This month’s suggestions for your subscription streaming services’ hidden gems cover a wide range of genres and styles, including a piercing psychological thriller, a moody marital drama and a wild sex comedy, with a handful of top-notch documentaries to keep you hooked in reality anchored.
‘Black Bear’ (2020)
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
When Aubrey Plaza burst onto the scene over a decade ago, her bone-dry wit, snarky delivery, and MVP-supporting appearances in comic book movies and on television all heralded the second coming of Janeane Garofalo. But her electrifying dramatic work in recent years – on The White Lotus, in Emily the Criminal and in this searing portrait of psychosexual hubris from writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine – makes one think a little closer to Gena Rowlands. The totally unpredictable psychodrama begins as a love triangle, with Plaza as an actor and filmmaker in a secluded retreat with a married couple (Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon, both excellent). Over the course of one long night, the trio flirts, interprets and accuses, rearranges and regroups their allegiances, until…well, then it goes somewhere else entirely, grippingly blurring the lines between life, art and their respective commentaries.
Director Sarah Polley has been running the gauntlet for her latest film, Women Talking. On Twitter, she took a moment to tongue-in-cheek and winsomely noting the debt of one of her competitors and asking: “that Steven Spielberg is returning my cast from ‘Take This Waltz’.” And in Polley’s second outing, “Fabelmans” co-stars Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen fabulously play Margot and Lou, a loose couple whose comfortable marriage is thrown into doubt when Margot is suddenly struck by lightning is enhanced by her attraction to a new neighbor (understandably, given that he’s played by Luke Kirby). Polley masterfully takes what could have been a tearful melodrama or a ranting screed and turns it into a nuanced and probing meditation on what it really means to be faithful.
‘Sharp Stick’ (2022)
Stream it on Hulu.
Lena Dunham’s 2022 was a study in contrasts, with two night-and-day fiction films to ponder: her Amazon original Catherine Called Birdy, which seemed to challenge notions of who Dunham is and what she does, and indie comedy-drama Sharp Stick, which took those notions into new and provocative territory. Her focus is on Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth), a 26-year-old nanny who quite unwisely gives up her virginity to the scruffy burnout father (Jon Bernthal) who employs her. Dunham’s talent for writing amusingly self-destructive women and stupid men remains intact, and her own role as a mother caught in the middle is as thorny and complicated as the film that surrounds her.
The mixed response to Noah Baumbach’s recent film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise was another reminder that turning the author’s thematically and historically dense works into quicksilver cinema seems to be something uniquely difficult. But in 2012, director David Cronenberg rose to the challenge with “Cosmopolis,” turning DeLillo’s chronicle of a day in the life of a young billionaire into a snapshot of Occupy-era self-destruction, while Robert Pattinson makes a particularly effective DeLillo protagonist, all cold surfaces and questionable motives.
‘The Monster’ (2016)
Stream it on HBO Max.
Bryan Bertino’s tight, compact thriller finds a fiercely independent tween girl (Ella Ballentine) and her alcoholic mother (Zoe Kazan) on a long, hard drive through the lonely night – and then stranded in their car, which is dodged by a wolf falls the road. But this wolf was trying to escape another animal, and the women soon supplanted the wolf as prey. That sounds easy enough, but that’s not all Bertino plans to do; The intricate and elaborate flashback structure of the image makes it increasingly clear that these two are quite capable of being just as monstrous to each other.
‘The Pez Outlaw’ (2022)
Stream it on Netflix.
The documentary, directed by Amy Bandlien Storkel and Bryan Storkel, tells the story of Steve Glew, a collector, seller, and smuggler of Pez candy dispensers — or more specifically, Glew tells the story himself, telling his story not only with cheerful comic vigor, but also starring documentary’s vigorously stylized dramatizations of his various heists and frolics. This irreverent approach is right for this low-stakes story that takes the tools of Netflix’s increasingly ubiquitous true-crime documentary and debunks it as ridiculous.
“Leave No Trace” (2022)
Stream it on Hulu.
When the Boy Scouts filed for bankruptcy in February 2020, it was one of many national stories that quickly took a back seat in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Thousands of allegations of sexual abuse eventually came to light, eventually surpassing 82,000 accusers. Irene Taylor’s documentary describes the history of the organization and its pattern of protecting accused pedophiles in its midst (while outlawing gay Scouts and Scoutmasters as dangers to children). Taylor compiles an anatomy of a conspiracy, detailing how these secrets have been kept so securely guarded for so long, while tracking down survivors from across the country to hear their stories. It’s an unsettling, annoying piece of work, put together with a delicate blend of righteous outrage and necessary sensitivity.
Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song (2021)
Stream it on Netflix.
The documentary by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine is, it should be noted, not a traditional biographical portrait of singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, and thankfully there have been many. Instead, the filmmakers examine the long, strange, intriguing history of the title track – now arguably its most well-known composition, deployed in media of all kinds, covered by every artist with anything but initially a forgotten track on a poorly selling album . This odyssey from ignored to iconic is inherently dramatic, and Gellar and Goldfine bring it to life with panache while acknowledging that Cohen’s particular passion made his beginnings something of musical magic.
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