Netflix may get maximum attention, but it’s not a one-stop-shop for moviegoers to watch old and new must-have movies. Each of the major streaming platforms caters to its own niche of movie obsessives.
From the endless wonders of the Criterion Channel to the new frontiers of streaming brought to you by Film Movement and Peacock, IndieWire’s monthly consultant highlights the best of what’s in store for every major streamer, with an eye toward exclusive titles that can help to the readers. which. of those facilities suits them well.
Here’s yours for August 2024.
Samantha Bergeson contributed to this story.
There’s a surprising collection of new offerings on Criterion Channel in August to drown out their sorrows over the end of the Olympics. But the one that deserves your attention without delay is the masterpiece of Bertrand Bonello’s triptych, even if it did appear on the channel in the last days of July. in a great premiere in “live” streaming. Premiered at Venice last year, “The Beast” is the kind of “2046” or “Cloud Atlas-style” rambling we want so much more often: In 1910, a rich love blossoms between Gabrielle, married (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay), they decide not to go through. Their intimacy is such, however, that Gabrielle confesses to him the feeling of unhappiness that weighs on her life, her worry about a calamity that has led her to become obsessed with it – anyone born with an abyss of terror in their soul can perceive this “Beast” of the name it bears with a short story by Henry James that vaguely animated this film.
Indeed, calamity befalls Gabrielle and Louis, and back to their next lives, a hundred years later, when Gabrielle is now a style house in Los Angeles and Louis is a murderous Incel stalker after her. They were vital in everyone’s lives the first time and still now in a very different way. And finally, we see them in 2044, when AI has eliminated as many tasks as possible in the world and the only satisfying task left requires everyone to purge their feelings and, like a robot, through surgery.
The combination of feelings and moods “The Beast” covers a wide spectrum: one minute is an Edith Wharton-style tragedy, the next, a real horror movie about a woman alone in a threatened house. And it offers the most productive use of the green screen in a movie since “Holy Motors. “
If you want something else to take that point away after “The Beast,” Criterion has epics to dive into: A major Paul Thomas Anderson retrospective on the transmitter includes “Magnolia,” “Punch-Drunk Love,” “There Will. “Be Blood”, “El Maestro” and “Pizza de Licorice”. This line is also layered with a new collection from Philip Seymour Hoffman, which adds “25th Hour,” “Capote,” “The Savages,” and “Synecdoche, New York” to the mix. In addition, there are tribute collections to Egyptian pioneer Youssef Chahine and mad master Preston Sturges, a series of films about photographers, and “Black Holiday,” a list of films such as “Leave Her to Heaven,” “The Lady of Shanghai,” and “Niagara,” where the search for excitement and recreation is directed to very dark places. Many of them are whirlwinds of emotions comparable to “The Beast” and in which it is just as harmful to walk. fall. —CB
Available until August 1.
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Nominated for the Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prix and the Camera d’Or, in addition to numerous Goya and Gaudí awards, in 2021, Clara Roquet’s “Libertad” joins the cast of Film Movement streaming in August. Family Las Tensions flare during a languishing family vacation on the Spanish coast. According to Film Movement, “Nora (María Morera) doesn’t know how another summer will go in her relatives’ coastal mansion in Spain; her grandmother is in a poor situation. Her health and her little sister are a baby, and she dreads the coming weeks However, things take an exciting turn when he meets Libertad (Nicolle García), the daughter of the family’s maid, Rosana (Carol Hurtado). In Colombia, Libertad also hates the idea of spending time with her mother to help her. to forget about Nora’s rich family. The social division between the teenagers does not save them from temporarily becoming friends, as they begin to spend nights together in secret, hiding their friendship from their parents due to the threat of separating.
Available for streaming on August 2.
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Released via Neon earlier this summer, Theda Hammel’s brilliantly edgy, millennial COVID comedy “Stress Positions” is coming to Hulu in August. The film features alternately slapstick and downright degraded performances from Hammel and comedian John Early as two highly productive friends filming the summer 2020 lockdown in Brooklyn.
As I, Ryan Lattanzio, wrote in my Sundance review on IndieWire: “‘Stress positions’ widen the gap between the dark e-book of events that shaped millennials’ lives (9/11 and the pandemic) and the one between liberal millennials and millennials. Z with a less demanding and more hopeful vision of the world. Hammel’s muses and emissaries on either side of the dichotomy in a dizzying comedy of concepts are comedian John Early as a gay boy on the verge of divorce and Qaher Harhash as his nephew, a 19-year-old. -old Moroccan style with issues of identity change. own Here’s a movie showing an unfortunate organization of self-obsessed millennials who grew up out of liberal arts schools and the web for who they are.
Available for streaming on August 21.
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For any filmmaker – any artist – of Jean-Luc Godard’s stature, there will be plenty of detractors capable of tearing him down. In this case, to reject Godard’s films as impassive provocations. Recommend that he was an expert in deconstruction. film, but an amateur in the construction of a film. Rejecting someone who appreciates his movies as “going through a phase. ” To all these criticisms, he shows “Alphaville” as a response.
One of the few films, in fact, capable of transforming an ordinary environment into something supernatural: its camera focuses on a Paris in the middle of the afternoon that seems like a long-term world, as if you were visiting New York and imagining its cannons. Coruscant – “Alphaville” is an emotional epic, a sci-fi painting at the height of “Brave New World” and “1984” as an expression of twentieth-century anxieties. And above all, show them “What is love?” Scene in which Eddie Constantine’s interstellar agent, dressed in a suit and Homberg, tries to introduce human feelings to the robot Anna Karina. “Your voice, your eyes, your hands, your lips. Our silences, our words. Light that goes away. Light that returns. A single smile between us. In search of knowledge, I watched the night create the day while we seemed unchanged.
Anna Karina says all this in voiceover as the light dims and the soft lights that surround the two intertwine, like the light of a watchtower in a world where poetry, emotion and love are prohibited. She briefly presents the screen completely occupied through a close-up of Karina’s eye, like Godard’s reaction to the opening credits of “Vertigo. ” It is a cinema as natural as it is emotional and as far as possible from an intellectual exercise.
The rights to “Alphaville” have been in flux for years, appearing from time to time on Criterion as well as TCM and elsewhere, but for the foreseeable future it will have a role in the Kino Film Collection starting in August. Matrix—CB
Now streaming.
“New Strains,” a special jury winner of Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw, is a low-fidelity pandemic lockdown comedy filmed on Hi8 video about a mysterious pandemic that turns a feuding couple into other people who behave like children. IndieWire’s sister site Artforum praised the mumblecore film as “a bizarre romantic comedy that presents the cohabiting couple as a double-edged sword of existential convenience and unfettered neurosis. “Married filmmakers Kamalakanthan and Shaw shot the film in New York City with a decades-old camcorder with a non-professional cast, sinking into booth fever and emotional ruin behind closed doors.
Available until August 2.
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“And Then We Danced” director Levan Akin returns with a gritty queer drama about a retired Georgian instructor adrift in Istanbul, Turkey, while searching for her missing trans niece. But what if it’s not necessary to discover her niece at all? The complicated but slow-moving Mzia Arabuli plays instructor Lia, who joins Lucas Kankava as Achi, a Georgian teenager who claims to know where his niece lives, and Deniz Dumanli as ‘Evrim, a trans NGO lawyer who looks a bit like to Lia.
From this previous year’s Berlin IndieWire review: “As the feature film written and directed by Akin, his third, unfolds, it becomes increasingly impressive in its novelistic scope, peering into the nooks and crannies and invisible wallet of Istanbul to celebrate its outcasts or protégés, from a network of brave and highly seasoned trans women who live in what looks like a dilapidated building on the outside, but offers much personal joy on the inside, to bright-eyed young people who live in the city streets at the beginning of “Crossing”, Lia walks along the sea to prepare for the journey from Batumi, where she joins Achi, who claims to know her niece Tekla’s treatment.
Available for streaming August 30.
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The Zellner Brothers’ wild Sundance comedy “Sasquatch Sunset” is coming to Paramount this month following its release from Bleecker Street Films earlier this summer. The directors of “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” created a truly strange ecological parable. about what the lives of Bigfoot and his ilk might be like, with actors like Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough dressing up as Sasquatch to alternately sickening and moving effect.
From the IndieWire review: “The costumes and makeup will appeal to you first (they’re fantastic), but not the devious emotional force that hides beneath enough hair, skin, dirt, and tiny fine urine (sorry, they can’t not (they’ll be discussed here, as prevalent as they are in the film) that even the most attentive audience might not realize they’re watching Jesse Eisenberg or Riley Keough. In Sasquatch Sunset, a long-gestating film, occasionally teased and lightly reserved through David and Nathan Zellner, the family unit of four at the center of the story may not look like you and me, but they really do feel human.
Available for streaming August 26.
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After 20th Century Studios removed Jeff Nichols’ ’60s motorcycle odyssey “The Bikeriders” from its December 2023 release schedule, Focus Features thankfully held the day. The distributor has picked up the director’s new film, “Mud,” with an all-star cast including Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy and Austin Butler, for release in spring 2024, after winning raves at Telluride last year. “The Bikeriders” will pay homage to “Easy Rider” and Marlon Brando in “The Wild One” (especially in terms of Hardy’s performance) for this thrilling portrait of outlaw bikers who come together and fall apart over the course of a decade. in the Midwest.
Available for streaming on August 9.
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With a “Squid Game” that fulfills the premise of “The Purge”, “Jackpot!” it might be director Paul Feig’s strangest film to date. And it still works, thanks to Awkwafina’s turn as a humble lottery jackpot winner who will have to survive until the sun goes down in order to collect her winnings. Did we mention that everyone is looking to assassinate him and take his prize?John Cena plays an amateur lottery protection agent who agrees to protect Awkwafina for a percentage of his winnings, just as Cena’s enemy (Simu Liu) intends to rob them via homicideArray—Samantha Bergeson.
Available for streaming August 15.
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On Shudder this month: Experimental filmmaker Eddie Alcazar (“Perfect”) writes and directs the haunting black-and-white premiere of “Divinity” at Sundance 2023, with Steven Soderbergh as executive generating the sci-fi thriller. With a screenplay that includes Stephen Dorff, Scott Bakula, Moises Arias, Karrueche Tran, Jason Genao, and Bella Thorne, the film centers on two shadowy siblings who kidnap a tycoon in his quest for immortality.
From the IndieWire review: “Drawing generously from the B-movies, film noir, porn, motion prevention, and advertising of the 1950s, the black-and-white film imagines a world in which our insistence on escaping the inevitabilities of nature has robbed us of the only explanation for why we have to exist. Produced and “presented” by Steven Soderbergh, whose omnipresence in the film’s marketing materials is a perfectly valid value to pay for such a bold art painting that is made in the top position, this is one of the most exciting midnight movies of 2023. . ”
Available until August 2.
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