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.
Armageddon Time (James Gray)
Armageddon Time is the sort of film usually invoked as a “portrait of the nation” or “state of the union address,” something taking the temperature of a country—most likely the United States—at a particular time in history. But it’s also a work that makes self-consciousness a virtue: its wonderful writer-director, James Gray, is informed up to his eyes about the virtues and pitfalls of films like these, and here makes something so idiosyncratically his own but that audiences and critics might still mislabel with one of those aforementioned ideas. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Bouchra (Meriem Bennani, Orian Barki)
Based on a real-life conversation shared by co-director Meriem Bennani and her own mother, Bouchra (co-directed with Orian Barki and co-written by them and Ayla Mrabet) opens with a phone call. Aicha (Yto Barrada) is checking in on her daughter from Morocco when Bouchra (Bennani) broaches a subject they’ve been avoiding for almost a decade. Stuck creatively, the latter has decided to find emotional catharsis through a script about the complex dynamic shared with her parents and seeks context from the opposite side. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Fence (Claire Denis)
After getting a quiet theatrical release earlier this month, Claire Denis’ The Fence has now arrived on streaming. The great director’s latest is perhaps not so evocative and penetrating as her career high marks, but it’s stuck with me far more than most of last year’s most “acclaimed” films. Ethan Vestby said in his review, “Is the idea of a Claire Denis film changing? There was likely an image one formed in their head when that name emerged: elliptical, sexy, avant-garde. Yet recent works are suggesting a different direction, one far more direct and less mysterious. It can even be said that her newest, The Fence, plays like a final film––not necessarily as a grand summation or statement, but like a stripping-down of almost everything possible.”
Where to Stream: AMC+
Is God Is (Aleshea Harris)
“Complicated” doesn’t begin to describe the family history that twin sisters Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) are facing in Is God Is, Aleshea Harris’ film adaptation of her acclaimed play. A directorial debut brimming with storytelling ingenuity and stylistic verve, the revenge tale follows the sisters on their path toward justice after their father left them and their mother for dead. While sometimes the theatrics at play can take away from the desired emotional connection, it’s quite an impressive first outing in the directorial chair for Harris, hopefully leading to more opportunities. – Jordan R.
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Mother Mary (David Lowery)
The first thing we hear in Mother Mary is the sound of Michaela Coel’s voice. She anticipates Mother Mary’s arrival and warns us that this story is cursed. Anyone who has been watching television for the last decade could recognize the richness and clarity of her tone. But now, on the big screen, we get to hear it louder than it’s ever been. Writer-director David Lowery sets the stage for Mother Mary, but it’s Coel—playing the jilted, acidic fashion designer Sam Anselm—who steps out center stage. Coel dominates the screen, keeping all our senses at attention; though she has been in films before, Mother Mary feels like her grand entrance. Living on a large, dark property in England, Sam has banished herself from society. All she has is her work, loyal assistant Hilda (Hunter Schafer), and enough fire in her soul to chase off creeping feelings of ennui. Sam is also, crucially, a woman haunted by love, her passion fueled by sustained, aching heartbreak. – Jourdain S. (full review)
Where to Stream: HBO Max
Red Rooms (Pascal Plante)
Part-subversive courtroom thriller, part-Demonlover-inspired satire on how technology has fed our most taboo addictions, all-parts irresistible, I don’t think any film will see its cult following grow in size by the end of the decade quite like Red Rooms. I was initially confused by widespread comparisons to David Fincher, beyond this being an icy take on the serial-killer genre, but in the months since my first viewing, it’s dawned on me: much like the audiences who have Mandela effect-ed themselves into believing you see Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box in Se7en, this is a movie which gets its power from affording the viewer space to illustrate the most gruesome images for themselves. Without a clearer view of those to anchor the story, the worldview and sympathies of Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) remain impenetrable, her every action––from a friendship with a serial-killer “groupie” to the most ill-advised fancy dress costume in history––an act of violence. Without a single drop of blood, Red Rooms still feels destined to be described as one of the most depraved thrillers in history; I haven’t been able to shake it since seeing it, and quite frankly I don’t want to. – Alistair R.
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Romería (Carla Simón)
Continuing in the low-key register of her Golden Bear winner Alcarràs, Carla Simón returns with Romería, another tale of intergenerational dissonance. A film about the stories families choose to tell and the ones they bury deep inside, it unfurls on Spain’s Atlantic coast, where 18-year-old orphan Marina (Llúcia Garcia) hopes to reunite with her paternal family. It’s also a story about displacement and yearning for lost roots, themes that cut close to the bone for a director whose parents died of AIDS when she was still a child, and who reunited with her father’s family in the town of Vigo, Galicia, where the film is set, at the same age. Simón has always been an autobiographical filmmaker; Romería might be her most personal work yet. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Rosebush Pruning (Karim Aïnouz)
Moulding cruel or nihilistic characters into darkly attractive protagonists requires a deceptively delicate touch. We’ve grown so used to seeing it done effortlessly that a movie like Rosebush Pruning can perhaps be some useful reminder of how difficult it is to pull off. The latest from Brazilian sensualist Karim Aïnouz (of Futuro Beach and The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmão fame) spends so much of its swift runtime affecting a transgressive atmosphere that it never quite gets around to making its caustic characters compelling or providing an outsider who might warrant our sympathy or concern. Why play funny games, you start to wonder, if there are no normies worth terrorizing? – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI
Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin)
The films of Mark Jenkin ooze a hypnotic, seasick sensibility; to watch them is to be lulled by their restless jumps through time and space, their ability to convert his home turf of Cornwall into a suspended world where facts and visions collide in stupefying dioramas. The director is a spinner of wandering tales, never fueled by linear plots so much as ambient forces: a ticking clock, gusts of wind, the distant roaring of waves. His dramas tend to pull your gaze from people and toward the inanimate objects that litter their surroundings. It’s here––in the interstice between the fictional foreground and non-fictional background––that the actual story often lies. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Wizard of the Kremlin (Olivier Assayas)
Following up one of his smallest-scale films, Suspended Time, Olivier Assayas’ latest is the epic political drama The Wizard of the Kremlin, based on Giuliano da Empoli. Starring Jude Law as Vladimir Putin alongside Paul Dano, Alicia Vikander, Tom Sturridge, Will Keen, and Jeffrey Wright, Savina Petkova said in her Venice review, “Audiences resisted Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice because they feared the idea of Donald Trump being a movie’s protagonist, but never in its runtime does The Wizard of Kremlin show any ambivalence towards its main character. Without daring to question Baranov as a narrator, Assayas’ film consents to be interpreted as cynical. Because what is it, if not cynical, to insist on turning a chain of events that are still unfolding into a compact story? We may be used to recognizing films that fetishize something through their form, but we seemingly need to be wary of a content-fetish too.”
Where to Stream: Hulu
Also New to Streaming
Kino Film Collection
Love the Hard Way
MUBI
The Loneliness of Lizards
VOD
A Sad and Beautiful World
Toy Story 5
The post New to Streaming: Rose of Nevada, Romería, The Fence, Mother Mary & More first appeared on The Film Stage.
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