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.
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (Kahlil Joseph)
Celebrating and condensing centuries of Black history that would take more than a few lifetimes for any scholar to thoroughly ascertain in totality, Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions eschews dryly academic ethnographic study to deliver a kaleidoscopic, vigorous, engrossing journey. Utilizing Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah’s W. E. B. Du Bois-inspired “Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience”––the latest edition of which is nearly 4,000 pages––as its foundation, with page numbers presented throughout its plethora of references, the viewing experience is less daunting than one imagines the filmmaking process surely must have proved. Converging and clashing seemingly thousands of pieces of media to thought-provoking effect, this is a directorial debut that’s overwhelming in its rapid pace while also acting as a generous invitation to further examine any one of its sprawling tendrils of past, present, and future Black history. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
End of History (Jacob Gregor)
Shot on a shoestring budget of around $5,000 during a 10-day road trip to Deadhorse, Alaska, Jacob Gregor’s End of History has more to say about the bleak state of American culture than most multi-million dollar films. Following an isolated man’s journey, whose mind is being deteriorated by media figures enacting more damage than society may realize, Gregor crafts a feat of American slow cinema, capturing the country in all its loneliness and degradation.
Where to Stream: Means.tv
Hamnet (Chloé Zhao)
Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel operates in an emotional register that’s easy to ridicule. The premise itself is ripe for mocking: what if the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet was the direct inspiration for his play Hamlet? Yet there is so much quiet tenderness here, so much patient filmmaking. For me, the honesty behind any artifice worked like the most beautiful of magic tricks. Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes, while Paul Mescal plays her husband, William Shakespeare. These two young stars cannot be denied, and Zhao allows them to blossom within her frames. Some movies are about the right thing at the right time in a viewer’s life. Hamnet is that for me. Watching earnestly helped me. And for that I am grateful. — Dan M.
Where to Stream: Peacock
How to Shoot a Ghost (Charlie Kaufman)
From just his scripts alone, Charlie Kaufman is certainly one of the most distinctive voices in American cinema, be it Being John Malkovich or Adaptation. Ever since 2008’s Synecoche, New York, he’s turned to directing, realizing his visions of neurosis and despair with the least amount of compromise possible. In recent years he’s found a kindred spirit in Canadian poet Eva H.D., who’s written multiple scripts under which Kaufman has only taken a directing credit. Their newest collaboration, How to Shoot a Ghost, premiered at the recent Venice Film Festival and is now on Criterion Channel. Starring previous Kaufman collaborator Jessie Buckley and the unknown Joseph Akiki as two spirits wandering through Athens, Greece, the poetic leanings of its author are apparent, while paired with the director’s fixation on mortality. – Ethan V. (read the full interview)
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
If you were handed over the man who destroyed your life and those of countless others––a psychopath who tortured, raped, and murdered in the name of a tyrannical system––what would you do? Would you exact revenge or do the impossible––forgive and set him free? It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi’s first film since his release from prison in Iran, hinges on that excruciating dilemma. The story is easy enough to summarize; its emotional wallop defies facile description. In an unexpected stroke of luck, four Iranians who did time for protesting the regime manage to abduct the guard responsible for the unspeakable atrocities they suffered behind bars. Having knocked him unconscious, they shove him in a van and travel around, wondering what to do. The whole journey spans less than a day. By the time it wraps, Accident feels like content under pressure. Panahi welds scorching social critique to a masterful command of form: a devastating cry for justice, his latest also serves as a superb thriller. It is a towering achievement. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
A Little Prayer (Angus MacLachlan)
In the quiet, peaceful mornings that ease your way into writer-director Angus MacLachlan’s A Little Prayer, a woman belts out gospel songs that echo down the block. They’re a bleary-eyed nuisance to many waking in this small, North Carolina neighborhood, but Bill Brass (David Straitharn) and his daughter-in-law Tammy (Jane Levy) have a mutual fascination with them, rising early with curiosity and wonder. Why does she sing them? Where do they come from exactly? The pair eventually attempt to investigate their leafy streets to find the source, yet as the spirituals dissipate and leave them alone in bird-chirping silence, they seem to revel in their beautiful, unsolved mystery. – Jake K.S. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Mistress Dispeller (Elizabeth Lo)
