether their own productions (Hereditary) or fellow acquisition titles (Talk to Me). – Caleb H. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New Streaming
Hulu
Shelby Oaks
Kino Film Collection
Ajami
The Mole
MUBI
Cold Tropics
Eletrodoméstica
Endless Cookie
Friday Night Saturday Morning
Green Vinyl
Tatsumi
Netflix
Roomates
VOD
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
The Napa Boys
Slanted