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 Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (Raven Jackson)
A film that feels uprooted from deep beneath the earth, Raven Jackson’s poetic, patient debut is a distillation of cinema to its purest form, a stunning patchwork of experience and memory. Tethered around the life of Mack, a Black woman from Mississippi, as we witness glimpses of her childhood, teenage years, and beyond, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt becomes a sensory experience unlike anything else this year. Shot in beautiful 35mm by Jomo Fray and edited by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s collaborator Lee Chatametikool, there’s a reverence for nature and joy for human connection that seems all too rarified in today’s landscape of American filmmaking. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: Prime Video
The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (Marie Losier)
A heartwarming film about industrial music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and h/er spouse Lady Jaye Breyer. Made over the course of seven years, Marie Losier’s intimate portrait combines footage of the couple’s day-to-day activities with rare archival footage of their art performances.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
Ghost Trail (Jonathan Millet)
The wars in Gaza and Ukraine have dominated headlines for the past several years, yet receiving relatively little coverage today is the Syrian civil war, sparked in the wake of 2011’s Arab Spring. It is yet ongoing and stands now at an uneasy stalemate. Over a decade of fighting, horrifying humanitarian and war-time crimes were committed; all the while 13 million Syrians were displaced from their homes. These refugees, lost in foreign countries offering asylum, are still looking for answers and perhaps a reckoning and retribution. Director Jonathan Millet’s debut narrative feature Ghost Trail dives deep into one survivor’s psyche and lays bare the cost of a conflict from which the world seems to have moved on. – Ankit J. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Hot Spring Shark Attack (Morihito Inoue)
On the heels of the thuddingly formulaic Jurassic World Rebirth, if one is looking for a creature feature that injects some madcap energy into the genre, leave it no further than Morihito Inoue’s Hot Spring Shark Attack. Ostensibly about a hot spring town in Japan under siege by sharks, the sub-75-minute film has a flurry of ideas on its mind, with a freneticism that delights and exhausts in equal measure. Yet it is at least worth seeing for those wondering if, 50 years after Jaws, one can still bring new ideas to the shark thriller. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: VOD
In the Lost Lands (Paul W.S. Anderson)
Before jumping directly into the action, Paul W.S. Anderson’s In the Lost Lands opens with a framing device we’ll return to only at film’s end. The George R. R. Martin adaptation otherwise gives no context whatsoever, and when the plot elements finally reveal themselves it’s near-fablelike, with a powerful Queen despondent that she hasn’t been able to experience the true mysteries of the world. She requests that the witch Grey Alys (played, of course, by Milla Jovovich) grant her powers to transform into a werewolf. Until then the movie is a set of seemingly unstructured action sequences with no narrative information to grasp and nothing to connect to. Things seem to happen purely mechanically––at one point, portions of a fight scene take place telepathically between two characters. But far from being confusing, the effect is entirely thrilling. – Neil B. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Invention (Courtney Stephens)
Grieving comes in many guises. In Courtney Stephens’ Invention, speculative fiction blends with personal history to explore the ways we process death. The subject is Callie Hernandez, an actress and filmmaker whose father died of a COVID-related illness in 2021. There’s much archival footage of the man, mostly television recordings from his times as a kind of telemarketer for new-age healing methods, but Stephens and Hernandez go one further, suggesting an alternative timeline. In this ersatz world, a patent for an electromagnetic healing device is left to her in her father’s will. No categorization does the film justice: it’s about death and mourning, of course, but it’s just as interested in people’s susceptibility to conspiracy. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Pavements (Alex Ross Perry)
If the Hollywood superhero-industrial complex is perishing, the Rolling Stone and Spin magazine extended universe is hastily being built. What better defines “pre-awareness” for the studios like the data logged by Spotify’s algorithm, where billions of track plays confirm what past popular music has stood the test of time, and also how––in the streaming era––you can gouge ancillary money from it? But unlike the still-brilliant Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which stood to excoriate the nostalgia sought by such films, recently reinvigorated by the success of Bohemian Rhapsody, Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, on the eponymous ’90s slacker idols, justifies that every great band deserves a film portrait helping us to wistfully remember them, and also chuckle as pretty young actors attempt to nail the mannerisms of weathered, road-bitten musicians. So good luck, Timothée. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)
We begin with music that’s uncharacteristically tense for a Wes Anderson film––chugging cellos leading a full orchestra that’s more Mission: Impossible than Moonrise Kingdom––and opener à la Nolan blockbusters: an assassination attempt. It’s an exhilarating launch into a story that starts petering out soon after. Renowned criminal mastermind Zsa Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) sits before a gorgeously designed train car much like the off-white, wooden, burgundy, and plaid train car that will take him and his associates around Phoenicia for the rest of the movie. An unfortunate associate is crammed into the back corner. Without warning, a bomb obliterates any semblance of said corner, and we launch into The Phoenician Scheme, never to take a breath. – Luke H. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Shrouds (David Cronenberg)
David Cronenberg has only grown sharper and more devastating in reckonings with the body. After his long-awaited return with Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg quickly followed it up with The Shrouds, a darkly funny, mournful conspiracy thriller led by Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, and newly minted Oscar nominee Guy Pearce. Rory O’Connor said in his Cannes review, “David Cronenberg’s films have often imagined a future where technology would find a way into our collective id. 55 years into the director’s incomparable career, might that future have finally caught up with him? In Cronenberg’s new film––the slick, scrambled The Shrouds––there are two barely speculative conceits: that an AI chatbot could be designed to look like a recently deceased love one; and primarily, that a company might have the bright idea to wrap a blanket of HD cameras around our nearest and dearest before they’re sent six-feet-under, allowing us to check in on their decaying corpse, all with the click of an app.”
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel, VOD
A Vanishing Fog (Augusto Sandino)
A winner at SXSW for its striking cinematography and world premiere at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, where it premiered in its main competition back in 2011, Augusto Sandino’s second feature A Vanishing Fog finally received a U.S. theatrical run courtesy of Hope Runs High earlier this year and is now available digitally. Capturing the journey of an explorer attempting to protect the endangered ecosystem of Colombia’s Sumapaz Paramo, what Sandino lacks in narrative pull, he makes up for in compelling, surreal imagery, oozing a mysterious sense of atmosphere on this brief but mesmerizing expedition.
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
Disney+/Hulu
Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story
HBO Max
Opus
Kino Film Collection
Deadly Circuit
Vice and Virtue
Peacock
Drop
VOD
A Better Tomorrow and A Better Tomorrow II
Watch the Skies
The post New to Streaming: The Shrouds, The Phoenician Scheme, Ghost Trail, Invention & More first appeared on The Film Stage.
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