The 5 Best New Streaming Films of the Week (January 21st, 2014)
1. “24 Exposures”
New York Times film critic Miriam Bale called this sleazy erotic thriller Joe Swanberg’s “Peeping Tom”, which should tell you all you need to know. The prolific mumblecore director has dabbled in genre before, of course — the drama of “Silver Bullets” slowly melting into fantasy comes to mind — but this is perhaps his first full-on experiment in style.
Available to stream on Friday.
Robert Redford lost his chance to claim the elusive Academy Award, but that should hardly diminish the virtues of his performance here — a nearly silent reckoning with nature and the almighty that finds the man playing a veritable MacGyver on a boat. Added bonus: the film features what may be the greatest instance of the word “f*ck” ever recorded.
3. “Like Father, Like Son”
Each of Kore-eda’s nine fiction features to date proceeds, with varying degrees of nuance, from a fairly sensational premise, and on paper they have a tendency to sound more like broad daytime soap operas than the typically subtle, even minimalistic dramas they are. “Like Father, Like Son” is no exception: it relates the high-tragic story of the Nonomiya family, bourgeois condo-dwellers in Tokyo who discover that a hospital’s administrative error six years earlier sent them home, in a requisite flurry of postpartum confusion, carrying and caring for somebody else’s newborn son.
Available to stream on Friday.
4. “In a World”
Lake Bell’s debut feature about a female voiceover artist proved a surprise hit with critics and audiences alike this year, scoring an impressive 90% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and landing on more than a few year-end lists (it was even a favorite of notoriously hard-to-please Globe & Mail critic Adam Nayman, who gave it a near-perfect review for the paper).
5. “Pit Stop”
Yen Tan’s slow-burn drama, co-written by “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” director David Lowery, finds a lot of nuance in its shopworn story of gay lovers in smalltown Texas. A hit at last year’s Sundance film festival, the feature arrives long overdue on VOD.
