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.
Hundreds of Beavers (Hoopla)
Still making its way across the rep-cinema circuit, Mike Cheslik’s new comedy Hundreds of Beavers seems to be this year’s Skinamarink: a highly stylized, hyper-niche, DIY production that is quickly building an impressively devoted cult audience. A dialogue-free experiment in extreme slapstick, Cheslik’s film, which follows a 19th-century applejack maker who becomes a beaver’s worst enemy, is the kind of full-throttle effort in unbridled zaniness that rivals the best of Looney Tunes. And while Hundreds of Beavers likely plays best in a sold-out theatre filled with an adventurous audience, it’s heartening to see that it’s getting a relatively speedy home-market release courtesy of Hoopla, the best free (with a library card) streamer that many audiences have still never heard of.
Beverly Hills Cop trilogy (Netflix)
To mark Netflix’s coming release of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, the long-in-the-works fourth edition of a franchise that could have easily ended after Part One, the streaming giant has added the three previous Eddie Murphy adventures to the service. Okay, perhaps No. 2 is decent, but ... listen, best to just revisit the original 1984 instalment, which definitely stands the test of time. Not only because Murphy’s slick shtick feels as raw and bracing as ever, but because director Martin Brest knew exactly how to calibrate the film’s action-to-gags ratio. And I think it is safe to say that the film also represents the second-best performances from both Bronson Pinchot (his No. 1 film remains True Romance) and Paul Reiser (he’s still got Aliens at the top of his CV).
From the Streets of Cannes series (Mubi)
Ahead of this month’s Cannes Film Festival – which I’ll once again have to view from afar (pause for deep sigh) – the increasingly ambitious art-house streamer Mubi is delivering a collection of the most ambitious films to come out of the Croisette over the past decade. Titles include Lee Chang-dong’s untouchable South Korean thriller Burning headlined by a career-making turn from Steven Yeun, the haunting and enigmatic drama Zombi Child from Bertrand Bonello (whose latest feature The Beast is currently making deserved waves at indie theatres across North America), and, um, Jodie Foster’s dark comedy The Beaver, starring Mel Gibson. (Mubi gets a slight pass here, slotting the film into its sidebar collection called “Le Booing,” focusing on films that were jeered off the stage in Cannes.)
Migration (Prime Video)
It takes a second to wrap your head around the fact that Mike White, the one-man machine behind HBO’s The White Lotus, also churned out an animated kid’s flick about ducks this past winter. But once you actually watch Migration – and as someone with three kids under 10, I have done this a lot over the past few months – White’s connection makes all kinds of obvious sense. Again, we have White using family as a means of uncovering and dissecting myriad neuroses, as well as wringing top-tier performances from actors who have too often been typecast or unjustly ignored. It’s just that in Migration, it’s ducks instead of wealthy families, and Kumail Nanjiani (voicing the nervous patriarch of a mallard clan) instead of Jennifer Coolidge.
Bullet Train (Netflix)
For those who were disappointed with last weekend’s big summer-movie kickoff contender The Fall Guy – and judging by the film’s poor box-office showing, the lack of enthusiasm seems to be contagious – perhaps now is a good time to revisit director David Leitch’s last effort to revive the big-screen action comedy, Bullet Train, which was on most accounts more successful in balancing high-octane visual style with quick-heavy screenplay savvy. There are an awful lot of weapons stashed onboard Bullet Train: guns, grenades, knives, bombs, samurai swords, even soda-pop bottles. But the film’s biggest weapon, of the secretly funny variety, rests in the chiselled form of star Brad Pitt, who once again proves that he is as charming a buff-and-tough movie god as he is a wry, self-deprecating comedy star.
Barry Hertz