[ad_1]
Read Richard Brody’s lists of the best films on Amazon Prime and Netflix, and of twenty-three short films to stream.
Disney took over Hulu last year, and since then the platform has been expanding its subscriber base rapidly, in part because of its emphasis on the streaming of TV series. Nonetheless, Hulu does also feature movies, and, though it tends to dig deeper into the past than Netflix does, its emphasis is on the recent past, especially the first decade of this century. A careful cull yields enough cinematic treasures, and also some pleasant surprises. (It also features, for no additional cost, some wonderful movies that are on other services for a per-view fee—notably, Anthony Mann’s Western melodrama “The Furies,” starring Barbara Stanwyck; Claire Denis’s screwball melodrama “Let the Sunshine In,” starring Juliette Binoche; and Albert Maysles’s documentary “Iris,” a portrait of the nonagenarian style icon Iris Apfel.)
What to stream during the quarantine: classics for comfort.
-
Aretha Franklin’s 1972 performances for the “Amazing Grace” album
were filmed under the aegis of the director Sydney Pollack, whose
technical errors led to the movie remaining unfinished for decades;
its tight close-ups and panoramic views of Franklin with her
fellow-musicians display the glory of her art. -
Eliza Hittman’s second feature, the drama of a young man who’s
enduring the homophobic prejudices of his Brooklyn milieu, is a
finely detailed view of the tight fabric of family and neighborhood
relations and the disruptive intensity of desire.
-
The first feature that Jerry Lewis, already an international
celebrity, directed (with himself as star) is also a daring work of
comedic and technical imagination—a tribute to the great silent-film
comedians that’s also a lampooning of his own fame. -
“The Bridges of Madison County”
Beside the pull of romance and the pleasure of acting alongside
Meryl Streep, it’s clear what attracted Clint Eastwood to this
adaptation, which brings to light two themes that are constants in
his work. First, it’s a story of the vast but necessary division
between what’s kept secret and what’s made public, the high price of
public life and self-revelation; second, it’s a story of the needful
tragedy of discipline, renunciation, and sacrifice. -
“C.S.A.: The Confederate States of
America”Kevin Willmott’s ingenious and agonized counter-historical
fantasy—done as a documentary about what today’s America would be
like had the South won the Civil War—is an incisive critique of
actual life in the modern United States. -
Joe Swanberg gathers an extraordinary cast—including Jake Johnson,
Rosemarie DeWitt, Melanie Lynskey, Anna Kendrick, Judith Light, Sam
Elliott, Brie Larson, Mike Birbiglia, and Orlando Bloom—for this
freewheeling domestic thriller, about the discovery, in a backyard,
of evidence that points to a murder. -
This work of anthropological surrealism, by the Colombian director
Ciro Guerra, is based on the travel diaries of
early-twentieth-century European explorers in the Amazon region; he
dramatizes a shaman’s encounters with them, in the course of
decades, with a meticulous eye for detail and unsparing attention to
colonial horrors. -
This wondrously original science-fiction twist on superheroic
themes, directed by Julia Hart, stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a woman who
struggles to control her miraculous powers while being pursued by
the government. -
Young and not-so-young artistic aspirants in Brooklyn reach a fever
pitch of familial and romantic tensions in this Bergmaniacal
melodrama, directed by Alex Ross Perry and starring Emily Browning,
Adam Horovitz, Chloë Sevigny, Analeigh Tipton, and Jason
Schwartzman.
-
“Hail
Satan?”
This startling documentary by Penny Lane, about the activism and the
background of the Satanic Temple, considers the group’s efforts to
maintain the constitutionally mandated separation of church and
state. -
Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of James Baldwin’s
novel,
starring KiKi Layne and Stephan James, is a masterwork of intimate
and historical portraiture, a passionate restoration of shared
experience and individual memory. -
Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden give two of the greatest
performances in all Hollywood—hers, as a saloon owner, is scathing
and operatic, and his, as a gunman, is hip and tormented—in Nicholas
Ray’s 1954 Western, co-starring Mercedes McCambridge, as a combatant
in business and love. -
“Paranoid Park”
The director Gus Van Sant brings energized curiosity to this
fragmented and subjective murder mystery, set in Portland, about a
teen-age skater’s confusion—familial, romantic, and moral. -
Céline Sciamma’s historical drama, set in eighteenth-century
Brittany, about an artist (Noémie Merlant) and the subject of a
portrait (Adèle Haenel), finds ingenious stylistic correlates for
the intersections of personal relationships, artistic
collaborations, and the essence of art. -
“Sands of Iwo Jima”
Made in 1949, only four years after the end of the Second World War,
this fierce drama—starring John Wayne and directed by Allan
Dwan,
whose first movie is from 1911—depicts bitter relationships,
political tensions, false bravado, and personal failings within the
ranks of the Marines, and the terrifying sacrifices on which the
battle and the war depended. -
A chance encounter led Ethan Hawke to befriend Seymour Bernstein, a
remarkable concert pianist living in New York who has long stayed
off the concert circuit. Hawke directs this warmhearted and
musically enthralling documentary portrait. -
This grand political fantasy, directed by Boots Riley—amazingly, his
first feature—depicts workplace relations and economic exploitation
with an overwhelming outpouring of imaginative energy. -
Susanna Fogel’s secret-agent spoof, starring Kate McKinnon and Mila
Kunis, has some of the most ingeniously designed and precisely
staged physical comedy in recent cinema. -
Andrew Bujalski’s hearty comedic drama, about the intersection of
personal and professional lives in and around a Texas sports bar,
is also a showcase of subtle and stylish performances by a teeming
cast headed by Regina Hall, Haley Lu Richardson, and Shayna
McHayle.
-
The Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu is the most original of the new wave of Romanian filmmakers, and simply one of the best
directors working now. His wry 2015 drama is the multilayered and
ironic tale of a literal excavation in quest of buried loot—and of a
metaphorical excavation of Romanian history. (Porumboiu’s most
recent film, the intricate thriller “The
Whistlers,”
has shifted to an online release. I discussed it recently on Zoom
with Miriam Bale, the
artistic director of the Indie Memphis Film Festival.) -
In Nanni Moretti’s exuberant and critical comedy about Vatican politics and the burden of power, the grand French actor Michel
Piccoli plays the newly chosen pontiff—and Moretti plays his
psychiatrist. -
“Whose Streets?”
This analytical and impassioned documentary, by Sabaah Folayan and
Damon Davis, about the residents of Ferguson, Missouri, reveals the
political inequities that led to the police killing of Michael
Brown, the inadequate official response to it, and the efforts to
repress protest against it.
Bonus: For those with ESPN+, too (also a Disney service, which is bundled along with Disney+ and Hulu), there’s “Subject to Review,” Theo Anthony’s probingly philosophical and detective-like inquiry into the technology of video review in professional tennis.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
[ad_2]
