weekend watchlist: nature bites back in an unsettling folk-horror fairy tale
plus other stories of forging personal paths through unfriendly places, times, and people
Don’t spend hours scrolling the menus at Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other movie services. I point you to the best new films and hidden gems to stream.
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Apologies for the lateness of this weekend’s Watchlist. I’ve been sick with the megacold that everyone in London who doesn’t have COVID at the moment seems to have come down with. It’s the worst head cold I’ve had since I can’t remember when, but I seem to be on the mend now…
both sides of the pond
I love a film the genre of which cannot be pinned down. The marvelously unsettling Lamb, from Iceland, is a little bit folk horror, a little bit fairy tale, and a whole lotta nature-bites-back.
Noomi Rapace (the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) stars in this unforgettable debut from filmmaker Valdimar Jóhannsson about a woman for whom life takes a strange turn when she and her husband (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) discover the unusual titular newborn on her farm.
Two things to know about this movie: 1) It’s best to know as little about it beforehand, so don’t watch any trailers or even Google the title, cuz you’ll be unfairly spoiled, and 2) There comes a moment when, just as you’re thinking What the fuck?, someone onscreen says that as well… and there’s still a ways to go from there.
US: available for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime and Apple TV
UK: streaming on Mubi, including on Mubi on Amazon Prime (7-day free trial); also available for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime and Apple TV
In case you missed it:
where to stream (almost) every Oscar nominee
US
new on demand
You’ve seen the terrific Clifton Collins Jr. in lots of movies and TV shows — often playing convicts, killers, and other criminals — and finally he gets the leading role he has long deserved in Jockey. This contemplative drama, the feature debut of writer-director Clint Bentley, sees Collins’s veteran equestrian clashing with a rookie on the racing scene (Moises Arias) who claims to be his son… and clashing with himself, as he pushes through the damage to his body, battered by decades of riding, to try for one last big win before he has no choice but to retire. This is a beautifully bittersweet tale of midlife regrets making way for a new beginning.
available for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime and Apple TV
leaving Netflix soon
I haven’t seen it since it was new, but I suspect that Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 psychological drama The Master might have new resonance a decade on, what with its tale of listlessness, disillusionment, and the struggle to find meaning in a world turned upside down. Joaquin Phoenix’s traumatized World War II veteran falling in with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s charismatic cult leader feels like a story that might now read as a cautionary tale ahead of its time, as so many lost and hopeless people today turn to authoritarian figures for guidance. Or perhaps we’d recognize the film as representative of the last iteration of a point in the cycle of history that has come around again. (The terrific cast also features Amy Adams, Laura Dern, and newly minted Oscar nominee Jesse Plemons.)
streaming on Netflix through April 14th; also available for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime and Apple TV
UK
iPlayer hidden gem
As debates over sex, gender, and identity continue to rage, it’s worth revisiting 2018’s incisive The Miseducation of Cameron Post, in which a terrific Chloë Grace Moretz plays a lesbian teenager subjected to so-called gay-conversion therapy. Set in 1993 at a residential high school somewhere in rural America, it finds new levels of bleakly funny horror in adolescent awkwardness and confusion… though director Desiree Akhavan also mines an abundance of warmth and humanity in the absurdity of her heroine’s situation. This is like a black comedy from a dystopia, except the dystopia is real and we are living in it: this crap is still happening today. (Read my review.)
streaming on BBC iPlayer for 11 months; also available for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime and Apple TV
new on Disney+
Immersive documentary The Reason I Jump is an extraordinary cinematic experience that explores the personal landscapes of the profoundly autistic. Director Jerry Rothwell uses methods both literal and figurative to introduce us to several young people who are nonverbal yet far from uncommunicative; delicately beautiful cinematography offers us a perspective of tiny details rather than big pictures, of time jumbled up so that long ago and right now feel indistinguishable, of wandering in a headspace that is isolating but also intensely engaging and inescapably gripping. The empathy the film engenders is deeply felt and enormously eye-opening. (Read my review.)
streaming on Disney+; also available for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime and Apple TV
find lots more movies to stream at Flick Filosopher
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