What to watch in September when it comes to new films added to Netflix, Stan, SBS, Tubi and more - ABC News

Having reopened in July, cinemas saw their first fresh blockbuster meat hit screens in August, with Christopher Nolan's Tenet.

It's not the only new film release in cinemas, but it may signal a shift in distributor attitudes, with some high-profile films finally re-scheduled for release.

In the meantime, we're spoilt for choice of streaming services: from Netflix, Stan, Foxtel Now and streaming package Binge, to Amazon Prime Australia, Apple TV+ and Disney+, arthouse specialists MUBI, and free services like ABC iview, SBS On Demand and Tubi.

We've asked our regular film reviewers to comb through all these services and share recommendations, with a mix of subscriber-based and free offerings. Expect new independent and arthouse, festival favourites, classics, and underrated films from the vault.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

We Need to Talk About Kevin is adapted from the 2003 novel by Lionel Shriver about a teenage murderer.(Supplied: Paramount Pictures)

From the gritty social realism of Ratcatcher to the brutal rescue tale of You Were Never Really Here, Lynne Ramsay's oeuvre doesn't follow a straight line — but her sinister take on a strained (to put it lightly) mother-son relationship evokes the same fluid layering of sensory metaphor that marks her other works.

The opening shot — thin curtains swelling under a night breeze; silence cut by the sharp rhythmic spit of a lawn sprinkler — sets an itching, uneasy tone.

Starring the eternally ethereal Tilda Swinton, the film tracks Eva's twisted maternal feud with her son Kevin as he morphs from a shrieking bullhorn of a baby to an extravagantly petulant little kid (Jasper Newell) to an eerily sociopathic high schooler (Ezra Miller).

With hints of the film's tragic denouement splintered throughout, this thickly poetic thriller marinates in Eva's mixed feelings of guilt and trauma. Heavy as that may be, it's a light-headed thrill to witness Ramsay's tonal sorcery. VN

Watch on Tubi.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), Clueless (1995)

In Clueless, director Amy Heckerling transposed Jane Austen's Emma to the valley girl bratpack of Beverly Hills.(Supplied: Stan)

Two visions of American teen cinema at its most aspirational and utopian, where the popular kids aren't prom kings and queens but enterprising troublemakers who seem to unite the genre's subcultures. Is it any wonder they remain so beloved?

John Hughes's post-Breakfast Club jaunt still feels like his most personal work, imagining a mythically righteous dude — Matthew Broderick's almost obnoxiously charming Ferris Bueller — who might bind the geeks, sportos and wastoids in universal truancy and a shared disdain for boredom.

For all its prankster appeal, though, what lingers is the thread of melancholy; like all the best teen films, it's laced with the sense of youth that will never return.

If Heathers punctured the 80s illusion of high-school unity, then the improbable populist returned in Amy Heckerling's peppy Jane Austen riff Clueless, with 90s teen queen Alicia Silverstone as the headstrong matchmaker strutting her way through the rich-kid milieu of a Beverly Hills high school.

Heckerling trades the burnout SoCal kids of her Fast Times at Ridgemont High for something lighter and snappier but no less insightful, finding wisdom where it so often resides — in the superficial and the trivial. With Paul Rudd, and the late, great — greatest? — Brittany Murphy. LG

Watch Clueless on Netflix. Watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off on Stan from September 15.

Things to Come (2016)

French director Mia Hansen-Løve was formerly an actress, and appeared in two films by Olivier Assayas.(Supplied: SBS)

Mia Hansen-Løve's supernatural drama Bergman Island was one of the most hotly anticipated titles due to hit the film festival circuit this year, but, wouldn't you know it, the coronavirus pandemic has put the kibosh on the prospect of a 2020 release.

Take some comfort in the fact the French writer-director's fifth and best film to date has just been made available to stream on SBS. Winner of the 2016 Berlinale's Silver Bear for Best Director, Things To Come stars the magnificent Isabelle Huppert in particularly fine and subtle form (and what a year Huppert had, also giving an indomitable performance in Paul Verhoeven's Elle).

She plays Nathalie Chazeux, a philosophy teacher tested by significant life changes in her middle age — beginning with the sudden departure of her stolid husband (Andre Marcon) for another woman.

