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.
Blink Twice (Zoë Kravitz)
Over a close-up of a turtle, ominous sound design builds at such a deep frequency that the walls of a press-screening room in Beverly Hills began rattling. Once the shaking stopped and it’s realized this was not the third Los Angeles earthquake in as many weeks, the setup of Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut Blink Twice is doled out in impressively economical fashion: Rent is due for Frida (Naomie Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawkat). Rather than pay up and keep the wheels spinning in their going-nowhere-fast lives, Frida has a plan: retrieving a hidden wad of bills, she purchases gowns so she and Jess can crash a fancy gala after their waitress shifts end. Looking suitably glamorous, the two ignore a security guard’s insistence they stay away from tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) and his entourage. A meet-cute between Frida and Slater ensues––the entire setup straight out of a Disney (or Disney Channel) movie. – Caleb H. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Booger (Mary Dauterman)
Unable to come to terms with her best friend and roommate Izzy’s death, Anna (Grace Glowicki) does everything possible to avoid that which she cannot fix by focusing her energy on something she can. Or, at least, something she thinks she can fix. Because there are no guarantees Anna will find Booger the cat once he leaves out the fire escape window. No guarantees he wants to come back. – Jared M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Challengers (Luca Guadagnino)
Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers opens in an intentionally disorienting manner: We are in New Rochelle, New York for a tennis challenger. Wearing cheap shorts that resemble boxers, Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) battles Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), clad in head-to-toe Uniqlo, while the glamorous Tashi Donaldson (Zendaya) watches tensely from the stands. Flashbacks, first from a few days prior, and then way back to 13 years ago, slowly fill in the gaps on how these two former best friends ended up in such a position: playing against one another in a mid-tier tennis challenger comically sponsored by a tire brand. – Caleb H. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Coma (Bertrand Bonello)
A contemporary cliché that weakly attempts to diagnose what ails us in modern life is the idea of being addled by technology––of our minds and attention spans swamped by screens, content, scrolling. But as the pandemic hit this notion gained a new relevance: it’s not that the virtual realm of content and media was luring us away from our reality––faced with an indefinite lockdown, it had finally become our sole one. Even though this can be poorly rendered by some, it’s the more sensitive and aware artists, such as Bertrand Bonello with his new feature Coma, that remind of the urgency to confront it. – David K. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Cuckoo (Tilman Singer)
Hunter Schafer is a very good actress. This probably won’t be news to anyone who watched even the first episode of Euphoria, where her aching vulnerability seemed to swallow the scenery whole. Fresh from appearing in the latest Hunger Games, the actress takes her first leading role in Cuckoo, a supernatural horror that doesn’t feel pushed to explain itself, offering a fun mashup of older, less-well-heeled filmmaking tropes. There is a nicely hammy turn from Dan Stevens and one finely tuned homage, but in Schafer it holds an ace: nailing the physical comedy and stretching her emotive face to the limit, the film is all hers. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater)
Near the end of his essay for the Criterion release of Dazed and Confused, Kent Jones writes, “[Richard] Linklater has a keen, poetic memory for exactly how we did nothing.” Like the best American directors, Linklater understands that the roots of Americana are in a formless wandering, one that was as often about bullshit as transcendence. Everybody Wants Some!!, the spiritual sequel to his 1993 feature, is another rumination on transition, following the residents of a baseball house the weekend before classes at an unspecified college in 1980. It’s a weekend bacchanalia filled with rule-breaking parties, masculinity endurance tests, hotboxed bedrooms, closed-door hookups, and the flickers of a romance that could be about more than getting off. – Michael S. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Handling the Undead (Thea Hvistendahl)
The first word that comes to mind when thinking of how to write about Thea Hvistendahl’s Handling the Undead is: dread. To expand: slow, ponderous dread. Written by John Ajvide Lindqvist (and based on his novel of the same name), this is a zombie movie in the tradition of the author’s own Let the Right One In. There are zombies here but, as with the vampires in the latter work, the focus is elsewhere, mostly. Its genre construct is meant to elevate a deeper kind of pain. In this incarnation, a series of sad people dealing with different variations of grief must contend with an unsettling new reality: those loved ones they’ve buried have come back to life. – Dan M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs)
