New to Streaming: Eephus, Grand Tour, The Woman in the Yard, Youth Trilogy & More

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Benediction (Terence Davies)

Time is everything in a Terence Davies film. In Benediction, his biopic about English poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden), he eventually covers his subject’s marriage to Hester Gatty (Kate Phillips). There’s a shot of the couple standing still, facing the camera as they pose for a wedding photo (a shot that tends to pop up throughout the director’s filmography). The camera flashes, we see the black-and-white photo, and then a fade transitions us to the future, where it rests on their bedside while Hester looks at their newborn child. The sequence is an encapsulation of what Davies does best: observing life with one’s head facing backwards, the cumulative weight of the past bearing down on every moment of the present. – C.J. P. (full review)

Where to Stream: Hulu

Companion (Drew Hancock)

Competently aping David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh’s cold, formally precise styles, director Drew Hancock’s mise-en-scène successfully conveys the antiseptic near-future we’re probably already living in, but can’t seem to work around the stakes and thrills being relatively low. To be more specific about the tension of Companion: it isn’t stupid, dull, or badly made per se, but it’s unlikeable, and awfully smug for something not that high on insight or genuine surprise. The multiple instances of Josh spelling out his modern male psychology of entitlement and abandonment issues point to the fact that basically no January New Line Cinema genre movie can just be termite art anymore. – Ethan V. (full review)

Where to Stream: Max

Dead Mail (Kyle McConaghy and Joe DeBoer)

Blending found footage and what appears to be grainy 16mm (they shot the film on an early DV as a matter of fact), Kyle McConaghy and Joe DeBoer’s Dead Mail embraces the creepiness of its concept. Like Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow or Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, this is the stuff of subconscious nightmares, though Dead Mail falls slightly more into the slasher camp. The film is effectively creepy from the feeling that––à la Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers––it’s a relic of the past. Also, like Schoenbrun’s film, it suggests a story that could have been imagined from a 20/20 segment or a late-night documentary that a child should not have watched after their bedtime but nevertheless did. – John F. (full review)

Where to Stream: Shudder

Eephus (Carson Lund)

If the perfect sports movie illuminates the fundamentals that make one fall in love with the game, there may be no better movie about baseball than Carson Lund’s Eephus. Structured solely around a single round of America’s national pastime, Lund’s debut feature beautifully, humorously articulates the particular nuances, rhythms, and details of an amateur men’s league game. By subverting tropes of the standard sports movie––which often captures peak physical performance in front of legions of adoring fans––Lund has crafted something far more singularly compelling. Rather than grand slams and no-hitters, there are errors aplenty and no shortage of beer guts and weathered muscles amongst the motley crew. Lund is more interested in examining the peculiar set of social codes that only apply when one is on the field, unimpeded by life’s responsibilities and entirely focused on the rules of the game. – Jordan R. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes)

Miguel Gomes, the Portuguese filmmaker behind The Tsugua Diaries, Arabian Nights, and Tabu, made his long-awaited return at last year’s Cannes with the mesmerizing odyssey Grand Tour. Rory O’Connor said in his Cannes review, “If Chris Marker and Preston Sturges ever made a film together, it might have looked something like Grand Tour, a sweeping tale that moves from Rangoon to Manila, via Bangkok, Saigon and Osaka, as it weaves the stories of two disparate lovers towards a fateful reunion. The stowaways could scarcely be more Sturgian: he the urbane man on the run, she the intrepid woman trying to track him down. Their scenes are set in 1917 and shot in a classical studio style, yet they’re delivered within a contemporary travelogue––as if we are not only following their epic romance but a director’s own wanderings.”

Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie (Peter Browngardt)

Directed by Peter Browngardt, this is a charming affair. Modeled after sci-fi B-movies of the 1950s and starring Looney Tunes legends Porky Pig and Daffy Duck (both voiced by Eric Bauza), The Day the Earth Blew Up starts with a UFO landing. The spacecraft takes off on the roof of Porky and Daffy’s broken-down house (bequeathed to them by surrogate father Farmer Jim) just before crashing. It goes on to infect a local scientist (Fred Tatasciore) with a zombifying goo not long after. Soon enough, the goo is in the mix at the gum factory, where Porky and Daffy have taken jobs in a last-ditch effort to save their beloved home from being demolished. – Dan M. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

The Order (Justin Kurzel)

At quite a steady clip, Justin Kurzel followed True History of the Kelly Gang and Nitram with The Order, a gritty crime drama that’s certainly his best film since the debut Snowtown. Starring Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jurnee Smollett, Alison Oliver, and Marc Maron, the film tells the true story of FBI agents tracking down robberies carried out by white supremacists. Luke Hicks said in his review, “Australian native Kurzel has finally––as was inevitable at his climbing rate––begun telling stories stateside, but the move to the American West simply amounts to a setting shift. The film doesn’t feel foreign to his other work––a compliment or a dig, depending on how you read it. For one, The Order bears its fair share of clichés. You can guess how it’ll end. The boilerplate crime-thriller framework follows that of his past films, which don’t stray from the formula either.”

Where to Stream: Hulu

Small Things Like These (Tim Mielants)

Anyone looking to debate the limits of progress should cast an eye on 1980s Ireland. As a generation born in revolution and civil war moved from farms to towns, a middle class emerged. Some people had televisions; if they were good, some of their kids had Levi’s jeans. As certain things loosened, the Catholic church’s grip on most aspects of Irish life seemed to only grow tighter. Between 1922 and 1996, and aided by a callow state, the church was responsible for imprisoning tens of thousands of women (mostly young single mothers who couldn’t afford the child) into what was essentially indentured servitude. In these “laundries,” women worked seven days a week and weren’t allowed to leave. Their babies were taken from them and sold for adoption, or worse. Around 1,600 women died. The number of babies is estimated to be in the thousands. – Rory O. (full review)

Where to Stream: Hulu

The Woman in the Yard (Jaume Collet-Serra)

While horror films function as an important part of this writer’s interest in cinema, it’s been hard not to feel some growing personal contempt for the genre. The reason being not just the high/low budget demands of the market over-saturating us, but the punishing self-awareness of Gen X and Millennial genre nerds now making them and the post-Get Out flop sweat over needing “metaphor.” So when a new horror film is not just kind of good, but also genuinely scary and tense, it’s cause for celebration. Such is the case with the modest proposal that is The Woman in the Yard. – Ethan V. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Youth (Hard Times) and Youth (Homecoming) (Wang Bing)

Completing one of the monumental projects of this decade thus far, Wang Bing premiered his final two installments of his 10-hour Youth, capturing the labor and less-than-ideal living conditions of textile workers in China, on the festival circuit this past fall, followed by a U.S. theatrical release and now streaming release. Rory O’Connor said of his second entry, “With all that, Youth (Hard Times) leaves you with the feeling of something monumental: a granular view of the frayed hems of late capitalism that still has 152 minutes to go and, if reports are to be believed, a couple of weddings to get through.”

Where to Stream: OVID.tv

Also New to Streaming

Kino Film Collection

Blues Under the Skin
Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

Peacock

Wolf Man

VOD

A Working Man

The post New to Streaming: Eephus, Grand Tour, The Woman in the Yard, Youth Trilogy & More first appeared on The Film Stage.