As cinemas have gone from shutdown to gradual re-opening this year, audiences have been 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. Expect new independent and arthouse, festival favourites, classics, and underrated films from the vault.
Black Lives Matter: I am Not Your Negro, Sweet Country, 12 Years a Slave, Do the Right Thing
Cherry-picking from the vast and rich catalogue of Black and Indigenous cinema, SBS World Movies presents a two-week series focusing on real-life stories of protest and injustice, banded together under the activist banner Black Lives Matter.
The sleek and perceptive words of writer James Baldwin run through Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro (2016) like an electric current, drawing connections between the struggles for civil rights and the cinema feeding white America's delusional racist myths.
The western, one of the genres whose psychic fallout Baldwin scrutinises, is reworked through a First Nations lens in Warwick Thornton's Sweet Country (2017), as an Aboriginal stockman flees deep into the Central Australian desert — opening up space for Thornton's peerless poetic camerawork — with the coppers in hot pursuit.
British director Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave (2013) also examines not-so-distant history in a painterly adaptation of the memoirs of Solomon Northup, a free Black man who travels to hell and back when he's kidnapped and sold into slavery.
Spike Lee's Oscar-snubbed classic Do the Right Thing (1989) makes it clear, however, that state-sponsored violence has never ended. With Public Enemy's anthem Fight the Power booming through a sweltering Brooklyn block, Lee serves up a blast of bold style and fraught drama that is its own irrepressible form of protest. ABB
Watch on SBS World Movies from November 1.
Re-Animator (1985)
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Academic curiosity births ghastly zombification in Stuart Gordon's B-movie spin on an old Lovecraft tale, as a medical student invents an elixir that brings living beings back from the dead — though they re-enter the world not quite the same.
Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) is the mad scientist who embarks on a macabre experiment that will change the shape of medical science forever (and from the resulting amount of blood splatter, presumably keep his dry cleaner safely in business). Grisly sound design accompanies the film's gory indulgence: the peeling of a scalp from a skull, orange-like; the air-rending screams of an undead cat.
Moving into the house of his academic peer Dan (Bruce Abbott), to the mistrustful irk of Dan's sweetheart Meg (Barbara Crampton), West soon gets much of the university faculty mixed up in his experimentation, to everyone's extreme misfortune. This cult classic is a trash film par excellence. Gordon died in March — but his film lives on. VN
Watch on Tubi.
Destroyer (2018)
The prosthetic nose Nicole Kidman famously donned for The Hours (2002) may have helped her pick up an Academy Award, but it's got nothing on the transformation she would undergo to play Erin Bell, a flinty LA cop plagued by the memory of an undercover assignment gone bad, in this neo-noir from Karyn Kusama (Jennifer's Body).
It's a Charlize Theron-as-Aileen Wuornos kind of performance, all the more perversely engrossing for the gap between the star's beauty and her haggard appearance onscreen: thoroughly de-glammed, Kidman here is skeletal, stiff, her eyes sunken into a face ravaged by something more pernicious than just time. (Lemme tell ya, those lingering close-ups had me vowing to up my skin care regime.)
"You know what successful people do, Detective Bell?" Bradley Whitford's smarmy, corrupt lawyer prods her. "They get over things." If Erin doesn't exactly seem the type, then it's not until the flashbacks interwoven throughout — a steady drip-feed of her undercover days in a hard-partying gang — reach their violent crescendo that her real goal becomes painfully clear. KY
Watch on SBS on Demand from November 18.
No Home Movie (2015)
No filmmaker has tapped the loving burden of the mother-daughter bond as sensitively or extensively as the great Belgian director Chantal Akerman, whose body of work — from her 1976 epistolary film News from Home through to her final feature, No Home Movie — is permanently haunted by the voice of Natalia Akerman, aka "Maman".
A documentary shadowing the last months of her mother's life, mostly sealed off in her Brussels apartment, No Home Movie is bracingly raw, with Akerman's eternally uneasy handheld camera often placed on a kitchen table, hovering at Maman's back, or recording their pixelated conversations over Skype, in which neither party wants to say goodbye.
The film delivers an infinitely moving double-portrait — of Akerman's anxious relationship with her mother, who was an Auschwitz survivor, and with life itself, baring Akerman's own painful feelings of entrapment, displacement and grief, distilled in the wordless final scenes in which Maman is no longer around. ABB
Watch on MUBI from November 28.
Selma (2014)
A man who needs no introduction, Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. is bravely given the biopic treatment in director Ava DuVernay's riveting third film, which swaps out the traditional creaky cradle-to-grave narrative for a sustained focus on the three Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965 — now-legendary events that paved the way for the Voting Rights Act, one of the major civil rights advances gained under King's lead.
