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.
Anemone (Ronan Day-Lewis)
The first time Daniel Day-Lewis shows up in Anemone, he’s cloaked in shadow, sitting inside a small cabin in the middle of the North England wilderness. It’s a nearly indecipherable introduction that almost feels by design––a soft, silhouetted launch for his unexpected and welcome return to the big screen. In 2017, right before the press tour for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, the three-time Oscar winner announced his retirement from acting, marking the end of a prolific and singular career. He’d taken breaks before––like in 1997, when he left Hollywood to become a shoemaker in Italy for several years. But this second schism felt different. He was leaving “for good,” he said, the kind of bold declaration that doesn’t leave room for interpretation. Which is why, eight years later, when the light eventually catches his 68-year-old features to reveal a thick goatee, short white hair, and that familiar gaunt face, it’s both a thrilling reveal and a reminder that even the greats can swallow their pride and heed the call to create again. – Jake K. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow)
If human life were to essentially grind to a halt tomorrow, would it be due to a) the itchy trigger finger of a military hothead, b) the low accuracy rate of even the best interceptor missiles, or c) some other cocktail of worst-case scenarios? These are some of the options being assessed in A House of Dynamite, Katheryn Bigelow’s first movie in eight years and a story as combustible as its title suggests. Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Jared Harris, and Jason Clarke all feature, but the star of the show is a single, rogue nuclear missile. This unseen, unexpected harbinger of doom is headed for Chicago and set to blow in twenty minutes––unless those in power can find a way to avoid catastrophe. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović)
If there is a filmmaker whose work can be described as “elemental cinema,” that’s Lucile Hadžihalilović. It’s easy to chronicle her 2015 film Evolution as fluvial for its many water (and underwater) scenes, but also how its rhythmic flow steers the mysteries of a post-humanist plot. One might say that Innocence is earthy with a soil that’s dry––there, the woods are where secrets are concealed––and the San Sebastian Special Jury Prize winner Earwig is as ethereal as it is enigmatic. The way Hadžihalilović borrows from elements serves to alchemize the images we see onscreen, lacing them with a thin veil of unknowability. Yet their meaning is never fully out of reach; these are coming-of-age stories at their core. Hadžihalilović’s newest film, The Ice Tower, was billed as her most accessible work yet, borrowing from a source more familiar than she has before: Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale “The Snow Queen.” – Savina P. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor)
After a self-distributed theatrical run, the Oscar- and Advocate Award-winning No Other Land has now finally arrived on digital platforms, also in self-distribution fashion, with all proceeds going directly to Palestinian communities of Masafer Yatta. Jared Mobarak said last year, “Despite the horrors shown throughout No Other Land (all prior to October 7), it’s the Israeli bulldozers calmly retreating post-demolitions that I cannot shake. Beyond the secret document proving that “converting” Palestinian villages like Masafer Yatta into army training grounds was to drive inhabitants out, or an Israeli courtroom––devoid of jurisdiction as illegal settlers––ruling to reject Arab permit requests while evicting families with roots going back almost two centuries, all that’s necessary to understand the terrorism at play are those trucks blindly destroying private property before rolling away. Because it’s not about these occupiers “needing the land” or “enforcing the law.” It’s about control. About laughing at Israeli Yuval Abraham and Palestinian Basel Adra, knowing their only recourse is creating devastatingly crucial documents like this.”
Where to Stream: VOD
Orwell: 2+2=5 (Raoul Peck)
“From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned,” George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature.” Orwell: 2+2=5, the new documentary from Raoul Peck, serves as a stark reminder of indisputable facts and the rate at which they are disappearing. This film comes at a precarious time in which fiction is often presented as fact. Phrases from Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984 hit as hard (if not harder) than they did so many decades ago. In a totalitarian state, “war is peace” and there are “thoughtcrimes.” Capitulation is not just expected; it is required. – Dan M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Riefenstahl (Andres Veiel)
It is fascinating what the human mind will allow. Riefenstahl, a documentary directed by Andres Veiel about the life of Leni Riefenstahl, explores the rationalizations the filmmaker allowed herself in order to explain her collaborations with the Nazi Party in Germany during their time in power. Until the day she died (at 101 years old in 2003), Riefenstahl refuted accusations that she was aware of the crimes being committed around her. “I never saw any atrocities happening,” she says in an interview from 1976, after the interviewer presents her with an account of her witnessing the murder of 22 Jews. She denies it adamantly. Throughout the film, we watch her deny much, while separate information suggests she was more aware of the evil around her than she ever let on. How much did Leni Riefenstahl know when she was working directly with Hitler and his team of monsters? – Dan M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost (Ben Stiller)
About halfway through his sentimental and ruminative documentary Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost, director Ben Stiller reveals that his parents––actors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara––spent the majority of their life together sleeping in separate but adjoining bedrooms. It’s a small, casual detail that illuminates the pair’s personal and professional relationship––both inside the family’s cherished Upper West Side apartment and on TV screens across the country. – Jake K. (full review)
Where to Stream: Apple TV+
Weapons (Zach Cregger)
For as long as we’ve known about Weapons, writer-director Zach Cregger’s hotly anticipated follow-up to his 2022 blackly comic splatter sensation Barbarian, we have heard endlessly that it’s the supernatural horror genre’s epic equivalent to Magnolia––not exactly the most marketable elevator pitch, but one designed to make the average cinephile sit up and take notice. Cregger himself has done little to dissuade such comparison, citing PTA’s operatic Los Angeles drama as his biggest inspiration, and thanks to a mysterious marketing campaign, it’s arriving on screens shrouded in secrecy, coupled with only the vague promise of a bold vision from an emerging auteur. If knives do fittingly come out for Weapons, then it’s because Cregger has only nailed the sprawling, ambitious, genre-hopping nature of that ensemble drama without ever getting to grips with the emotions driving his flawed characters while, wherever possible, shying away from exploring their moral murkiness. It’s an entertaining film, but not a particularly resonant one considering the charged subject matter; it’s structured like a parlor trick, keeping one at a deliberate remove until working out how its constituent pieces fit together rather than caring about the people within them. – Alistair R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Max
Also New to Streaming
Kino Film Collection
Name of the Game
Night of the Juggler
VOD
Bone Lake
Chain Reactions
Good Boy
The Roses
The Summer Books
The post New to Streaming: No Other Land, A House of Dynamite, Anemone, Riefenstahl & More first appeared on The Film Stage.
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