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.
2000 Meters to Andriivka (Mstyslav Chernov)
In 2000 Meters to Andriivka, we are thrown headfirst into war. From a first-person point of view, we live with a brigade of Ukrainian soldiers as they make their way to liberate the village of Andriivka, which is occupied by the Russians. As the Ukrainians trudge through the forest (they have to avoid the mine-filled roads) they take heavy fire from the opposition. The village is just over a mile away, a strategic power point in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. – Dan M. (full review)
Where to Stream: PBS
Blossoms Shanghai (Wong Kar-wai)
Two years after Wong Kar Wai’s Blossoms Shanghai premiered in China, the long-awaited series will now be coming to America. Beginning this week, the Criterion Channel is exclusively premiering the 30-episode series, with three new episodes released every Monday night at 8 p.m. ET through the end of January.
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
Blue Moon, which world-premiered at the Berlinale, is another beautifully personal work from Linklater, full of authorial idiosyncrasies and tics, but distinguishing the film from his corpus is it being the kind you can only make at a mature career stage. It’s not so much that Linklater has nothing to prove––screenplays like Robert Kaplow’s and its rarified, remote milieu of mid-WWII New York theaterland can typically send financiers balking. With a “legacy” career, little favors and gives come your way; for Linklater, maybe his next will be a legitimate awards contender, and new relationships with acting talent can be brought to bear. And different or lower expectations for the end product allow him to really express who he is as an artist at this point in his life. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)
After dabbling in dystopian fantasy (The Lobster) and period comedy (The Favourite), shocking us along the way with original creations (Dogtooth) and fanciful adaptations (Poor Things) alike, Yorgos Lanthimos has proven time and again that there’s not a single uncreative bone in his body. Remaking the criminally underseen Korean sci-fi comedic thriller Save the Green Planet!, he succeeds in honoring the original while putting his unique stamp on it. The result is a sleeker (if slightly paler) version of a truly bonkers film. – Zhuo-Ning Su (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Left-Handed Girl (Shih-Ching Tsou)
The neon-lit alleyways of Taipei’s night markets have never looked quite so vivid as they do through a child’s eyes. Shot on an iPhone to emphasize the sheer wonderment of a five-year-old’s POV, where every mundane backstreet is filled with endless possibility for a young protagonist who has left the countryside for the first time, director Shih-Ching Tsou’s solo debut Left-Handed Girl is a simple but striking drama about growing up in a family living paycheck-to-paycheck. Its visual sensibility and child’s-eye view of near-poverty naturally brings to mind co-writer Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, which Tsou produced, but this isn’t a tale of life on the margins so much as it is about those who have narrowly made it out of them, every rent increase or unexpected life expense threatening to push them back. – Alistair R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Mickey 17 ( Bong Joon Ho)
Is Mark Ruffalo giving a Trump impression? It’s early into Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 when the actor struts into the frame in a velvety blazer, wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) in tow, gloating as a crowd stands and claps like he’s the second coming of Christ. Ruffalo is Kenneth Marshall, leader of some cult-adjacent Church and one-time presidential candidate behind a new space mission designed to yank humanity from a near-inhospitable Earth and drop it onto Niflheim, a planet in some remote corner of the galaxy. A hopeless narcissist surrounded by a cabal of yes-men armed with cameras immortalizing his every move, he speaks with impossibly white teeth forever bared in a self-congratulatory grimace, nostrils flared, vowels ever so slightly drawn out. In a film ostensibly following not one but two (!) Robert Pattinsons, it’s Ruffalo that takes center stage. And if his diction and mannerisms instantly jolted me back to another real-life narcissist surrounded by a cast of sycophants of his own, that came more as a revelation than distraction. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Oh, Hi (Sophie Brooks)
You ever tie someone up and then leave them there? Me either. But it sure makes an interesting inciting incident for a movie. Something much more relatable is the romantic getaway––an important milestone in any new relationship. All that unadulterated time together does wonders to get to know someone, truths unearthed and informing the future of a relationship. Iris (Molly Gordon) and Isaac’s (Logan Lerman) trip kicks off like an AirBnb commercial in Oh, Hi! But what begins as a fun weekend loses its appeal; unfortunately the film follows suit. – Kent W. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Urchin (Harris Dickinson)
A few scenes into Urchin, we take a trip through the Bardo. First the camera (as in a million films before this) closes in on a shower drain, but then something new: a tunnel of darkness and color that gives way to damp, mossy calm, where a lone man in a clearing, standing with his back to us, is taking in the light. The director of this intrepid sequence is Harris Dickinson, who has found the time––somewhere between becoming a beloved actor and sex symbol and playing John Lennon––to direct a thoughtful, adventurous film. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
Kino Film Collection
The Day of the Dolphin
Naked Acts
VOD
Last Days
Shall We Dance?
The post New to Streaming: Blossoms Shanghai, Blue Moon Bugonia, Urchin, Left-Handed Girl & More first appeared on The Film Stage.
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