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.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (Disney+, starting Aug. 2)
From left, Noa, played by Owen Teague, Freya Allan as Nova, and Raka, played by Peter Macon, in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.20th Century Studios/The Associated Press
There is no such thing as a “bad” Planet of the Apes movie. Sure, some of the films – we’ve hit 10, not counting the seventies television series, which was then re-edited into five TV movies – were as satisfying as a blackened banana. But each entry still contained the following elements, all of which have been scientifically proven (using the Dr. Zaius empirical method) to entertain: monkeys fighting humans, monkeys fighting each other, monkeys using weapons to fight both humans and each other, and, most importantly, monkeys riding horses. So on that level, the latest entry, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, is a fun enough distraction. Featuring more hot monkey-on-monkey action than any of the Apes entrants before – even if it is digitally created, rather than prosthetic-enabled in the traditional Roddy McDowall style – Kingdom has so much simian shenanigans, including a whole lotta horses, that it threatens to imagine what might happen if Michael Bay acquired the National Geographic channel.
Love Lies Bleeding (Prime Video)
Katy O'Brian, left, and Kristen Stewart in Love Lies Bleeding.Anna Kooris/The Associated Press
Shot with an eye for grime and populated by characters fatally allergic to doing the right thing, director Rose Glass’s follow-up to her deeply discomforting 2019 horror film Saint Maud represents as much a levelling up of ambitions as it does an impressively stubborn commitment to pushing buttons audiences might not even be aware that they have. It is an unnerving, skin-crawling experience, but laced with such a genuine romanticism for its muck that it is impossible to shake.
Set in a half-rotted New Mexico town in the latter half of the eighties, Love Lies Bleeding follows two perfectly mismatched souls: Lou (Kristen Stewart), a sullen gym manager whose life is going nowhere slowly, and Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a drifter who harbours dreams of winning a bodybuilding competition in Vegas. Their cigarette-stained dream quickly curdles into a nightmare, though, once Lou’s slimy brother-in-law (Dave Franco) and her estranged gun-running father (Ed Harris) saunter into the picture. Soon, bodies are piling up, FBI agents are sniffing around, and the line between cruel reality and twisted fantasy blurs wonderfully.
Hit Man (Hoopla)
Glen Powell in Hit Man.Matt Lankes/Netflix
A few weeks after Canada’s hardest-core Richard Linklater (or perhaps Glen Powell) fans lost their minds over the new rom-com Hit Man not being available to stream on Netflix here like it is available in the United States, certain eagle-eyed moviegoers noticed the film was actually free to watch for any Canadian holding a library card through the niche service Hoopla.
A compact, perfectly sculpted force of drawling charisma and bottomless machismo, Powell grabs every inch of the screen here, not so much chewing scenery as rolling his tongue around it. The actor seduces and destroys as if it was pure instinct. Which is what makes his performance in Hit Man so irresistible: Linklater knows exactly the power that his leading man commands, but instead of lazily exploiting it off the top, the director reverse-engineers a charm offensive so earth-shaking that it registers on the Richter scale.
Mad Men, every season (Netflix, Aug. 1)
Mad Men returns to Netflix on Aug. 1.Frank Ockenfels/AMC
Grab a Coca-Cola and settle in for all seven seasons of Mad Men, which returns to Netflix this month to remind everyone that AMC used to be a titan of cable television, before the streaming wars tore everything apart. Revisiting Matthew Weiner’s legendary series also serves as a dispiriting reminder that more movies need Jon Hamm, dang it, as the once-and-always Don Draper is simply too fantastic, layered, and often hilarious a performer to be kept inside the crevices of such mostly forgettable stuff these days as The Morning Show and bit parts in whatever new thing Tina Fey is producing. And if you needed further reasons to either watch Mad Men for the first or second or 10th time, how about one of the very best television casts ever assembled? Elisabeth Moss, John Slattery, January Jones, Rich Sommer, Alison Brie, Christina Hendricks, and the wonderfully slimy (and seemingly underemployed) Vincent Kartheiser are all thoroughly amazing. There also might not be a truly bad episode in the entire run.
American Outsider: The Films of Kelly Reichardt (MUBI)
Michelle Williams in Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy.Supplied
The Pacific Northwest-based filmmaker Kelly Reichardt has delivered a remarkable string of quiet and cautious low-budget films over the course of her consistently understated career – movies that force us to question our fragile place in the world. Wisely, MUBI is currently packaging two of Reichardt’s best, the heartbreaking 2008 drama Wendy and Lucy and the subtly brutal 2010 neo-western Meek’s Cutoff, this month. While both films star Michelle Williams – who also headlined Reichardt’s most recent masterpiece, last year’s art-school comedy Showing Up – the two titles are separated by hundreds of years in their settings. In Wendy and Lucy, Reichardt follows a woman and her dog as they travel to Alaska, looking for work in the midst of the economic ruins of the early aughts. In Meek’s, the theme of American struggle is still front and centre, but the year is 1845, when a small group of families are crossing the Oregon Trail in the hopes of securing a better future. These being Reichardt films, hope becomes something to cling onto, stubbornly.