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 Criterion Channel to the new frontiers of streaming presented through Film Movement and Peacock, IndieWire’s monthly consultant highlights the best of what’s to come for each of the top streamers, with an eye on exclusive titles that can help. Readers which of these facilities suits them.
Here’s yours for August 2024.
Samantha Bergeson contributed to this story.
There’s an unexpected collection of new offerings on the Criterion Channel this August to drown out the sorrows of the end of the Olympics. But the one that certainly deserves your attention is the masterpiece of Bertrand Bonello’s triptych, although it actually debuted on the channel in the last days of July during 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 much more often: In 1910, a wealthy love blossoms between Gabrielle, married (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay), yet they make the decision not to go ahead. Their intimacy is such, however, that Gabrielle confesses to him the sense of doom that weighs on her life, her concern about a calamity that has led her to become obsessed with it: anyone born with an abyss of terror in their soul can perceive it. this, this “Beast” of the name it has with a short story through Henry James that vaguely animates this film.
Indeed, calamity strikes for 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 stalker Incel killer after her. They were vital in everyone’s life the first time and now in a different way. And finally, we see them in 2044, when AI has eliminated most of the world’s tasks and the only satisfying task left demands that everyone purge their feelings and become robots through surgery.
The combination of feelings and moods “The Beast” covers a wide spectrum: one minute it’s an Edith Wharton-esque tragedy, the next a true horror movie about a woman alone in a threatened house. Array Y gives you the most productive use of the green screen. in a movie since “Holy Motors. “
If you want something else to tone down that point after “The Beast,” Criterion has epics to dive into: A major retrospective of Paul Thomas Anderson on the transmitter features “Magnolia,” “Punch-Drunk Love,” “There Will. “Blood”, “The Master” and “Licorice Pizza”. This diversity also features some overlap with a new collection by Philip Seymour Hoffman, which adds “25th Hour,” “Capote,” “The Savages,” and “Synecdoche, New York. “To the mix. In addition, there are collections that pay homage to Egyptian pioneer Youssef Chahine and the crazy master 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 is directed 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 on August 1.
Other highlights:
Nominated for the Grand Prix at the Cannes Critics’ Week and the Caméra d’Or, as well as numerous Goya and Gaudí awards, in 2021, Clara Roquet’s “Libertad” joins Film Movement’s streaming catalogue in August. Family tensions flare during a languid family holiday on the Spanish coast. According to Film Movement, “Nora (María Morera) doesn’t know how she will spend another summer in her family’s coastal mansion in Spain; Her grandmother is in poor health and her little sister is taking a bath, and she dreads the weeks ahead. However, things take an exciting turn when he meets Libertad (Nicolle García), the daughter of the family’s maid, Rosana (Carol Hurtado). Far from home in Colombia, Libertad also hates the idea of spending time with her mother to help her clean up Nora’s wealthy family. The social divide between the teens doesn’t save them from temporarily becoming friends, as they begin spending nights together in secret, hiding their friendship from their parents in the face of the threat of separation.
Available for streaming August 2.
Other highlights:
Premiering on Neon earlier this summer, Theda Hammel’s brilliantly edgy, millennial COVID comedy “Stress Positions” is coming to Hulu in August. The film alternates between burlesque and downright degraded performances via Hammel and comedian John Early as two best friends filming the summer 2020 lockdown in Brooklyn.
As I, Ryan Lattanzio, wrote in my Sundance review on IndieWire: “‘Stress Positions’ widens the gap between the dark e-book of the events that shaped the lives of millennials (9/11 and the pandemic) and the gap between liberal-leaning millennials and Gen Y. 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 comedy-of-concepts are comedian John Early as a gay man on the brink of divorce and Qaher Harhash as. his nephew, a 19-year-old Moroccan style to replace his identity questions. Here’s a movie showing a hapless organization of self-obsessed millennials who grew up coming out of liberal arts schools and the web for who they are.
Available for streaming August 21.
Other highlights:
With any filmmaker – any artist – of the stature of Jean-Luc Godard, there will be a gang of detractors in a position to tear him down. In this case, Godard’s films must be dismissed as impassive provocations. Suggesting that he was an expert at film deconstruction, but an amateur at film construction. Dismissing someone who enjoys his movies as “going through a phase. ” To all those criticisms, show “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 canyons. those of Coruscant – “Alphaville” is an emotional epic, a science fiction painting at the height of “Brave New World” and “1984” as an expression of the anxieties of the 20th century. And above all, show them “What is love?” scene where 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 leaves. Light that returns. A single smile between us. In search of knowledge, I saw 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 as fully 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 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.
“New Strains,” a special jury winner at the Rotterdam Film Festival from Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw, is a lo-fi pandemic lockdown comedy shot on Hi8 video about a mysterious pandemic that turns one bickering couple into another. 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 solace and no-holds-barred neurosis. ” Married filmmakers Kamalakanthan and Shaw shot the film in New York with a decades-old camcorder with an unprofessional cast, leading to cabin 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.
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 very spicy trans women who live in what looks like a ruined building on the outside, but offers a lot of personal joy on the inside, to bright-eyed young people who live in the streets of the city. Lia walks along the beach to prepare for the trip to Batumi, where she joins Achi, who claims to know her niece Tekla’s deal.
Available for streaming on August 30.
Other highlights:
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” crafted a truly bizarre 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 sly emotional force that lies beneath enough hair, skin, dirt, and tiny fine urine (sorry, they can’t be discussed here). , as frequent as they are in the film) so that even the most attentive audience doesn’t realize they’re watching Jesse Eisenberg or Riley Keough In Sasquatch Sunset, a David and Nathan Zellner film of long gestation, often provoked and slightly reserved. The four-person family unit at the center of the story may not look like you and me, but they feel really human.
Available for streaming August 26.
Other highlights:
After 20th Century Studios got rid of Jeff Nichols’ ’60s motorcycle odyssey, “The Bikeriders,” from its December 2023 release schedule, Focus Features thankfully kept up the day. The distributor chose the director’s newest film, “Mud,” with an all-star cast that includes Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy and Austin Butler, for a spring 2024 release after receiving praise 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 combine and pass their tactics separately over the course of a decade in the Midwest.
Available until August 9.
Other highlights:
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 until August 15.
Other highlights:
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.
According to IndieWire’s review: “Drawing heavily on the B-movies, film noir, porn, prevent motion, and advertising of the 1950s, the black-and-white film imagines a world in which our insistence on fleeing from nature’s fatalities has robbed us of the only explanation for 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 such an ambitious work of art that is made in the top position – this is one of the most exciting midnight films of 2023. “
Available for streaming August 2.
Other highlights: