Tag: Needle

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: Prime Video

The Colors (Abbas Kiarostami)

An early effort by the Iranian master during his time at Kanoon (The Institute of Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults), which he credits with helping him become an artist. The absorbing rhythm and visual genius of The Colors anticipates Kiarostami’s later films, although he thought of it in simpler terms: “I made this film for children, and they were indeed very entertained by it.”

Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club

Eternal You (Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck)

As AI continues to pervade every industry, there are also wide-ranging personal implications that society only seems to be currently scratching the surface of. Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s documentary Eternal You, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival last year, explores the AI technology that is providing immortality, at least in a digital sense, as users resurrect virtual reality avatars of their deceased loved ones in the pursuit of emotional healing.

Where to Stream: VOD

The Girl with the Needle (Magnus von Horn)

After making a splash with his influencer satire Sweat, Swedish director Magnus von Horn returned to Cannes with the black-and-white drama The Girl with the Needle. Savina Petkova said of Denmark’s Oscar entry in her Cannes review, “Teaming with co-writer Line Langebek, van Horn takes a true story and weaves many obstacles, encounters, and disappointments to make sure we see Karoline as a multifaceted character, even if she barely speaks. It’s not that she’s deliberately quiet or scheming in any way; her reticence to talk instead confirms a lack of faith in life as it is. Girl‘s period setting––1919 in a post-WWI Copenhagen––may be a century removed from our times, but its atmosphere weighs on you just as today’s world might. With old wars supposedly ending and new ones brewing, home evictions, poverty, and lack of abortion rights, Scandinavia in the 1920s can terrifyingly mirror many parts of Europe in the 2020s. The Anthropocene looms over The Girl with the Needle, which is the best thing a period piece can hope for: a knowing, truthful look at the past from the vantage of our present.”

Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)

Gladiator II (Ridley Scott)

Most men think about the Roman Empire several times a week, if a recent meme is to be believed. With Gladiator II, Ridley Scott brings the era back to life in the way only a teenage boy could imagine it. Historical accuracy continues to be an irrelevance for the director, and who could blame him? Why stick to the facts when it’s so much more fun to have your little freak of an action hero battle hordes of CGI monkeys or partake in a naval battle in the flooded Colosseum? If this decades-in-the-making sequel feels better than the original, it’s because there are no prestige aspirations here––Scott follows the formula of the first to a tee, turning up the dial so each set piece is bigger and stupider than before. There’s no commentary on the senseless nature of the violence being spectated, as there was with the first; if Scott were to pause the film after Lucius (Paul Mescal) bites off a monkey’s arm in battle to once again ask “are you not entertained,” it would likely register as sincere rather than scathing. – Alistair R. (full review)

Where to Stream: Paramount+, MGM+

Oh, Canada (Paul Schrader)

The cinema of Paul Schrader has always felt like a confessional, all those dark rooms and troubled men, the registered Swiftie’s own tortured poets department. The confessional edges closer to the form in his latest film Oh, Canada, an august adaptation of Russell Banks’ 2021 novel Foregone that tells of a famous documentary filmmaker at the end of his days, divulging secrets of his past to an interviewer’s head-on camera. Might the old Calvinist be looking for a little more absolution? When Banks, a friend since the director’s adaptation of Affliction, died in 2023, Schrader was coming to the tail end of his own series of health scares––these included everything from hospitalizations for long COVID to the retina detaching from his right eye during the filming of Master Gardener. “If I’m going to make a film about death,” he recently admitted thinking to himself at the time, “I’d better hurry up.” – Rory O. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)

With imagery quite literally conjured from the deepest bowels of darkness, it’s clear why Nosferatu has been on the mind of Robert Eggers since he saw F. W. Murnau’s silent classic at the impressionable age of nine. The director’s fourth feature is his most assured and accomplished, an impeccably crafted, knowingly humorous, and perhaps too-rigid odyssey into the depths of true evil where one can feel Eggers’ obsessions flow through every nocturnal frame. While The Northman was evidence he could work in a bigger playing field, his latest is the ideal marriage of focused, character-driven frights of his first two features and the imaginative world of his Viking epic where no detail was left unconsidered. As Nosferatu relates to the vampire tales that have come before, from Murnau to Herzog to Coppola, the experience isn’t seeing how the director reinvents the wheel, but precisely how he honors this timeless myth with an exacting, full-bodied vision in all its evocative, erotic, gory gothic horror. – Jordan R. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Johan Grimonprez)

It was Mark Twain who said, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” which is one way of approaching Belgian filmmaker and multimedia artist Johan Grimonprez’s sprawling, jazz-infused Soundtrack to a Coup d’État. The political essay revisits 1960, a turbulent year in global affairs: Patrice Lumumba rises to power in Congo just as the United States, through the CIA-backed Voice of America radio network, aims to soften America’s image aboard, sending jazz musicians Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Abbey Lincoln, and Max Roach to tour the world. The film positions the jazz musicians as a kind of political cabinet while Gillespie envisions his own run for the White House on TV talk shows back home. It proceeds with a rather kinetic, defiant tone in which the jazz, breaking news, citations, and quotes interrupt the historical footage a more standard documentary may have primarily focused on. – John F. (full review)

Where to Stream: Kino Film Collection

Sleep (Jason Yu)

Wes Craven understood, when conceiving A Nightmare on Elm Street, the creepiness of our sacred sleep time being invaded, and Adam McKay was similarly onto something when realizing how good a sleepwalking gag could be in Step Brothers. So Sleep, a new festival-minted genre picture from Jason Yu, a former underling of Bong Joon-ho, in its own blend of horror and comedy, should be able to deliver on the promise of both. Yet if accomplished in pulling off the kind of tonal shifts and formal precision you’d expect from someone who trained under that Oscar-winning genre superstar, there’s a bit of a lack of a true pulse to the proceedings––even as the terrain of pregnancy and threats to newborn children is something that will never fail to get people going (similarly a power-drill to the head near the end of the film is probably a recurring horror image for a reason). – Ethan V. (full review)

Where to Stream: Hulu

The Wild Robot (Chris Sanders)

The best studio animation of last year by quite a wide margin, The Wild Robot is an adventure as wondrous as it is heartfelt. Exploring the trials, tribulations, and joys of parenting through the story of a stray robot in the wilderness, Sanders nails the emotional throughline to create a stirring, human-free experience. While the script could have used perhaps a bit more specificity, what it lacks in originality, it makes up for in earnestness and craft, chock full of detailed environments and wonderful character design. – Jordan R.

Where to Stream: Peacock

Your Monster (Caroline Lindy)

Did Beauty kill the Beast? Or was it the other way around? Or maybe they lived happily ever after? Writer-director Caroline Lindy plays with classical expectations in her enjoyable debut feature Your Monster. Actress Laura Franco (Melissa Barrera) is just out of surgery when the film starts. We quickly learn she’s survived some unnamed cancer and, in the tough year of treatments, her theater-director boyfriend of five years Jacob (Edmund Donovan) broke up with her. To make matters worse, he also moved forward with producing a Broadway musical that they developed together, one with a lead role he’d promised to Laura. – Dan M. (full review)

Where to Stream: Max

Also New to Streaming

Kino Film Collection

The Disappearance Of My Mother
Prey for Rock and Roll

MUBI (free for 30 days)

Touch of Crude
Beauty is Not a Sin
The Here After

VOD

Sonic the Hedgehog 3