Nathalie is loosely based on Hansen-Love's own mother. From a filmmaker whose work is always rooted in the personal, comes a powerfully sensitive and unflinching portrait. KY

Watch on SBS On Demand.

Lying Lips (1939), Go Down Death! (1944)

Edna Mae Harris was an actress and singer and appeared in many of the so-called "race films" of the late 30s and early 40s.(Supplied: TUBI)

Decades before blaxploitation, Spike Lee and Tyler Perry, pioneering director Oscar Micheaux was a one-man African American film factory, creating more than 40 so-called "race films" — movies starring predominantly black casts, marketed to black audiences — during an era when Oscar-nominated "coloured" performers weren't invited to their own awards ceremonies (His most famous film, the anti-Birth of a Nation classic Within Our Gates, is streaming on MUBI).

Among the dozen or so race films on Tubi is Micheaux's Lying Lips, which features musical performances from Edna Mae Harris as a nightclub singer framed for murder, and the familiar baritone of a detective played by Robert Earl Jones (father of iconic actor, James).

While many of these films trade in stock plots and archetypes (and plenty were helmed by white directors), they gave black performers spaces outside Hollywood's racist caricatures, and often showcased the period's swing, jazz and blues — see Ethel Waters' lively musical Bubbling Over (1934), the Nat King Cole-led Killer Diller (1948), or Harlem is Heaven (1932), featuring superstar tap dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.

Of particular note, Spencer Williams' Go Down Death!, which reprises the vibe and nightmare imagery of the director's masterpiece The Blood of Jesus (1941) in its battle between morality and empathy, the sacred and the profane. LG

Watch on Tubi.

Mean Girls (2004)

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"He who fights monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche — in a book that Cady Heron, the high school new girl played by a fresh-faced Lindsay Lohan in this totally fetch teen movie, obviously never read.

Initially befriended by the "art freaks", Cady soon falls in with The Plastics, a trio of rich bitches ruled by Rachel McAdams and feared and revered by their cohort in equal measure. What starts out as a sociological experiment inevitably gets real, and Cady herself morphs into a lip-glossed monster.

Tina Fey took a self-help book (Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes) and turned it into a timeless, sharp-witted parable about the cruel machinations of "girl world", stacked with solid-gold one-liners that have become beloved fixtures of the pop-cultural lexicon.

The Mark Waters-directed film is a classic of the genre, even more enjoyable once your high school years are safely in the rear-view. KY

Watch on Netflix.

Bumblebee (2018), Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020)

British screenwriter Christina Hodson, best known for Bumblebee (pictured) and Birds of Prey, is penning the forthcoming Batgirl.(Supplied: Netflix)

The Transformers series got a much-needed makeover with Bumblebee, an 80s-set prequel that mixed the decade's teen and Amblin movie templates to pleasing — and maybe even a little emotional — effect.

The film is rich with period charm, with Hailee Steinfeld as a tomboy mechanic who air drums to the Smiths and salvages a junkyard Volkswagen Beetle who just happens to be an intergalactic robot. But what sells it is the genuine heart that screenwriter Christina Hodson puts into the chassis — even the film's concessions to the franchise universe can't dilute the rapport between teenage outsider and homesick mechanoid.

Hodson's writing also powers the female-centric friendships in Cathy Yan's fast and funny Harley Quinn spinoff Birds of Prey, with Margot Robbie and her gang injecting some bratty energy into a comic book genre sorely in need of it. If you missed it in cinemas, here's another chance. LG

Watch on Netflix from September 3 and 28.

Read our review of Birds of Prey.

Where the Green Ants Dream (1984)

Where the Green Ants Dream stars Wandjuk Marika, a Yolngu artist and key figure in the land rights movement.(Supplied: Stan)

Set in the Martian harshness of the South Australian outback, this lesser-known film from German auteur Werner Herzog is a mix of fact and fiction that incited consternation upon its release — but should prove a fascinating artefact for the conscientious viewer.

It was inspired by the first major Aboriginal land rights case, and casts two of the Indigenous activists involved in leading roles: Wandjuk Marika and Roy Marika play tribal elders determined to protect the breeding ground of their sacred green ants from destruction by a mining company.