Absence is at the center of His Three Daughters, Azazel Jacobs’ latest film. It’s set almost entirely in a small New York City apartment as three sisters reunite to care for their ailing father in his final days, and Jacobs never lets us see inside his room. The camera stays largely in common areas where the three leads argue, cry, reconcile, and come to terms with living in a world where the one thing tying them together no longer exists. Barring some divisive final-act choices, it’s a powerful work with a smart screenplay and three terrific performances that capture the messy nature of families going through a grieving process. – C.J. P. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun)
Tender yet rageful, quiet yet deafening, intimate yet expansive, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is a towering achievement of total artistic freedom, the kind of work where certain images will be eternally burned into your mind and the feelings it exudes will linger far after the credits roll. Expanding the aura of loneliness from We’re All Going to the World’s Fair into a vastly more ambitious, layered canvas, Schoenbrun’s third feature tells the story of Owen, played early on by Ian Foreman and later by Justice Smith in a revelatory performance. Following the isolated journey of questioning his identity through childhood and adulthood, we witness his special infatuation with a late-night TV show and the ineradicable bond it creates with another lonely soul, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine). The deeply expressive, imaginative ways in which Schoenbrun is able to articulate one’s struggle with identity is nothing short of staggering. This may not be a horror film in the conventional sense––in fact, every directorial decision assertively refutes convention––but I Saw the TV Glow emphatically argues nothing is more terrifying than being trapped in a body you don’t desire and having no words to properly express the feeling. – Jordan R. (full review)
Where to Stream: Max
Last Summer (Catherine Breillat)
Anne (Léa Drucker) is an esteemed lawyer: as uncompromising as she is in her line of work, she is free to enjoy her private life. In her ’40s she has it all, the job and the family she never thought would come. So begins Catherine Breillat’s newest film, Last Summer, which may be a remake of May el-Toukhy’s 2019 adulterous drama Queen of Hearts, but yields to the French filmmaker’s every wish. Even though we never get any backstory to Anne’s character, it’s hinted that her youth was not a pleasant one, as an early abortion took away the possibility to have children of her own. But now, in the summer of her life, she is a mother of two adopted girls and stepmother to an unruly teenager named Théo (Samuel Kircher), from her husband Pierre’s (Olivier Rabourdin) previous marriage. Amidst the idyllic rituals of daily life in the countryside, Anne seems composed and satiated. She is not one to look for trouble. – Savina P. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
Mother, Couch (Niclas Larsson)
Mother, Couch is a boiling point of a picture. Written and directed by Niclas Larsson (and based on Jerker Virdborg’s novel Mamma i soffa), this is an edgy story about small discourtesies and how they sometimes build into something big, nasty, and violent. Three half-siblings (Ewan McGregor, Rhys Ifans, and Lara Flynn Boyle) are forced back together when their mother (Ellen Burstyn) refuses to move from a couch in a big, dilapidated furniture store. The daughter (Taylor Russell) of the store owner appears very unworried by the dilemma. She even invites them to stay the night if it’s helpful. – Dan M. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
On the Adamant (Nicolas Philibert)
A lot of what’s good about On the Adamant can be found in that opening sequence: how François seems to channel his frustration through a creative outlet; how expression seems to focus him, if only for a minute. In another scene, a man with more apparent disabilities than François presents a drawing to the other members of his class, explaining that the two girls pictured are his daughters. When asked why he isn’t included in the scene, he charms the crowd by flipping it over to reveal another sketch of them together at the zoo. Those kinds of moments are what’s on offer in Philibert’s compassionate, calmly observed, at times intermittent film: an invitation to board the Adamant and meet its crew, enjoy their company, get some idea of their vantage, and appreciate the Art Brut energies of their craft. – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: Kino Film Collection
Youth (Spring) (Wang Bing)
Wang’s Youth series, set to progress through three more seasons, will be his farewell to shooting in China. Youth (Spring) documents a period of intense globalization and hyper-capitalism already well underway when he began filming nine years ago. The film stations itself down in the clothing factories of Zhili, where young people (some still teenagers) toil away for bottom-of-the-barrel wages. Although a little structurally scattershot, Youth (Spring) captures the trap laid out for its subjects, who repeatedly beg their employers for higher wages compensating for hard menial labor. The soundtrack’s constant grind of factory noise is more disturbing than any image. – Steve E.
Where to Stream: OVID.tv
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