Do you feel like you’re drowning … but you haven’t even left your couch? Welcome to the Great Content Overload Era. To help you navigate the choppy digital waves, here are The Globe’s best bets for weekend streaming.
Past Lives (Prime Video)
After enjoying a long journey from Sundance breakout to art-house hit to Oscar nominee, Korean-Canadian filmmaker Celine Song’s debut feature is finally available to stream. Loosely based on her own experiences, Song’s film begins in Korea, where a 12-year-old girl named Na Young (Seung Ah Moon) is preparing to move with her family to Canada. But she is not only leaving her home but her best friend, Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim). But this is not the end for the pair. As Song follows the two several decades later during one weekend in New York – each carefully dancing around their own feelings, as concerned for the other as they are for themselves – the filmmaker builds a romantic drama in which audiences are just as invested in seeing two people kiss as they are in actively hoping they don’t do anything of the sort. Song is attempting a delicate balance of character and genre expectations here, and the wonderfully surprising thing is she pretty much pulls it off. All with a sense of kind humour that feels strong and even courageous, given how deeply the material is mined from Song’s own life.
The Iron Claw (on-demand, including Apple TV, Amazon, Cineplex Store)
A horror movie body-slammed by the weight of a grimy beyond-the-mat wrestling expose, The Iron Claw is Canadian director Sean Durkin’s latest portrait of domestic miserablism (after 2020′s The Nest) that breaks the bone before it cuts right to it. Intensely dark and depressing – though not without its pressure-valve moments of levity – the based-on-a-true-story film is in the running for the bleakest release of the holiday season. Which is exactly Durkin’s point. This is a picture as severe as the real-life generational abuse that its director is chronicling.
Thanksgiving (Crave)
Horror fiend Eli Roth returns to gross out audiences with this effective and efficient slasher, which has the added bonus of being shot in Toronto and Hamilton. Based on a decade-and-a-half-old “fake” trailer that appeared during Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, Thanksgiving is a throwback to when horror films lived and died on their grimy VHS cover art, promising all kinds of sex and blood. While Roth’s film works fine enough as a whole, it’s worth watching for the prologue alone, a sequence of Black Friday shoppers gone berserk that neatly oscillates between hilarious and terrifying.
Strange Way of Life (on-demand, including Apple TV, Amazon, Cineplex Store)
Making a small splash on the art-house circuit this past fall, Pedro Almodóvar’s short film Strange Way of Life might be the best 30 minutes you’ll watch this spring. (And best of all, it’s an affordable on-demand rental, going for only $2.99 via most platforms.) Only Almodóvar’s second English-language project, after his 2020 short The Human Voice starring Tilda Swinton, Strange Way of Life is a western headlined by Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, who play two gunslingers reuniting after a passionate affair. Playing with genre and tropes, Almodóvar creates a singular kind of experiment, as romantic as it is eccentric.
Tales from the Gimli Hospital (Mubi)
More than 20 years after it was famously rejected by the Toronto International Film Festival, Guy Maddin’s 1988 masterpiece Tales from the Gimli Hospital has undergone a 4K restoration and is now streaming on Mubi as part of the service’s “Wizard of Winnipeg” program, alongside Maddin’s 1990 comedy Archangel. The more experimental and beguiling of the two, Gimli is set in late 19th-century Winnipeg, where a smallpox epidemic takes hold of a small Icelandic-Canadian fishing village, which sets the stage for a bitter romance between two hospital patients and their nurse.
Barry Hertz