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.
Godzilla Minus One (Netflix)
A surprise success during its underpromoted theatrical run this past December – and then unavailable digitally for months, even as the film triumphed at the Academy Awards, winning an Oscar for best visual effects – Godzilla Minus One has finally made landfall on Canadian streaming. And if you weren’t able to catch it on the big screen, then Toho Studios’ 33rd Godzilla film is very much worth the wait.
Rewinding the kaiju mythos back to the very beginning, director Takashi Yamazaki’s Japanese-language epic is set in the aftermath of the Second World War, with Tokyo in ruins and the national psyche shattered. Enter Godzilla, a being of pure radioactive carnage whose destruction spurs Japan’s walking wounded into action. Deftly political while still being a thrilling piece of entertainment, Godzilla Minus One is a true cinematic experience of the highest, largest order. I don’t think I’ll ever come down from the rush of seeing the nearly sold-out audience at my IMAX screening last winter bopping their heads along in unison to the theme music as Yamazaki cued up the film’s final at-sea battle. Turn the volume way up.
Under Paris (Netflix)
Speaking of monster flicks: It should be decreed by film-industry statutes that every summer needs at least one killer-shark movie. So while this season doesn’t have a Meg to call its own, bloodthirsty audiences do have Under Paris, the wild new French film from director Xavier Gens (Lupin, plus a number of horror flicks). Entirely ridiculous in concept but sincere in its ambitions to thrill and terrify audiences, Gens’s movie so closely follows the Jaws template that Steven Spielberg may want to look into French copyright law.
Essentially, sharks – whose saltwater environments have been devastated by pollution – have somehow crossed over into the freshwater Seine, and are none too happy with any human intrusion. A group of heroes try to raise the red flag, including Bérénice Bejo (The Artist), but they come up against a tourism-happy mayor (sound familiar?) who is hoping to pull off a triathlon in the river (I guess the filmmakers couldn’t use the words “Olympic Games”). What happens next? Chomp, chomp, chomp. And while the shark action is sometimes rendered through too-cheap CGI, there are enough carnage-happy set-pieces – including a Catacombs-set attack that maximizes claustrophobic panic – that kill. C’est fin(i).
The King Tide (Hoopla)
After getting lost in the mid-spring release calendar during which every Canadian movie of note tries to carve out some space after the big Hollywood awards bait of the winter and before the summer blockbuster season arrives, the excellent new film The King Tide has surfaced on the free streamer Hoopla. Director Christian Sparkes’s atmospheric gothic drama – which focuses on a small island fishing village that goes to extreme lengths to protect the mystical child who has turned their lives around – has the performances, style and high-production values that should have taken it far, or far enough, during its brief theatrical life. There is a commitment here to character and world-building that is stirring, with deeply emotional moments anchored by the work of lead actor Clayne Crawford and supporting player Frances Fisher. And though the plot crumbles just a bit by the third act, The King Tide washes away in the most haunting of manners. Better to catch Sparkes’s cinematic wave now at home than never at all.
A Bullet Pulling Thread (TVO, premiering June 16 at 9 p.m., also streaming on TVO.org)
One of the first documentaries acquired by TVO Docs programmer Shane Smith after moving to the broadcaster from his long tenure at Hot Docs, the new film A Bullet Pulling Thread is a remarkably affecting story of art and loss that will leave you equal parts furious and inspired. Directed by Ian Daffern, the film traces the story of two siblings from the Ontario city of Kitchener: Marilyn Farquhar, who has become an award-winning quilter, and her homelessness advocate brother Barry Shantz, whose restless life has been marked by run-ins with the law.
After Barry is killed by a RCMP officer during a mental-health incident, Marilyn uses her art to work through her grief, and seek justice from authorities who seem indifferent to the many social crises occurring under their watch. Intimate and sharp, Daffern’s doc feels like an essential examination of contemporary Canadian tension. It also makes for an excellent, if challenging, double bill with Stephen Hosier’s similarly themed doc from earlier this year, Attila (now streaming on Crave).
The Bourne series (Prime Video)
For one reason or another – perhaps because this summer’s big action films are leaving me deflated – my wife and I devoted a few evenings last week to revisiting the Bourne series. And I’m delighted to report that the franchise – at least the first three movies; let’s not mention the Jeremy Renner spin-off or the weak 2016 instalment – still kicks serious butt, throat and any other body part you can throw at Matt Damon. Watching the original trilogy back-to-back-to-back also provides an instructive mini-history of big-budget action filmmaking.
Director Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity, made back in the practically prehistoric blockbuster age of 2002, is a relatively straight-ahead spectacle, with its fist and gun fights measured and muted. Then once Paul Greengrass takes over with 2004′s The Bourne Supremacy, all shaky-cam hell breaks loose, with the explosions getting louder, the kills deadlier, the car chases crazier. The increasing extravagance suits the Bourne films just fine, though, especially once Greengrass and Damon deliver 2007′s The Bourne Ultimatum, which never, ever lets its heart-pumping momentum fade. And the series also gets bonus points for enlisting a murderer’s row of excellent character actors (Chris Cooper, Brian Cox, Scott Glenn, David Strathairn) to player CIA-sanctioned murderers.