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.
7 Walks with Mark Brown (Vincent Barré, Pierre Creton)
Directed by life partners Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré, 7 Walks With Mark Brown sneaks up on you. It traces a trip taken by the directors with a small crew and botanist Brown. They end in a forest built up to preserve plants dating back to the era of the dinosaurs. Without explicit mysticism, it’s an homage to the importance of life outside the human race. – Steve E.
Where to Stream: VOD
Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra)
Albert Serra’s new film Afternoons of Solitude is more akin to two hours of Sky Sports than you’d expect from the guy who once made Story of My Death. Following the rules, if not the spirit, of ever-festival-fashionable observational and direct cinema, we spend most of its runtime in long takes observing Spanish bullfighting rings, our eyes focused on Andrés Roca Rey, a Peruvian “exemplar” of the sport engaged in utmost, ritualized savagery. We’re very sensitized to the constructed and artificial nature of documentary now, but Serra’s prime achievement here is to achieve an objectivity of perspective. Commanded by DP Arthur Tort, it’s not a leering camera, and the editing patterns don’t cut to close-ups coercing us into disapproval, to achieve a a rapport where we can agree “this is awful, isn’t it.” It suggests an anthropological record of a pastime deserving our deference and grudging respect, yet equally an indictment of something barbaric and finally absurd. Roca, shown in power stance with his eyes focused and vulnerable like the poor bull’s, seems both hero and villain of the piece, but those categories also fail to apply here. Framed sculpturally and monumentally, as a body in cinematic space, he merely is. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI
Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay)
Near the climax of Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, two assassins––one well-dressed but dying, the other ragged but definitely alive––laid together on a kitchen floor, their hands lightly touching as Charlene’s “Never Been to Me” drifted in from a nearby radio, the lyrics barely escaping the wounded man’s mouth. That shock of counterpoint elevated what was, until then, a clinically well-executed revenge picture into something approaching the sublime. Ramsay plays that card again with less-convincing results in her long-awaited follow-up Die My Love, a visceral, coiled film about a woman in the throws of a mental breakdown. As ever, Ramsay’s soundtrack choices are equal-parts fun and unpredictable, not least David Bowie’s “Kooks” on a car radio or the director herself warbling an acoustic cover of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” over the closing credits––fitting choice for a work of toxic love and the things we do to our better halves, with little joy in the division. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
F1 (Joseph Kosinski)
Sports are at their dramatic best when the improbable occurs. So are the movies that portray those implausible stories. From Rudy to Rookie of the Year, America loves a narrative that tracks the rise of the five-foot-nothings and, well, the Chicago Cubs, baseball’s near-eternal underdogs. Joseph Kosinski applies that tried-and-true blueprint to F1 (also marketed as F1 The Movie, lest any confusion), his follow-up to the theatrical treasury known as Top Gun: Maverick. But the checkered flag for this big-budget, star-driven, premium-format film lies beyond the box office. – Kent M. W. (full review)
Where to Stream: Apple TV
Little Amélie or the Character of Rain (Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han)
Most of us don’t remember what it was like to be two years old. The first few years of life consist largely of fragmented memories, stories that others have told, and pictures of babies that bear just enough resemblance. But the memories that do remain, those that stick in the corners of minds, are filled with fascination for a child. These memories don’t need to be for significant occasions, though. I remember being four years old, trying a tangerine for the first time, fully blowing my mind that food can have that much flavor. For Amélie, the tot-sized lead in Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han’s animated Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, it’s eating a piece of white chocolate. The film exists as a 77-minute string of these moments, a glimpse into the life of someone who’s about to turn three years old, a remembrance of how each of us looked at the world. – Michael F. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)
