In what has become an annual tradition, this month’s guide to the under-the-radar titles of your subscription services spotlights films from this calendar year — movies that may turn up on the year-end lists of your favorite critics, or as nominations and winners during awards season. Here are just a few of the year’s finest indies, documentaries and international selections, available to stream at this very minute:
‘Janet Planet’ (2024)
The playwright-turned-filmmaker Annie Baker makes an astonishing feature filmmaking debut with this evocative memory piece, set in the hyper-specific milieu of early-’90s New England, but easily transportable to the time and place of your choice. The focus is on 11-year-old Lacy (a delightfully ordinary Zoe Ziegler) and her acupuncturist mother, Janet (a spot-on Julianne Nicholson); other people drift in and out of focus, mostly Janet’s romantic partners, all of whom are clearly ill-advised for one reason or another. It’s less a plot-driven narrative than a collection of moments, accumulating into a languid yet pivotal summer, captured in up-close, and sometimes off-kilter, compositions.
‘Didi’ (2024)
Like “Janet Planet,” Sean Wang’s coming-of-age movie dodges many of the traps and tropes of the form — primarily by spotlighting an imperfect protagonist, the soon-to-be-middle schooler Chris Wang (Izaac Wang), who can be quite the little jerk when he wants to be. Wang sets Chris’s story in the summer of 2008, and is uncommonly perceptive in replicating the details of being a kid online during that time: communication via AOL Instant Messenger, self-expression via YouTube, and social media via Myspace, where a punting from the “top friends” list was the most emotionally devastating act imaginable. The director is similarly adroit at capturing the nervousness of first crushes and the sound and fury of teen sibling arguments, but the most tender scenes involve Chris’s difficult relationship with his mother, played with depth and melancholy by the wonderful Joan Chen.
‘The Taste of Things’ (2024)
Tran Anh Hung’s story of a gourmand (Benoît Magimel) and the cook he loves (Juliette Binoche) falls in the great tradition of food movies, with scene after sumptuous scene of preparation and consumption, often rendered in hushed and respectful silence. And like the best food movies, it’s a love story, recognizing cooking as an act of intimacy rivaled only by lovemaking itself (and, for some, surpassing it). The central couple’s longstanding romantic arrangement — they work together, they sometimes spend the night together, but she refuses his offers of marriage — gets extra juice from the actors, who were romantically involved decades ago and bring that subtext into the pair’s loaded interactions. It’s a lovely, elegant movie, as delicate as a delicious soufflé.
‘Power’ (2024)
“This film requires curiosity, or at least suspicion,” explains the director Yance Ford, in the voice-over that begins this documentary meditation on policing in the United States. His narration is quiet and searching, the voice of a man who would not presume to know the solution to our current predicament, but knows we’re in one. With the help of the editor Ian Olds, Ford examines the origins of municipal policing, challenging assumptions both social and historical, and digging into the systemic issues that prevent effective law enforcement and hinder accountability for those who abuse it. Artfully manipulating archival footage and sound, with pointed juxtapositions and a haunting score, “Power” is a thought-provoking picture whose conclusions have grown even grimmer in the half-year since its release.
‘Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World’ (2024)
The Romanian director Radu Jude makes vexing satires of contemporary life, and his latest is a rude, bitter, buckshot-scattering takedown of grind culture, corporate doublespeak, public relations and living online. His protagonist is Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked production assistant for an industrial video company, who spends a typical day running her boss’s errands and conducting interviews, while picking up passengers for a few extra bucks and making vulgar TikTok videos for a few extra laughs. Jude’s movies are an overflowing stew, the pot perpetually boiling over with stray ideas and provocations, so there’s more to discover; the results are messy, and occasionally stamina-testing, but sharp and scathing all the same.
‘Hundreds of Beavers’ (2024)
The current media ecosystem isn’t conducive to cult movies anymore, but occasionally one breaks through, an out-of-nowhere slice of outsider cinema that astounds and baffles viewers in equal measure. That’s the case with this refreshingly unconventional frontier comedy from the director Mike Cheslik, a black-and-white, dialogue-free romp filled with surrealist slapstick and actors in oversized animal costumes. Ryland Brickson Cole Tews stars as a fumbling fur trapper who must catch and kill the titular quantity of animals to win the hand of his lady love, but that’s just a clothesline on which to hang a seemingly inexhaustible supply of clever comic bits. Its low-budget chintziness becomes its charm, with Cheslik drawing inspiration from everything, whether it’s Chaplin or Nintendo. It’s just the darnedest thing — and that’s a compliment.
‘The Truth vs. Alex Jones’ (2024)
The Onion’s recent bid to purchase the bankrupt Infowars, the digital brand of the noted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, gives Dan Reed’s excellent documentary about Jones’s fall from grace a bit of an extra kick. Reed interviews Jones’s former staff members to detail how he came to fame. He also talks to several parents of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 to show how Jones’s relentless insistence that the mass shooting was a hoax turned into a yearslong campaign of digital and personal harassment. The families started filing lawsuits in 2018, culminating in the largest verdict for a defamation case in U.S. history. There is some satisfaction and schadenfreude in that outcome, but this isn’t just a courtroom blow-by-blow; Reed gets into the weeds of how this business worked, and how Jones’s paranoia was so profitable. It’s a vital examination of the warped American psyche — of the man who made these claims, and the people who believed them.
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