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 to come for each of the major streamers, with an eye toward the exclusive titles that can help. Readers which of those facilities suits them.
Here’s yours for August 2024.
Samantha Bergeson contributed to this story.
There’s an unexpected collection of new offerings on Criterion Channel this August to drown your sorrows over the end of the Olympics. But the one that undoubtedly deserves your attention is the masterpiece of Bertrand Bonello’s triptych, although it really debuted on the channel in the last days of July during a great “live” streaming premiere. Premiering in Venice last year, “The Beast” is the kind of “2046” or “Cloud Atlas”-style ramble we want much more often: In 1910, a wealthy love blossoms between a married Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay), however, make the decision not to move forward. Their intimacy is such, however, that Gabrielle confesses the feeling of doom that weighs on her life, her concern for a calamity that has led her to become obsessed with it: anyone who was born with an abyss of terror in their soul can perceive it. . this, this “Beast” of the name he has with a brief story through Henry James that vaguely animates 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 soften that point after “The Beast,” Criterion has epics to dive into: A major Paul Thomas Anderson retrospective on the streamer features “Magnolia,” “Punch-Drunk Love,” “There Will. ” Blood,” “The Master” and “Licorice Pizza. ” This diversity also presents some overlap with a new Philip Seymour Hoffman collection, which adds “25th Hour,” “Capote,” “The Savages” and “Synecdoche, New York. ” Into the mix. In addition, there are collections in tribute to the Egyptian pioneer Youssef Chahine and the mad teacher Preston Sturges, a series of films about photographers and “Black Holiday”, a list of films such as “Leave Her in Paradise”, “The Lady from Shanghai” and “Niagara”, where the search for laughter and recreation goes to very dark places. Many of them are whirlwinds of feelings comparable to “The Beast” and into which it is just as harmful to fall. —CB
Available for streaming August 1.
Other highlights:
Nominated for the Grand Prix of the Cannes Critics’ Week and the Camera d’Or, in addition to numerous Goya and Gaudí awards, in 2021, “Libertad” by Clara Roquet joins the Film Movement catalog in 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 ill and she dreads the coming weeks. However However, things take an interesting 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 forget. from Nora’s wealthy 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 under the threat of separating.
Available for streaming on August 2.
Other highlights:
Released via Neon earlier this summer, Theda Hammel’s brilliantly edgy and 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 Z millennials with a less demanding, more hopeful worldview. Hammel’s muses and emissaries on either side of the dichotomy in a fast-paced comedy of concepts are comedian John Early as a gay boy. on the brink of divorce and Qaher Harhash as his nephew, a 19-year-old Moroccan-style old man with identity-changing issues. Here is a film that shows an unfortunate organization of self-obsessed millennials who grew up outside of schools. liberal arts and the web for what they are.
Available until August 21.
Other highlights:
In any filmmaker – any artist – of the stature of Jean-Luc Godard, there will be a lot of detractors capable of bringing him down. In this case, of rejecting 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 their films 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 nighttime Paris that seems like a long-term world, as if you were visiting New York and imagining its canyons like those of Coruscant — “Alphaville ” is an emotional epic, a science fiction painting on a par with “Brave New World” and “1984” as an expression of the anxieties of the 20th century. And above all, it shows “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. . The light returns. Just a smile between us. In search of knowledge, I watched the night create the day as we seemed unchanged.
Anna Karina says all this in voice-over as the light dims and illuminates around the two of them intertwined, like the light of a watchtower in a world where poetry, emotions and love are forbidden. One moment presents the screen completely occupied through an excessive 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 away as possible from intellectual training.
The rights to “Alphaville” have been shifting for years, appearing from time to time in Criterion, as well as TCM and elsewhere, but for the foreseeable future it will have a role in Kino Film Collection starting in August. Matrix —CB
Now streaming.
Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw special jury winner “New Strains” is a lo-fi pandemic lockdown comedy shot 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 strange romantic comedy that presents the cohabiting couple as a double-edged sword of existential convenience and no-holds-barred neurosis. ” Married filmmakers Kamalakanthan and Shaw shot the film in New York City with a decades-old camcorder with a non-professional cast, who sink into booth fever and emotional ruin behind closed doors.
Available until August 2.
Other highlights:
“And Then We Danced” director Levan Akin returns with a hard-hitting queer drama about a retired Georgian schoolteacher adrift in Istanbul, Turkey, as she searches for her missing trans niece. But what if you don’t need to discover your niece at all?The complicated but slow Mzia Arabuli plays instructor Lia, who is joined by Lucas Kankava as Achi, a Georgian teenager who claims to know where his niece lives, and Deniz Dumanli as Evrim, a lawyer for a trans NGO who looks a bit like Lia.
According to this year’s IndieWire review from Berlin: “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 of Istanbul to celebrate their outcasts or shelters, of a network of brave and very seasoned trans women who live in what looks like a ruined building on the outside, but which contains a lot of personal joy on the inside, for the bright-eyed young people who live on the streets of the town. “Crossing”, Lia walks along the sea to prepare for the journey to Batumi, where she meets Achi, who claims to know her niece Tekla’s treatment.
Available for streaming August 30.
Other highlights:
The Zellner brothers’ wild Sundance comedy “Sasquatch Sunset” arrives at Paramount this month following its Bleecker Street Films release earlier this summer. The creators of “Kumiko the Treasure Hunter” have created a truly bizarre ecological parable about what life could be like for Bigfoot and his ilk, with actors like Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough dressed up as Sasquatch to alternately disgusting and poignant effect. .
From the IndieWire review: “The costumes and makeup will draw you in first (they’re fantastic), but not the torturous emotional force that lies beneath enough hair, skin, dirt, and fine little urine (sorry, can’t no (it’s will argue here, as frequent as they are in the film) that even the most attentive audience may not realize they are watching Jesse Eisenberg or Riley Keough In Sasquatch Sunset, a long-gestating, occasionally provocative and slightly reserved film throughout. by 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 until August 26.
Other highlights:
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 part ways over the course of a decade. in the Midwest.
Available for streaming August 9.
Other highlights:
With a “Squid Game” that fulfills the premise of “The Purge,” “Jackpot!” might be director Paul Feig’s strangest movie mash-up to date. And somehow, it still works, thanks to the twist of Awkwafina as a modest lottery jackpot winner who will have to wait until sunset to withdraw her winnings. Did we mention that everyone is looking to kill him and keep his prize? John Cena plays an amateur lottery protection agent who agrees to protect Awkwafina for a percentage of her profits, just when Cena’s enemy (Simu Liu) intends to steal from them through murder. —Samantha Bergeson
Available until August 15.
Other highlights:
On Shudder this month: Experimental filmmaker Eddie Alcazar (“Perfect”) writes and directs Sundance 2023’s haunting black-and-white premiere, “Divinity,” with executive Steven Soderbergh spawning the sci-fi thriller. With a cast that includes Stephen Dorff, Scott Bakula, Moises Arias, Karrueche Tran, Jason Genao, and Bella Thorne, the film centers on two mysterious siblings who kidnap a tycoon in his quest for immortality.
From the IndieWire review: “Drawing liberally from B movies, film noir, porn, prevent motion, and 1950s advertising, the black-and-white film imagines a world in which our insistence on fleeing of the fatalities of nature has robbed us of the only explanation of why we have to exist. Produced and “presented” through Steven Soderbergh – whose ubiquity in the film’s marketing fabrics is a perfectly valid value to pay for a work. of art so ambitious that it is made in the first position – This is one of the most exciting midnight movies of 2023. »
Available for streaming on August 2.
Other highlights: