Welcome to April — a month that promises an eclipse, the end of March Madness, and plenty of great new streaming options! Here are ten such titles.
Disturbia, Amazon Prime Video
Millennial Rear Window is tight! If nothing else, Disturbia ensured that I’d always know the Spanish word for “perhaps.” (IYKYK.) But this take on the Hitchcockian surveillance story by way of Shia LaBeouf’s teenager on house arrest provides pretty solid suspense, if nothing particularly revelatory. This could probably use a Gen Z remake to account for social media…
EO, Max
In my top 10 movies of 2022, I declared “the clearest X-ray of contemporary society came not through radiation waves but through the braying of a donkey.” At the time, Jerzy Skolimowski’s extraordinary odyssey EO was still only available in select theaters. Now, the film I described as “visceral, vibrant filmmaking” with “an existential ache that communicates across species” is much easier to watch on a widely-used platform. It’s under 90 minutes, too! (I also interviewed Skolimowski, if you’re looking for supplemental reading.)
Inherent Vice, Paramount+
“Fawn all you'd like over the restrained elegance of Phantom Thread,” I wrote in an “unpopular opinion” for /Film in 2017, “but Inherent Vice is far more of an impressive achievement and an emblematic calling card for PTA.” I unabashedly love this detour for one of Hollywood’s most adored directors, and I’m not just grading on a curve because of the challenge he faced in adapting the dense prose of Thomas Pynchon into something remotely watchable. Inherent Vice is just plain fun. If you thought Josh Brolin’s Instagrams promoting Dune: Part Two were fun, wait until you see what he can do with a banana or profanity in this movie.
Joy, Max
“Remember Joy?” Blank Check host David Sims once dismissively tweeted. “It was about mops.” Actually, no, that’s not the truth, Ellen. (You can tell how totally normal I am about this movie for remembering a seven-year-old tweet.) Joy is a brilliant ode to a different vision of capitalism, a female-centered one that caters to ignored market needs and creates the conditions necessary to foster such innovations. It’s a bit messy in the way that all David O. Russell movies are, but that misshapenness feels like a reflection of the scrappiness Jennifer Lawrence’s titular protagonist must demonstrate to succeed.
Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, rental
You’ll hear more from me on the offbeat charms of the Zellner Brothers later this month when their new film Sasquatch Sunset releases. In the meantime, you can find out if their unusual Bigfoot movie is for you by watching a previous work, Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter. If you think it’s no longer possible for contemporary films to fall off the face of the earth, think again — this was unwatchable for many years until Bleecker Street heroically rescued it for a 10th anniversary re-release. Now you can enjoy Rinko Kikuchi (Oscar-nominated for her turn in Babel) as an isolated Japanese office worker who becomes obsessed with the idea that the movie Fargo points to a secret buried treasure.
The Matrix, Netflix
Happy belated 25th anniversary to The Matrix. That falling this particular Sunday was a little too perfectly timed as both Easter, a celebration of rebirth and resurrection, and Trans Day of Visibility. (A coincidence that no one got mad about. No one forgot to research that TDOV is always March 31 and Easter changes every year based on the lunar calendar. Couldn’t be anyone online.) “There was a growing sense [in the 1990s] that the roiling underground was rising up to subsume the status quo,” Adam Stenbergh wrote in his appraisal of the film’s legacy in 2019. “The Matrix proved the exclamation point at the end of that era by proving that these two sensibilities could be cannily combined into a single, successful movie. It rose to merge two competing worlds.” While the film is not without its bits of silliness, it’s a genuine watershed moment for mainstream cinema that still finds new ways to stun.
Molly’s Game, Netflix
After The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Being the Ricardos, I feel safe in declaring that Aaron Sorkin has lost some of his touch — or, at the very least, some of his luster for me. Part of that comes from the fact that, to paraphrase a favored critical quip for multi-hyphenate filmmakers, Aaron Sorkin is too good of a writer to have his scripts directed by Aaron Sorkin. I think Molly’s Game, Sorkin’s first time in the director’s chair, manages to get away with some of his excesses in part because it’s such propulsive fun to watch. It functions as both a sports movie inside the world of poker and a character study of Jessica Chastain’s driven ex-skier who immerses herself in the world of high-dollar Hollywood gambling.
The Mother and the Whore, Criterion Channel
Another example of a film I once recommended and was, for all intents and purposes, impossible to watch outside of New York City. (Sorry! I try to limit it.) Now, Criterion Channel has made the landmark French film The Mother and the Whore available online alongside a larger collection of work by its director Jean Eustache. As I wrote in my survey of a century in Gallic cinema:
The confinement of freedom forms the subject of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore. The film’s extended conversations demonstrate the depths of discontent among a young Parisian man grappling with the failed promises of sexual liberation. His attempts to calibrate a love triangle to his advantage show how youthful energy begins to fizzle and flame out.
Hear me out: the nearly four-hour runtime whizzes right by you.
Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, Amazon Prime Video
The Please Don’t Destroy boys deserved better than to have their debut feature film project get pulled from theaters and then unceremoniously released on a subpar streaming service. I’m not saying The Treasure of Foggy Mountain is some kind of comic masterpiece, but it made me laugh a decent amount … and comedic groups all have to start somewhere. They deserved the same chance to flop as The Lonely Island did with Hot Rod in 2007!
The Watermelon Woman, Max
Talking heads nowadays might feel like a pure information delivery system inside a work of art. But you should stop and consider those inside Cheryl Dunye’s landmark lesbian comedy The Watermelon Woman, which follows the character of Cheryl’s fictional hunt for a lost icon of queer cinema. As she told me ahead of her film’s canonization in the Criterion Collection last summer:
“The one thing you can do with the talking head—and this becomes the Dunyementary—is that you can shoot them at any point in the process. In particular, when shooting the movie, I would set time down to shoot [talking-head footage] on the days of production. But then it’s really important for me to have people come back, especially in my shorts, a couple of weeks later and try to get back into character. Tell me what it’s like to get back into character and what you remember. Because I want to hear that foggy memory and the things that popped out for you. I want storytelling about yourself, in character and as yourself talking about the character. That’s where it becomes the experiment. There’s something about how we remember ourselves, how we want to boast about ourselves, how we want to represent ourselves in words to the world.”
There’s a world of artistry inside the movies we watch, provided we put down our second screens and put ourselves in the position to perceive it.
I’ve interviewed Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher and British actor Josh O’Connor before the pandemic, and I count both of those among my favorite conversations. So imagine my delight when it was announced that they’d be collaborating on La Chimera … and that I’d have the opportunity to speak to them together. I loved this conversation for Slant Magazine just as I loved this magical movie, which is now playing in NY/LA before expanding across America on April 12.
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