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.
Poor Things (Disney+, with Star)
I’m on record as finding Yorgos Lanthimos’s fantastical comedy to be an obnoxious chore, but I appear to be in the minority, which is fine. For those who have waited until the film hit streaming to check out what all the Oscars-approved fuss has been about, now is your chance. A Frankenstein movie with the heart of a progressive pervert, Poor Things follows the misadventures of a young woman named Bella (Emma Stone) who is brought back to life by an experimental surgery after jumping off a bridge to the icy waters below. But in resurrecting her, the gently maniacal Dr. Baxter (Willem Dafoe) replaces Bella’s brain with that of the unborn child inside her belly.
In very loosely adapting Scottish author Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara seem to be aiming for Swiftian satire of the most incendiary variety. But in its rib-poking scenarios and bawdy body politics, it lands as the unintentionally timed answer to, “What if Barbie was rated R and also not nearly as funny?” Your mileage may differ, though.
Anatomy of a Fall (Prime Video)
In French director Justine Triet’s perhaps unlikely North American hit, the metaphors drop as hard and fast as the body at the centre of the legal drama. As the French filmmaker traces the court case of wife/successful novelist Sandra (Sandra Hüller) accused of killing her husband/struggling novelist Samuel (Samuel Theis), Anatomy of a Fall layers on the “aha” symbolism. The death occurs at an isolated cabin, as rickety and chilly as the couple’s marriage. The two suffer a language barrier – she’s German, he’s French, they tend to communicate in English – that highlights their communication issues. And the only witness to Samuel’s death? That would be the couple’s young son, who is partially blind. Still, these thematic conveniences don’t get in the way of a phenomenal lead performance from Hüller (Toni Erdmann), who anchors the film’s engineered air of ambiguity. As a wife who refuses to concede an argument, a mother who takes pains to protect her son, and an artist who craves success above seemingly everything else, Hüller is asked to play a wonderful mess of contradictions – and the actress pulls off the job wonderfully.
Mean Girls, 2024 version (Paramount+)
Just because Paramount’s marketing campaign mostly ignores the fact that this new version of Mean Girls is not just a 20-years-later reboot for the TikTok era, but also jammed from beginning to end with song-and-dance numbers imported from the 2018 Broadway show, itself inspired by Tina Fey and company’s original 2004 comedy, doesn’t mean you have to. The ultimate result, directed by the husband-and-wife duo of Arturo Perez Jr. and Samantha Jayne, is mostly a toe-tapping, head-bopping delight. Given that Hollywood seems intent on remaking anything and everything more than a decade old, this update offers something genuinely new, even if all the musical numbers are wrapped around the familiar comfort of plot beats, characters and punchlines lifted word-for-word, beat-for-beat, from the first film.
Napoleon (Apple TV+)
Critics, and audiences, mostly greeted Ridley Scott’s historical epic with a sour face, but I’m determined to turn those Napoleonic frowns upside down. In every element of his new film, Scott identifies a wild, seemingly insurmountable challenge and then sets forth to trounce it with the confidence of a man who has never let anyone see him sweat. The battles are roaring, bone-shaking experiences that are immediately stripped of glory (audiences will never again underestimate the destructive force of a cannonball, specifically what it can do to a horse). The costumes and set designs are luxurious, meticulous feats. The music is stirring, the scenery startling, the everything of it all simply so giant that the film practically begs for a subtitle: Napoleon: They Don’t Make ‘Em Like This Any More.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Crave)
Director Daniel Goldhaber’s scrappy indie not only boasts the best title in recent memory, but also the best genre bait-and-switch. While it may sound like a docudrama – and indeed, Goldhaber is loosely adapting Swedish academic Andreas Malm’s 2021 non-fiction book of the same name – How to Blow Up a Pipeline is actually a rip-roaring heist movie of a manifesto. Following a group of wannabe saboteurs, each of whom has their own reasons for resorting to such a last-resort act of ecoterrorism, the film is as relentlessly thrilling as it is politically provocative.
Barry Hertz