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.
April (Dea Kulumbegashvili)
Like Beginning, April also carries the mark of reality, mediated. The director is inspired by fictionalized stories gleaned from the real world––especially her hometown, a village at the foot of the Caucasus mountains in Georgia and its people. Beginning’s sparse dialogue, long takes, and atmosphere of violence closing in on the main character––a Jehovah Witnesses pastor’s wife played by the new film’s lead, Ia Sukhitashvili––made space thicken and swell, while April breathes. Arseni Khachaturan’s patient, somehow insistent camera uncovers a world that is both familiar and uncanny: a world split between rumbling storms, rainfall, a gorgeous sunset seen from angles almost as low as the grass itself, and a rotting patriarchal society that squashes female independence with its body politics. Nina (Sukhitashvili) is an OBGYN who, despite best efforts, has to report a newborn’s death as the result of a previously unregistered pregnancy. The local woman’s husband demands an investigation, well aware of rumors that Nina performs illegal abortions in the village––something the patriarchy cannot allow. – Savina P. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI, Metrograph at Home
Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari)
Blue Heron, Romvari’s feature debut, once again mines the director’s own history, following a Hungarian family of six as it settles in a nondescript stretch of suburbia outside Vancouver. The opening line, “I struggle now to remember much of my childhood,” belongs to the youngest child, Sasha (Eylul Guven), the film to her older stepbrother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), a sullen, taciturn adolescent with a history of self-destructive behavior no one has learned how to deal with, much less address. Yet Romvari refuses to write him off as a troubled child. Yes, the kid is most certainly not all right, but he traverses Blue Heron as its most mysterious, elusive character, and that impenetrability is a measure of Romvari’s empathy. Rather than pathologizing his pain––a tendency his own parents succumb to––she invites us to sit with it and bask in his drawn-out silences, in the gaps between the words and imperfect memories that grown-up Sasha (Amy Zimmer), in the film’s second half, will try piecing together. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel
Close Your Eyes (Víctor Erice)
Eríce’s latest is the ultimate cinephile catnip: the triumphant return of a director known to only make masterpieces, a film filled with in-group references and nods to cinema history (including a lengthy performance of a song from a Howard Hawks film), and an ending that hinges on the literal power of cinema itself. Thankfully, these qualities are hardly gimmicks; there’s real pathos in this story of a missing director that’s aided by these loving reminders of what makes the seventh art so important to so many. Close Your Eyes commands a secular, cynical audience to remember that art was born out of religion and miracles can still happen if one believes. – Z.W. L.
Where to Stream: Film Movement+
Disclosure Day (Steven Spielberg)
Certain beliefs unite all of humanity. Take, for example, the idea that the extraordinary is possible. Or, even more, that the impossible is possible. Steven Spielberg isn’t shy about believing in extraterrestrial life, and he doesn’t think you should be either. He’s so sincere about this aloof-yet-sky-high-stakes concept that he’s returning to it again with a very simple profundity in tow: “Empathy is the core of animate existence–our evolutionary advantage.” And he intends to remind us of our capacity for such. – Luke H. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Eephus (Carson Lund)
If the perfect sports movie illuminates the fundamentals that make one fall in love with the game, there may be no better movie about baseball than Carson Lund’s Eephus. Structured solely around a single round of America’s national pastime, Lund’s debut feature beautifully, humorously articulates the particular nuances, rhythms, and details of an amateur men’s league game. By subverting tropes of the standard sports movie––which often captures peak physical performance in front of legions of adoring fans––Lund has crafted something far more singularly compelling. Rather than grand slams and no-hitters, there are errors aplenty and no shortage of beer guts and weathered muscles amongst the motley crew. Lund is more interested in examining the peculiar set of social codes that only apply when one is on the field, unimpeded by life’s responsibilities and entirely focused on the rules of the game. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Nirvanna the Band the Show and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (Matt Johnson)
The most purely entertaining film of the year, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, has found a streaming home alongside the first-ever U.S. streaming release of the first two seasons of the equally brilliant Nirvanna the Band the Show. Devan Suber said in his review of the feature, “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.”
Where to Stream: Hulu
Pressure (Anthony Maras)
Can you make an engaging film about predicting the weather? Pressure, directed by Anthony Maras, answers this question in the affirmative. Set mere days before D-Day is set to commence, General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) needs an accurate forecast to ensure the operation will go as planned. The film’s stark opening minutes portray the vicious aftermath of Operation Tiger, a D-Day training exercise gone horribly wrong only months earlier. Hundreds of American soldiers were killed by friendly fire after some deadly miscommunication. We find Eisenhower steadfast but shaken, surrounded by British generals who believe they can do a better job leading the Allied Expeditionary Force (AEF) to victory. Damian Lewis represents this feeling in his outsized portrayal of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, commander of all D-Day land forces. – Dan M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Peacock
Also New to Streaming
Apple TV+
The Dink
Kino Film Collection
Trans-Europ-Express
Prime Video
Masters of the Universe
Shudder
Saccharine
The post New to Streaming: Disclosure Day, Blue Heron, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie & More first appeared on The Film Stage.
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