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.
Oppenheimer (Prime Video, starting Feb. 16)
Extremely patient Christopher Nolan fans are finally rewarded this weekend, when Oppenheimer hits streaming on Prime Video. And if you missed this on the big screen, then better to see it at home than not see it all. Because while Oppenheimer may have arrived looking like a familiar biopic, it is deeper, richer and more devastating than anything the director has ever made. Across three propulsive hours, Nolan’s film about the father of the atomic bomb progresses from layered character study to zippy heist film to political thriller to existential horror show. Oppenheimer is that rare mainstream-studio miracle: a film with the tenacity to ask the big questions while answering them, too. Best to watch (or more likely, rewatch) it now before it sweeps the Academy Awards next month.
This Is Me… Now (Prime Video)
Like her love, it don’t cost a thing to check out Jennifer Lopez’s new “narrative musical film” ... so long as you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber. Based on her forthcoming album, also titled This Is Me... Now, this curious feature is directed by Dave Meyers and is said to feature an “intimate, fantastical and narrative-driven reflection of Lopez’s journey to find love,” which means, I can only assume, some primo Ben Affleck footage that just might rival Gigli. Without the benefit of an advance screener, though, I’m going to say this is Lopez’s most intriguing on-screen project since, at the very least, The Cell.
Next Goal Wins (Disney+)
Based on the 2014 documentary of the same name by Mike Brett and Steve Jamison, Taiki Waititi’s Next Goal Wins dramatizes (comedatizes?) the story of Dutch-American soccer (re: football) coach Thomas Rongen (Michael Fassbender), who is sent to rehabilitate the American Samoa team, the very worst players in the professional world. Can the alcoholic and temper-tantrum-prone Rongen help the players, managed by jack-of-all-island-trades Tavita (Oscar Kightley), achieve their athletic dreams? Will he stop brazenly insulting the team’s trans player, Jaiyah Saelua (Kaimana)? Will Waititi figure out a way to squeeze Rongen’s ex-wife (Elisabeth Moss) into the proceedings, even though she has nothing to do with the story?
Mostly, this is lightweight, enjoyable-if-you-don’t-invest-too-much fare. Although he is miscast and sporting a horrible blond hair-dye job, Fassbender does as much as he can to balance Rongen as an incurable jerk and inherently decent guy. Non-binary performer Kaimana has a natural charisma that helps anchor some of Waititi’s more tone-deaf decisions. Kightley is consistently hilarious as the never-say-die Tavita. And even Waititi’s Flight of the Conchords buddy Rhys Darby pops by to deliver five minutes of solid straight-man shtick. If you aren’t asking for much, Next Goal Wins scores by default.
Red Rooms (Crave)
Draped underneath a thick layer of dread, Pascal Plante’s 2023 follow-up to his Cannes-certified drama Nadia, Butterfly is one of the most effectively unnerving thrillers of the past year. Following two young women’s very different obsessions with a Paul Bernardo-like serial killer (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, perfectly cast as a creep without the actor needing to say a word of dialogue), Red Rooms mixes the modern folklore of the internet with the pulse-pounding tension of a classic whodunnit. Juliette Gariépy, playing the more mysterious of the two women who are drawn to a Montreal murder trial, delivers a knockout performance, accenting her character’s ambiguity with the hardest of edges. I’m still unsure about where the whole story ends up, but the journey is genuinely, impressively upsetting in the most riveting kind of way.
The Beekeeper (on-demand, including Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play)
When director David Ayer’s latest kill-fest opens, Jason Statham’s brooding Adam Clay is tending to the bees belonging to his neighbour, a kind-hearted widow played by Phylicia Rashad. But after her character is bilked out of her life savings by some sleazy hackers – soulless boiler-room hipsters who seem to be boogeymen imagined by the American Association of Retired Persons – Clay springs into action. It turns out that in addition to his fondness for hives and honey, the dude was once part of an elite black-ops force actually known as “Beekeepers” – unstoppable killing machines who were trained by government forces to “protect the hive.” In sloppier hands, The Beekeeper would cling to the lower rung of the Statham canon – more Expend4bles than Wrath of Man. But Ayer (End of Watch, Fury) makes sure to consistently inject Kurt Wimmer’s janky script with a rush of winking outlandishness, turning trash into dumpster-diving treasure.