Bagdad Theater in Portland, Oregon
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, studios have had to change the way they release new films. With theaters closed and everyone stuck at home, films slated for big screen release are now hitting streaming services without theatrical windows.
It's unlikely this will remain a trend once multiplexes reopen—who doesn't prefer their cinema with a crowd of giddy onlookers in widescreen form? But, in the meantime, we figured reviews of straight-to-streaming films will help you navigate what’s worth watching while in lockdown.
Abe — Netflix
The message of this coming-of-age drama—that food can bring people together—is valuable at any time, but it’s especially helpful now. Abe graciously explores how a chef's cuisine can unite his half-Israeli, half-Palestinian family, and its charm is as accessible as a fish taco, as rich as Wagyu, and a lot more tasteful than these silly comparisons.
A more tasteful analogy would be to compare writer-director Fernando Grostein Andrade’s debut feature to a mix between Chef and The 400 Blows, with an indie twist. The narrative follows twelve-year-old Abe (Noah Schnapp), a Brooklyn middle schooler who is obsessed with food, as he brings peace to his family. It’s not an original premise—trying to save parents from divorce is a common coming-of-age trope. But there’s a benevolence to Abe, an effortless likability, that keeps us engaged even when the plot ventures into familiar territory.
Thanks to Schnapp, who continues to out-act his Stranger Things co-stars, you may also forgive some of the didactic political talking points, usually heard in shouting matches between mom's (Dagmara Dominc) Israeli side of the family and dad’s (Arian Moayed) Palestinian side. Abe tries to please both with little luck. He tries fasting, which pisses off mom; he tries a bar-mitzvah, which infuriates dad. Perhaps a family dinner will spark an appetite for unity?
First things first, though. Abe needs to hone his craft, and the summer camp his parents sent him to isn’t going to cut it. Enter Chico (Seu Jorge), a seasoned street chef who takes Abe under his wing, teaching him the basics: how to chop, how to grow, and most importantly, how to make entrees appear delicious enough to make audiences hungry. Credit cinematographer Blasco Giurato's soft lighting for bringing these dishes to life. And credit Abe—the kid and the movie—for bringing families together in the name of food.
True History of the Kelly Gang — VOD
Australian director Justin Kurzel has an acute way of flipping history on its head (Macbeth). He perfects that quality in True History of Kelly Gang, a savage reconstruction of the Western genre where sheriffs are evil and barbarians are heroic.
Based on Australia’s nineteenth century outlaw, Ned Kelly, True History of the Kelly Gang dramatizes a well worn story through a punk rock lens. Kelly’s ragtag bunch of thieves wear dresses as they devour English authorities like lions after a week of fasting. (It’s an approach that will leave audiences divided—for a more relaxed adaptation check out Mick Jagger’s Ned Kelly.) But after a disturbing setup leaves Kelly’s father maimed, the film positions its violence as a commentary on police and government corruption. Don’t worry, these baddies deserve what’s coming.
None more so than a couple of sheriffs. The first is played by Charlie Hunnam, whose rugged good looks hardly mask his sadistic behaviors; later, it’s Nicolas Hoult, a constable who runs a brothel. Both are as foreboding as the landscapes they inhabit, ravaging a desert of leafless trees and ramshackled homes without resistance. That is, until Russell Crowe’s highwayman comes along to teach ten-year-old Kelly valuable life lessons (how to curse, how to use a gun, et cetera.), training the youngster for his Robin Hood-like future. In the second act, he becomes the sum of life’s tortured events, banding a group of oppressed villagers together to commit ruthless acts of revenge as Marlon Williams’s score rattles our home speakers.
Bathed in blood and pitched way over the top, all of this builds to a final shootout made to reinvent the story and the Western genre as a whole. It’s an impressive technical achievement that plays like a nightmare you can't forget, with George McKay’s Kelly going full madman, screaming aimlessly as he meets a firing squad head on. Spoiler alert: He doesn’t come out riding off into the sunset.
Bull — VOD
Smart, unflinching, and observant, Bull is a rare kind of feature debut, a film that shoots tough subject matter through a mature, sympathetic lens.
Writer-director Annie Silverstein is wise beyond her years, seen in the complicated relationship at Bull’s center. Kris (a terrific Amber Harvard) is a teenage delinquent living on the outskirts of Houston. Unsupervised by her chronically ill grandmother, she throws a party at her neighbor Abe’s (Rob Morgan) house, then wakes up to a scolding and the opportunity to skip jail by working as Abe’s assistant at rodeos. An unlikely bond forms.
Although unlikely friendships usually make for eye-rolling sentimentality (we’re looking at you, Green Book), Silverstein embraces realism over feel-good tropes. The mistakes her characters make give the film authenticity, as Kris and Abe bond over hardships while nursing each other’s wounds. Abe pops pills because his glory days at the rodeo are over. Kris sells pills because she needs money to support her little sister. Together, they steer things in the right direction.
In one of the best sequences, Kris rides a bull as Abe looks on with a smile that recalls that of a proud father. Fly-on-the-wall camerawork brings the moment to life, using shallow depth of field to hone in on Kris’s joyous expressions. But like the indie classics of Chloe Zhao (The Rider) and Debra Granik (Leave No Trace), Bull’s main focal point is marginalized America, using its characters and raw performances as a means to express Silverstein’s concern for small town poverty.
Still, if you can hang on through the bumpier portions, you will be rewarded with a devastatingly touching closing shot: a vision of lives sliced, smashed, and trampled, and willingness to get back on the saddle once more.
My Darling Vivian — Amazon Prime
Johnny Cash once said: “Sometimes I am two people. Johnny is the nice one. Cash causes all the trouble. They fight.”
Cash is talking about his divided personality, a pas de deux that made for soulful, introspective music and hell for both of his wives. The first of which, Vivian Liberto, gets a corrective counterpoint to the Cash and June Carter myth in Matt Riddlehoover's South by SouthWest documentary. Carter, of course, has been credited with saving Cash’s career and raising his four children, while Liberto has been sidelined, even ridiculed, by biopics and newspapers immortalizing the Cash and Carter power couple. My Darling Vivian aims to change that for good.
Walking the line between hagiography and breakup movie, Riddlehoover succeeds in the impossible task of making us turn on an American sweetheart. Interviews from Cash’s four daughters don’t sugar coat their father’s absence. They recall days when he would leave Liberto to care for them, plus all of the pets Cash would bring home from who knows where (monkeys apparently ran wild in their bedrooms). One year he even disappeared to hang out with Bob Dylan. But it is Liberto’s selflessness that makes her story worth telling, depressing as it may be. She never gave up on her family.
The film is most successful in the first and third acts when Cash and Liberto are madly in love, then simply mad. Watching archival footage of these two writing heartfelt letters serves well to dramatize a back portion about what could have been. It's here Liberto shines, her acts of kindness telling a different story than newspaper headlines.
“You give me cause for love I can’t hide/For you, I know I’d even try to turn the tide,” Cash sang to Liberto in those romantic years before stardom. If only the lyrics rang true.