What to Stream: Three Online Releases of Movies That Would Have Come to Theatres – The New Yorker

Hollywood’s response to the coronavirus lockdown and the resulting shutdown of movie theatres is, so far, mainly, to do nothing—i.e., to wait the shutdown out in the hopes of eventually presenting major releases in theatres, whenever that might be. The availability of new movies online has come mainly from independent distributors, and they’re so far only a trickle, but the streaming schedule will grow richer in the coming weeks. Here are three—two new releases and one revival—now streaming.

Tayarisha Poe’s ambitious and atmospheric first feature, “Selah and the Spades” (which is available on Amazon Prime), is a fascinating and daring hybrid of tones and moods, and, if they don’t always mesh, their individual moments are nonetheless often striking and memorable. Selah Summers (Lovie Simone) is the queen bee of a prep school (with both boarding and day students) called Haldwell, and the head of the Spades, one of the five so-called factions that run the school’s social life. They do so in the manner of five Mafia families, with divided responsibilities (such as drugs, gambling, and cheating) and spoils (seemingly not money but power and prestige), and with a prevailing law of omertà that allows their reign of violence to endure with impunity. The movie is a vaguely anachronistic period piece, set in an age of push-button landlines and handwritten ledgers and 35-mm. S.L.R.s, with no cell phones or personal computers. Selah is a high-school senior who grooms Paloma (Celeste O’Connor), a recent transfer student and a sophomore, as her successor, but—with her drive for control—she also tries to keep Paloma subordinate and deferential. Meanwhile, Selah’s trusted associate Maxxie (Jharrel Jerome) has screwed up, and, in dispatching Paloma to clean up the mess, she begins to suspect Paloma of disloyalty.

The tightly tangled lines of power and practical motives on which the movie runs are sketched plainly—even too conspicuously. The film distills even its protagonist’s key experiences in short scenes that are meant to stand for a lifetime of complexes, as when Selah tells her mother by phone that she got a ninety-three on a calculus exam and her mother—who has her heart set on Selah attending a particular prestigious college called Redwood—retorts, “What happened to the other seven points?” The student life of Haldwell as depicted in the film is ahistorical, apolitical, culturally undefined, hermetically sealed, ignoring the loose ends peeking out from under the factions’ reign and within their members’ disciplined and overcontrolled habits.

In short, “Selah and the Spades” presents a grindingly mechanical and impersonal plot and presses a wonderful young cast into its narrow confines, allowing them little margin for inventive performance—only to overcome its own rigidity with a sense of style and a subjective energy that’s altogether rare in the current cinema. Poe, working with the cinematographer Jomo Fray, crafts a noteworthy array of moments within moments, of fleeting impressions seized from the high-pressure course of daily life to create an instant nostalgia, a forging of its characters’ memories that will endure long after the earnest yet absurd drama of their adolescent lives washes away. “Selah and the Spades” plays like a distanced and third-person effort to recapture intense first-person emotions and experiences; its artistic personality is divided against itself, yet its very tensions unleash creative energy that is itself moving and invigorating.

“To the Stars,” directed by Martha Stephens, is another period piece—this one more clearly specified in its place and time. (It was released on Friday on Amazon, iTunes, and other services.) It’s set around 1960, in a small Oklahoma town, where two high-school students are thrown together by circumstance. Iris (Kara Hayward) is a socially awkward, introverted intellectual who is ostracized by girls and sexually harassed by boys. Maggie (Liana Liberato) is a seemingly sophisticated newcomer to the neighborhood whose family just moved there to get a fresh start—in order to cover up for Maggie’s ostracism in their former town, as a result of some unspecified transgression, clearly sexual in nature, the specifics of which are revealed only drop by drop until a grand dénouement pulls the secret into the open. Yet, before that happens, Maggie defends and befriends Iris, gives her a hand with hair styles and clothing, and draws her out of her shell.

Sill, the grace notes, found in occasional tossed-off phrases, gestures, and glances, are as strong and significant as the overdetermined and undercharacterized action; if the direction of “To the Stars” tends toward the literal, it, too, offers a notable and distinctive element of style. The movie’s reconstruction of the period, with the specifics of hairdos and outfits and props, and with the over-all design of its color palette, offers the impression of having been conceived in relation not to movies of the period but to snapshots and home movies, to reflect the casual immediacy of vernacular material experience. Unfortunately, the style of the performances is less redolent of discovery and reinvention than of inherited convention. Yet the styles of this movie, too, leave strong traces in memory that reach beyond the boundaries of its dramaturgy.

What good is an Oscar? Lee Grant’s 1986 documentary feature “Down and Out in America” won one (tying with a film about the bandleader Artie Shaw), but it has remained long unavailable regardless. It came to Film Forum’s Web site on Friday, and it’s a powerful, bracing, mournful film. Specifically, its subject is the age of Ronald Reagan and the installation of a new era of calculated cruelties toward the poor and the powerless. Grant, working with the cinematographer Tom Hurwitz, visits farmers in Minnesota who are being dispossessed of their farms and their homes by banks that are engaging in predatory practices (chicanery involving the assessment of land) and, in the process, voiding the Midwest of tens of thousands of family farms to the benefit of corporate concerns. She documents their organized protests, which even garner the support of the state’s government—to no avail. She talks with unemployed people, former employees of local factories that have moved their manufacturing operations to Southern states—what’s unstated is, to states where unions are weak—or out of the country, and she observes the desolation of towns that results.

In Los Angeles, Grant films homeless people who have developed a well-organized and orderly shanty town on a vacant lot—which is visited by a police officer who’s the advance guard for a whole battalion of officers that comes by soon thereafter to evict the residents and demolish the structures. In New York, she visits formerly homeless residents of the Lower East Side who have transformed abandoned buildings into quality housing but fear their eviction by the authorities in the interest of real-estate companies. She also films outside a midtown hotel—and, unable to enter, obtains footage by way of residents’ hidden cameras—where the homeless are housed in grossly substandard conditions, at an absurdly inflated cost to the city. And, in an extended, pain-filled concluding sequence, she speaks with a young homeless couple with five young children who were burned out of their Coney Island apartment and are enduring a bureaucratic runaround and the squalor of their officially assigned hotel.

In her voice-over commentary, Grant traces the rise of unemployment and homelessness, the displacement of factories, the closing of farms, and the dispossession of city dwellers to the early nineteen-eighties, to the time of the first Reagan Administration. She makes clear that the lack of a federal policy is itself a policy, that inaction regarding the well-being of those in danger is itself a form of cruel action, that economic and social phenomena masked as in some way natural or self-generating (such as the increase in inequality and the upward transfer of wealth) are the product of politics—and that the effects of those policies is likely to be political, too. In “Down and Out in America,” the current state of American politics is seen in its first monstrous stages.