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.
Anatomy of a Fall (Justin Triet)
The ensuing days after a romantic breakup, even if it isn’t a cataclysmic one, are an uncanny time. Perhaps once the spell of verbal conflict and sparring’s ceased, suddenly your sole companion for the most intimate thoughts is yourself once again, but it’s an opportune moment for contemplation: how did it really go wrong? Or, can I be honest with myself and acknowledge my own partial responsibility for its demise? For Sandra (Sandra Hüller) and Samuel (Samuel Theis), the key onscreen and offscreen players in Anatomy of a Fall, are enduring this quagmire, although their inevitable breakup was enforced––the latter has just tragically died. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
The Chronology of Water (Kristen Stewart)
As a director, Kristen Stewart takes words and embodies them, carving each into the flesh of her filmmaking like scars. You can’t breathe underwater. The transfiguration of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir is a suffocating experience, keeping one under even as you think you might briefly come up for oxygen. By the halfway mark, Chronology may have induced dissociation. But you don’t look away, you don’t leave. You kick forward, stretching ahead. You reach the wall, break the surface, and breathe the air. Stewart’s staggering debut is more than catharsis—it feels and understands everything that leads to it. — Blake S.
Where to Stream: VOD
How to Make a Killing (John Patton Ford)
John Patton Ford’s sophomore feature rides the wave of its clever lead from first shot to last, cool and confident that everything will work out in his favor no matter how pitted the odds are against him. The writer-director behind Emily the Criminal introduces us to the ever-smirking Becket Redfellow (Glen Powell) in a prison cell where he laments, with a smile, that he ordered vanilla ice cream despite being brought chocolate before embarking upon a feature-length voiceover that begins with the chronicling of how someone with such a stately name (and history) ended up in such an unfortunate situation. – Luke H. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (Matt Johnson)
The funniest, most unpredictable, “no, seriously, how the fuck did they do that???” movie of the year is about two guys, an RV, and a dream to play the Rivoli. Matt Johnson and Jay McCarroll’s big screen take on their cult-classic web (and later cable) series is perfectly legible for newbies, throwing off enough gags across the spectrum that something will land, be it a particular movie seen in a theater to a stray comment from a passerby. As much a triumph of low-budget/mockumentary filmmaking as it is one of sheer audacity, it simply must be seen to be believed. – Devan S. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
A Poet (Simón Mesa Soto)
Far removed from the mournful yearnings of A Quiet Passion––much less the quotidian, calming rhythms of Paterson––Simón Mesa Soto’s Medellín-set second feature finds unexpected poetry in the jagged, pained misery of dashed dreams and misinterpreted, career-ending good intentions. A Poet’s Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Rios), though 2,000 miles south of the down-on-their-luck, desperate characters often captured by Sean Price Williams’ camera, would find some recognition in the shared Sisyphean struggle of striking out at every opportunity life offers up. This Un Certain Regard jury prize winner is a darkly humorous, cautionary character study in letting one’s long-lost creative dreams drive every decision––one in which Soto, more often than not, finds empathy as his protagonist circles the drain. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Pompei: Below the Clouds (Gianfranco Rosi)
With Mount Vesuvius looming over southwestern Italy’s idyllic region of Naples, both in history and imagery, one might reasonably think Gianfranco Rosi’s Below the Clouds is about the storied volcano, active and enormous. Yet the title announces Rosi’s focus clearly: Below. In the shadow of Vesuvius––an ominous, peripheral character in the film’s mosaic of curios and quiet charismatics––the vast, densely populated terrain the ancient volcano lords over is teeming with distinct and peculiar modern life. Through a welcome litany of characters and occupations, Rosi shows us around Naples with an invasive interest, like a father bestowing a passion to his child. – Luke H. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI
Resurrection (Bi Gan)
Bi Gan plotted Resurrection long before AI was a twinkle in our anxious eye, but while watching a world where dreaming is outlawed, one can’t help making the devastating connection. What else is AI but a replacement for dreaming? For creativity? A sole dreamer travels through the history of China via cinema. By the time he’s landed in Bi’s now-patented, astonishing oner, fear of a “Dead Cinema” melts away like wax. What initially seems a final statement on the concept of the “Moving Picture” becomes a stirring, electrifying glimpse into what it looks like to save an art form. — Brandon S.
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Send Help (Sam Raimi)
New Sam Raimi films are few and far between these days, but when one appears, the debate as to whether he’s an inherently mean-spirited director invariably rears its head. His last pure horror movie, 2009’s Drag Me to Hell, is often deployed as the smoking gun for this argument, even though its protagonist represents everything audience members should root against: a loan manager desperate for a promotion who wills evil into her life after making an elderly woman homeless. Released in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, it was a characteristically goofy and gross ghost story that managed to meet its moment, slowly joining the ranks of Raimi’s best-regarded films in subsequent years, where it remained stubbornly topical. Send Help is being heavily trumpeted as Raimi’s first horror effort since, but is far more tantalizing when viewed as a return to that nihilistic strain of corporate satire where anybody who wants to climb the ladder is mercilessly punished for their shameless capitalist aspirations. – Alistair R. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
There is a haunting, anxious pulse inside the heart of Sentimental Value, a movie preoccupied with the way parents shape us in their absence and teach us forgiveness in their clumsy bids for reconnection. It ticks a few beats faster when a legendary filmmaker (Stellan Skarsgård) returns to his generational family home for his ex-wife’s funeral and tries salvaging a relationship with his two estranged daughters (Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). Using a light, dexterous, tender touch, Joachim Trier remains sensitive to life’s heaviness and absurdities, and the transcendent ways art might help us understand them. — Jake K-S.
Where to Stream: Hulu
Sirāt (Oliver Laxe)
Oliver Laxe hasn’t been shy about Sirāt being the first film he’s made with a larger audience in mind, his invitation to the masses on an intense spiritual journey that more than deserves its title as The Wages of Fear’s mythic successor. What is less discussed is that his film is an anti-crowd-pleaser for the ages: a movie that demands to be seen on the big screen like few others this year, even if the emotional extremities of its second half feel designed to make one run for the exits. When watched with a packed crowd, the gasps you’ll hear are as relentless as the sound design––it still proves impossible to look away from such an uncompromising vision of hell on earth. — Alistair R.
Where to Stream: VOD
Also New to Streaming
Hulu
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice
Kino Film Collection
Handsome Harry
Who is Dayani Cristal?
MUBI
A Mysterious World
Whore’s Glory
Paramount+
Primate
VOD
Goat
Jimpa
The post New to Streaming: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, Sirāt, Send Help, A Poet & More first appeared on The Film Stage.
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