DuVernay maps out the organising and politicking work in detail, brilliantly complicating one-dimensional conceptions of King the kindly orator by presenting King (a compelling David Oyelowo) as a savvy, radical strategist too.
Even though it was not possible to use King's actual words (the rights are currently licensed to a Steven Spielberg project), Selma's rendering of history is successfully intimate and epic in sweep, moving between public and private realms, from stand-offs with trigger-happy state troopers that are harrowing to watch to an early morning moment of doubt as King seeks solace in a hymn. ABB
Watch on SBS World Movies from November 6.
The Fugitive Kind (1960)
"This is a snakeskin jacket," drawls Nicolas Cage in Wild at Heart (1990), "and for me it's a symbol of my individuality, and my belief in personal freedom." It's also an homage to the one worn by Marlon Brando in this sultry, brutal Southern Gothic, directed by Sidney Lumet (just a few years after he made a name for himself with 12 Angry Men) and adapted from the Tennessee Williams play Orpheus Descending.
But Valentine "Snakeskin" Xavier is no Stanley Kowalski. He's an outlaw looking to reform; a sensitive soul wrapped in a rugged exterior, who clings lovingly to his beat-up guitar, and his jacket, as Orpheus to his lyre. Fleeing the temptations of New Orleans, he stumbles into gainful employment in a small town — where his presence dredges up the repressed passions and prejudices of the locals.
As the wife of a tyrannical shopkeeper, the great Anna Magnani (Rome, Open City) will also delight Lynch fans in particular — surely the inspiration for another of his iconic characters: Blue Velvet's tortured lounge singer, played by Isabella Rossellini. KY
Watch on Stan from November 9.
Toomelah (2011)
With its handheld camerawork and a cast almost entirely made up of non-professionals, Ivan Sen's second feature is far from the gloss of his subsequent films, Mystery Road (2013) and its sequel Goldstone (2016). But all three share certain thematic concerns: Sen's landscapes always bear awful scars left by colonialism in Australia, and his characters too — even if they don't know it yet.
Nine-year-old Daniel (Daniel Connors) sports sneakers and a tough-guy act several sizes too big for his wiry frame. Growing up in Toomelah, an impoverished former mission in northern New South Wales, he prefers the company of the local weed dealer (Christopher Edwards) to the chastisements of his schoolteacher.
A shambolic storyline coalesces into a surprisingly tense, affecting crime drama with the return of a rival dealer (Dean Daley-Jones, Redfern Now).
Shortly after Sen first encountered his young, wild-eyed lead, Connors was suspended from school for threatening to stab another kid with a pencil — an incident that would find its way into the script. Watching the film, one is keenly, uncomfortably aware of Toomelah's overlap of fact and fiction. KY
Watch on Netflix from November 7.
Non-Stop (2014)
It's a simple premise: Federal Air Marshal Bill Marks gets a mysterious text message on an overnight flight, asking for $150 million — or someone on the plane will die. Luckily for us (though perhaps less so for those on board) Bill is played by Liam Neeson, perfectly typecast as a heroic ruffian with a dark past and a penchant for violent overreaction.
Pressure builds in the cabin as people start kicking the bucket, casting suspicion on basically everyone in the extremely questionable ensemble of characters — including fellow Air Marshal Jack Hammond (Anson Mount), sociable seat-mate Jen Summers (Julianne Moore), and angrily distrustful cop Austin Riley (Corey Stoll).
Summoning the intense claustrophobia of air travel and the delightful gruff exteriority of an angsty Neeson, this airborne whodunit by Jaume Collet-Serra (also director of Neeson vehicles The Commuter and Unknown) is pure escapism, propelling its plot at a speed worthy of its title. VN
Watch on Stan from November 5.
The Juniper Tree (1990)
In Bjork's feature film debut, shot in Iceland in 1986 — the year the 21-year-old began fronting The Sugarcubes — she already possesses visionary powers.
Communing with the animal and the spirit world, Bjork's Magrit is a crackling mix of teenage innocence and rising knowledge, with eyes that see beyond the limits of her cruel world — especially after her mother is torched for witchcraft and she and her sister must fend for themselves.
Uncanny waking dream sequences that mash the supernatural with the stark powers of nature make this film so much more than a historical curio.
In luminous black and white, American writer-director Nietzchka Keene's chilly first film makes use of Iceland's emotional landscapes — craggy mountains, tree-less vistas and boundless dandelion fields — as the staging ground for a Brothers Grimm fairy tale that is coolly flipped, swapping out the evil stepmother for a story of women's sacrifice and survival. ABB
Watch on MUBI from November 21.
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2020-11-01 18:44:00Z
CAIiEI2gjbbBhsYrjsc9zxFKjAwqFggEKg4IACoGCAow3vI9MPeaCDDc2g4
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