For the second time in three years, Cannes’ competition ends with a film in which Josh O’Connor plays a scruffy, late-20th-century man with some knack for pinching masterpieces. Following (spiritually or otherwise) Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera is Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, an experiment in form so thorough and self-assured that even Robert Bresson might have appreciated it. Nobody expected the versatile director’s first heist movie to resemble Ocean’s 11, but The Mastermind is still remarkably low on flash. There is a jazzy score by Rob Mazurek and some even-jazzier opening credits, but this is very much a Reichardt joint: from its gorgeous, sylvan landscapes and autumnal color palette to the patient, observational tone, it suggests what robbing art in the early part of the 1970s might have truly felt like. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (Diego Céspedes)
As reminders that ignorance, bigotry, and hate can literally kill, stories about the AIDS epidemic will always be relevant. The latest, beautiful example arrived courtesy of Chilean writer-director Diego Céspedes, whose feature debut The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar. Although the film may lack a narrative beat or two to fully take flight, it’s nonetheless a finely crafted, deeply affecting tribute to love and community––a piece of proudly, vitally queer art. – Zhuo-Ning Su (full review)
Where to Stream: Letterboxd Video Store
Petite Solange (Axelle Ropert)
A mood of heightened melodrama gives way to something strangely enchanting in Petite Solange, the story of a 13-year-old girl coming to terms with the shattering notion that her parents’ love (and for that matter anyone’s) might not last. The director is Axelle Ropert, a French critic, actor, writer, and filmmaker whose career has pivoted between the genre films she and her partner, Serge Bozon, have collaborated on (La France, Madame Hyde) and her own body of work behind the camera. That personal side to her oeuvre has always tended more toward the familial and the bittersweet (The Wolberg Family, The Apple of My Eye), just as it has proven Ropert a keen proponent of the Tolstoyan idea that happy families are only intriguing when torn apart. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Predators (David Osit)
Filmmaker David Osit gives viewers a lot to wrestle with in Predators, his documentary about the reality show To Catch a Predator, which captured the zeitgeist of the early 2000s. In the show, host Chris Hansen confronted adult men who had arrived to a location (following an online chat correspondence) with the alleged intention of engaging in sexual activity with a minor. The set-up was, in fact, a sting orchestrated by the show’s producers in collaboration with local law enforcement. It made for compelling television and was advertised like so, as well as a public good. Predators wrestles with the legacy of the program, the ethical questions it raised, and the copycat vigilantes it inspired. The show was cancelled not long after suspect Texas assistant district attorney Bill Conradt committed suicide as cameras and cops were descending on his home. A cascading level of criticism was soon drawn against the production, putting into question whether the evidence obtained on camera was, in fact, admissible in a court of law. Hansen, after all, is not law enforcement. – Dan M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Paramount+
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (Rian Johnson)
Let’s eschew the type of slow-burning, big reveal that Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc excels at in the Knives Out series, and cut to the chase: Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is another satisfying, impossible-to-predict yarn featuring all the series’ hallmarks. There’s a wildly diverse ensemble, including a few stellar character actors and some rising stars. There’s a seemingly unsolvable crime carrying a whiff of Agatha Christie (and others, including Edgar Allan Poe). And there’s a reliable whodunit trope: Knives Out had a family of backstabbers with axes to grind, while Glass Onion offered a vacation setting and “friends” with revenge in mind; Wake Up Dead Man presents a “locked-door mystery” in a small town. – Christopher S. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Wildlife (Paul Dano)
“I feel like I need to wake up, but I don’t know what from… or to,” Carey Mulligan’s Jeanette declares to her teenage son Joe (Ed Oxenbould) in Wildlife, Paul Dano’s remarkably assured, thematically rich directorial debut. The haze Jeanette finds herself in is due to her husband Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) having abandoned them to fight a wildfire close to the Canadian border. The absence of a patriarchal figure in their family, who have recently relocated to small-town Montana, leads to Jeanette discovering newfound, untidy emotional independence and her son is there to witness the protracted, quietly devastating unraveling of a marriage. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
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Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
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Naked Acts
Paramount+
Roofman
VOD
The Carpenter’s Son
Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc
Christy
Keeper
Leila and the Wolves
The Temple Woods Gang