Not quite the fabrication some critics alleged, the green ant mythology was nevertheless something Herzog borrowed, with no regard for geography, from the West Arnhem Land Gunwinggu.

He's a filmmaker always in pursuit of "ecstatic truth" over mere facts, and his depiction of an encounter between natives and invaders perhaps says more about his own tendency towards romantic primitivism than it does Australian history: When Wandjuk Marika's character tells Bruce Spence's lanky geologist, "Your presence on this earth will come to an end. You have no sense, no purpose, no direction," I heard the words spoken in the director's deep Teutonic lilt. KY

Watch on Stan from September 21.

Hannah Arendt (2012)

German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt famously reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the Holocaust.(Supplied: SBS)

German New Wave feminist director Margarethe von Trotta and her long-time collaborator Barbara Sukowa reunited for a third time — following Marianne & Juliane (1981) and their Cannes-prize-winning Rosa Luxemburg (1986) — for this study of influential political philosopher Hannah Arendt and the genesis of her evergreen concept, "the banality of evil".

Punctuated by perpetually lit cigarettes that are practically a running gag, von Trotta's exploration of mid-century American paranoia and media suspicion finds Arendt — then a tenured professor in New York — assigned to cover the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal she seeks to understand rather than outright condemn; or, as she puts it, to reconcile the staggering mediocrity of the man with his capacity for evil.

Dramatising court proceedings, let alone writers and thinkers, can be a grind, but von Trotta and Sukowa — so good in everything from Fassbinder's Lola to this year's moving Two of Us — capture the essence of a woman who sought to bring the complexity of her experience to the new world. LG

Watch on SBS on Demand.

The Lighthouse (2006)

Film programmer SF Said described The Lighthouse as "an incendiary mix of war film, memoir and musical explosion".(Supplied: MUBI)

Although Maria Saakyan tragically passed away in 2018, aged just 37, her semi-autobiographical debut feature — which also happens to be the first film by an Armenian woman to be made in the country — has recently been rescued and restored, as part of an effort to share the director's work with the greater world.

The Caucasus Wars that broke out after the collapse of the Soviet Union left hundreds of thousands of Armenians, including Saakyan, in exile. Revisiting this scarred territory, her bittersweet wartime drama maps the inner world of its heroine Lena (Anna Kapaleva) — inviting comparisons to the poetic intensities of Andrei Tarkovsky — after she returns to her remote northern mountain village, desperate for her grandparents to leave with her for Russia.

Constantly surprising, the film's many unexpected treats include knockout sound design and a resurrected ghost — the late Sofiko Chiaureli, star and muse of the country's best-known filmmaker, Sergei Parajanov (The Colour of Pomegranates) — who pulls an offbeat turn as Lena's elderly aunt. ABB

Watch on MUBI from September 17.

Walker (2012), No No Sleep (2015)

Tsai Ming-liang is one of the most acclaimed "Second New Wave" directors of Taiwanese cinema.(Supplied: MUBI)

The hypnotic cinema of Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang (Stray Dogs; Goodbye Dragon Inn) finds its purest form in his Walker trilogy, a series of films that use a kind of radical stillness — and a healthy dose of Tsai's impish visual humour — to disrupt the cacophony of modern life.

Dressed in monk's robes, Tsai's forever collaborator Lee Kang-sheng inches across various Hong Kong tableaux in Walker, his sub-glacial movement serving as both a meditative and comical counterpoint to the bustle of the city — whether he's set against a crowded marketplace or descending the fluorescent stairway of a strip mall like some cosmic wanderer alighting from the heavens.

The astonishing performance channels the spirit of everyone from Chaplin and Keaton to Jacques Tati and Denis Lavant (who, fittingly, appears in the sequel, Journey to the West).

No No Sleep offers graceful, enigmatic closure, as the walker creeps through Tokyo en route to a vaguely intimate rendezvous in a men's bathhouse, and a beautiful coda — set in a capsule hotel that may as well be a long-haul spaceship — seems to return this otherworldly traveller home. LG

Watch on MUBI from September 19 and 20.

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2020-08-31 18:47:00Z
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