For as long as there have been relationships, there have also been affairs. It is perhaps one of the most durable narrative devices, so universal that just about anyone can find a perspective into such a story. To this, Elizabeth Lo’s Mistress Dispeller brings quite the intriguing concept: a Chinese service that women can hire to get their husbands to break up with their mistresses, thus preserving their marriage. While the film is well-made, it doesn’t penetrate the surface of such a compelling concept, rarely managing to locate the kind of drama that one imagines would be easily manufactured in a narrative take on this story. – Devan S. (full review)
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
The Moment (Aidan Zamiri)
The Moment finds Charli xcx at a unique moment in her career. After years toiling as a niche artist with a devoted fanbase, the album brat catapults her to global stardom. But with her brat summer tour over, what’s the next move? Charli’s team, which seems to be growing by the day, all seem to have separate answers. Does she try continuing brat summer indefinitely, cashing in at the risk of damaging the brand she spent so long cultivating? Some tell her she would be dumb not to. These evergreen artistic questions—LCD Soundsystem wrote a song about this—are pondered earnestly throughout The Moment. But as a proper mockumentary from a mostly British team, a bevy of jokes and inspired gags keep the proceedings from ever feeling too self-indulgent. – Caleb H. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
A Private Life (Rebecca Zlotowski)
It came as quite the surprise that acclaimed director Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest film, led by Jodie Foster and an all-star French cast, did not make Cannes competition. If it turns out A Private Life might indeed be too slight for Palme consideration, this up-tempo comedic murder mystery is a breezy, fun means of showcasing delicious chemistry between legendary actors. – Zhuo-Ning Su (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
The Conradian title conjures up expectations of espionage, surveillance, and violent action. But Kleber Mendonça Filho delivers far more in his immersive portrait of life under Brazil’s military dictatorship. It isn’t all doom and dread for leading man Wagner Moura: 1970s Brazil explodes in colorful, enveloping detail in Mendonça Filho’s memory piece brimming with fascinating characters and their stories, urban legends half-remembered, even an intrusion from the future that reframes the past. The Secret Agent stands as Mendonça Filho’s culminating magnum opus. — Ankit J.
Where to Stream: Hulu
Videoheaven (Alex Ross Perry)
In Videoheaven, Blockbuster––to take after Thom Andersen––plays itself. Now deep in a pop-cultural-scholarship phase inaugurated by his last feature Pavements, Alex Ross Perry has made a generous, absorbing three-hour essay film-cum-documentary on nothing else but video-rental stores, those fabled and most benign of places. That is the loveably niche subject, but like the best examples of those brick-and-mortar venues, it contains multitudes: closely inspired by academic Daniel Herbert’s acclaimed media studies text Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store, Videoheaven is the ne plus ultra consideration of this topic to date, dispensing large portions of information and close analysis entirely through a combination of film and TV excerpts, occasional pieces of archive, and voiceover from Maya Hawke (who appears in some of the former, along with her dad). Born in 1984 and coming of age in the early millennial period, Perry is declaiming that this was his generation and this was what mattered. It was magnetic tape and clumpy boxes, yes, but through rose-tinted shades, they look burnished in gold. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Also New to Streaming
The Criterion Channel
12:08 East of Bucharest
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
52 Pick-Up
American Dharma
Aurora
The Big Hit
Bleeder
Body Double
Clerks
Cruel Intentions
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
The Devil, Probably
Drive My Car
The Fall of Otrar
The Fisher King
Four Nights of a Dreamer
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
The Giverny Document
Gomorrah
Kummatty
Lancelot du lac
Lou Reed’s Berlin
Muhammad Ali, the Greatest
Not Fade Away
perfectly a strangeness
A Perfect Murder
El Planeta
Police, Adjective
Remote Control
Ring
The Ring
Sieranevada
Tiny Furniture
Tuesday, After Christmas
Two Lovers
Videodrome
Virgin Machine
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
Kino Film Collection
Köln 75
There’s No Tomorrow
Max
Fackham Hall
Metrograph at Home
Mysteries of Lisbon
Night Across the Street
Time Regained
MUBI
The Capsule
Coconut Head Generation
Mayor
Raging Bull
Ida
The Woman in the Fifth
Netflix
The Bling Ring
The Green Knight
VOD
Mother’s Baby