‘Daniel Isn’t Real’ (2019)
Stream it on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video or Hulu.
Everybody loves a fun horror flick in the fall, but viewers who check out this nail-biter on one of the myriad services carrying it may be taken aback by the visceral intensity of the experience. Its central conceit is a clever one: The 8-year-old Luke invents Daniel, an imaginary friend, to help him cope with a traumatic experience. But Daniel’s evil influence prompts Luke’s mother (Mary Stuart Masterson) to make the boy lock the imaginary friend away for years — until the lonely, college-age Luke (Miles Robbins) lets the full-grown Daniel (Patrick Schwarzenegger) out to play. The director Adam Egypt Mortimer keeps the vibes menacing, the gore plentiful and the moral conundrums lively, from its shocker opening to its grisly conclusion.
‘Kill. Bury. Print.’ (2026)
It’s easy to dismiss true crime documentaries as formulaic exploitation, and many of them are just that. But much of the genre derives its power and pleasure from sheer narrative disbelief; the axiom “truth is stranger than fiction” goes from cliché to inarguable fact. Take this story of the yearslong feud between the sheriff’s department of McCurtain County, Okla. (population about 33,000), and the family-owned McCurtain Gazette-News, which began running stories on corruption in local law enforcement and found itself on the receiving end of harassment, smears and even (in a surreptitious recording that received nationwide attention) death threats. Expertly crafted by the director Ben Klein, “Kill” is a first-rate piece of nonfiction storytelling, moving fast without skimping on details or insight, deftly illustrating the nationwide tension between government and media in small, personal terms.
‘Blink Twice’ (2024)
The actress Zoë Kravitz made a promising feature directorial debut with this sharp-edged mixture of social commentary and thriller. Channing Tatum stars as a disgraced tech mogul in the midst of an apology tour who is charmed by a pair of servers (Naomi Ackie and Alia Shawkat) at a high-toned gala, and invites them to join him and his friends to frolic on his private island. Echoes of Jeffrey Epstein are hardly coincidental, and the idyllic setting is soon clouded by creepy auras and inexplicable incidents. Kravitz orchestrates those events with a sure hand, and marshals the sprawling cast (which includes up-and-comers like Adria Arjona and Levon Hawke, and such mainstays as Kyle MacLachlan, Geena Davis and Christian Slater) with the confidence of an old pro.
‘Babes’ (2024)
Pamela Adlon followed up the triumph of her show “Better Things” with this pregnancy comedy starring the similarly beloved Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau. The script, by Glazer and her “Broad City” collaborator Josh Rabinowitz, concerns longtime besties Eden (Glazer) and Dawn (Buteau), who’ve maintained their closeness even as their paths have diverged; Dawn is married with children, while Eden maintains her party-girl lifestyle. That all changes when a one-night stand leaves Eden pregnant, and even she seems surprised by her choice to keep it — with, of course, the expert assistance of Dawn. Hilarity ensues, mostly via the uncommonly candid disclosure of the graphic details of pregnancy and childbirth, while the strains and complications of adult friendship serve as a surprisingly poignant throughline.
‘Finestkind’ (2023)
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video and Paramount+.
The Oscar-winning screenwriter Brian Helgeland (“L.A. Confidential”) writes and directs this combination of family drama and crime thriller; originally brought to Paramount+ by the producer Taylor Sheridan, it’s now also streaming on Amazon Prime Video. The story of two half brothers and their run-ins with the law on their fishing boat, it’s one of those movies where the margins are more noteworthy than the center, with the ostensible leading man Toby Wallace and his love interest Jenna Ortega easily outshined by the always-reliable Ben Foster as the elder of the siblings and Tommy Lee Jones, at his most grizzled, as their father. Foster conveys the chip on his character’s shoulder without overplaying his hand, while Jones’s frequent unpredictability as an actor pays off big in the closing passages.
‘At Eternity’s Gate’ (2018)
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
As a visual artist himself, the director Julian Schnabel is an unsurprisingly adept chronicler of the life of a painter. He crossed over to filmmaking with “Basquiat,” the 1996 biography of his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat; he returned to the subject with this potent portrait of the life and work of Vincent van Gogh. But like his subject, Schnabel is neither drawing straight lines nor painting inside them; he is less interested in nailing every biographical detail than in capturing the mood of the time and the feel of the work, the way a brush smashes into a canvas, the howl of a painting born of pain and heartache. Willem Dafoe was nominated for an Oscar for his work as van Gogh, and deservedly so; his high-keyed intensity has rarely been so expertly deployed.
‘Cameraperson’ (2016)
The idea of the ransom note assembled from words and letters cut from unrelated pieces of text may be one of the old clichés of crime thrillers, but it’s rather an apt description of the methodology of this mesmerizing documentary from the director Kirsten Johnson (“Dick Johnson Is Dead”). Before (and after) making it, she was one of the most prolific cinematographers in nonfiction cinema, shooting something like 50 films for the likes of Laura Poitras, Kirby Dick and Michael Moore. “Cameraperson” is assembled from pieces shot — but not used — for those films, outtakes, pre-rolls and other ephemera that manage, by existing even outside the structure of their documentaries, to take on a truth of their own. It sounds haphazard, yet it’s anything but; this is a gorgeous puzzle of a movie, whose pieces lock together to form a not only coherent but overwhelming whole.
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