Best Films to Stream This Week in the UK
With the country still in lockdown, we highlight the best new streaming releases, from belated sequels to moving docs
With the UK still in lockdown, we’ll have to wait a while longer for the proper big screen experience. Fear not: we’ve rounded up the best of the latest streaming releases to keep you entertained until the capital’s dream palaces return. Whatever you’re in the mood for, from bold dramas to enlightening documentaries, WeLoveCinema has you well and truly covered…
[New Releases]
Raya and the Last Dragon
Where to watch it: Disney+
The latest offering from Walt Disney Studios offers a timely reinvention of their classic “Princess” formula, a magical adventure set in a fictionalised version of south-east Asia, about a young woman – voiced by Star Wars‘ Kelly Marie Tran – who must track down the last dragon in order to stop an evil force from consuming the world (read our full review).
Coming 2 America
Where to watch it: Prime Video
A whopping 33 years after the release of the original, the great Eddie Murphy returns with a belated sequel to his classic comedy of culture shock, Coming to America. This time, the Zamundan prince, Akeem, must return to New York to track down a long lost son from a one night stand, in a follow-up that walks a fine line between sequel and outright remake.
Justine
Where to watch it: Curzon Home Cinema
This intimate and warmly drawn queer romance, starring Tallulah Haddon, tells the story of a young woman – the titular Justine – as she navigates addiction and love against a backdrop of wintery Brighton. A warts and all portrait of a relationship, it’s a film defined by the chemistry between Haddon and co-star Sophie Reid.
Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
Where to watch it: Curzon Home Cinema
The daughter of cult punk icon Poly Styrene looks back on the life and legacy of her mother, who fronted the ’80s band X-Ray Spex, using a previously unseen artistic archive left behind after her death. What begins as a retrospective of a singular and influential figure soon gives way to a melancholy portrait of a mother and daughter’s fractured relationship.
Notturno
Where to watch it: MUBI
Gianfranco Rosi, director of the acclaimed, Oscar-winning documentary Fire at Sea, helms this near wordless, episodic portrait of ordinary lives scattered throughout the world’s most turbulent war zones. Shot over the course of three years in Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, and Lebanon, Notturno paints a moving, devastating picture of a broken world – though one defined by the human capacity to start anew.
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[Still Streaming…]
Ayouni
Where to watch: True Story
This documentary from Palestinian-Syrian filmmaker Yasmin Fedda is a powerful and perhaps even essential testament to those who have gone missing under the Assad regime. More than 150,000 people have vanished in the last 10 years alone; Fedda’s film is a grappling with such insanities through the stories of two missing individuals and the toll it’s taken on their families and friends (read our full review).
Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry
Where to watch it: AppleTV+
Pop phenomenon Billie Eilish is the latest musical superstar to get her own “all access” documentary – this time on AppleTV+. Doubling as a deep dive into the making of her hugely successful 2019 album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and a meditation on modern fame and all its trappings, it’s an essential work for Eilish fans, but enlightening enough to make converts, too.
I Care a Lot
Where to watch it: Prime Video
Rosamund Pike gives a career-best performance as a heartless scam artist in this wildly entertaining thriller from filmmaker J Blakeson – one that brings new meaning to the term “American psychos.” As a timely satire on the growing industry of “elder abuse,” I Care a Lot manages to be massively gripping and hugely enlightening in equal measure, a socially-minded yarn that shines a light on America’s inept approach to care work (read our full review).
The Twentieth Century
Where to watch it: MUBI
The strange life of Canada’s tenth Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, is given an even stranger biopic in this surreal and playful film from Matthew Rankin. Filmed on 16mm and Super 8, it’s a singularly absurd rewriting of history that’s as much about the act of experimental filmmaking as it is its subject (read our full review).
The Kiosk
Where to watch it: True Story
The last days of a Parisian newsstand are captured in this charming documentary, shot with a headcam by the artist and filmmaker Alexandra Pianelli, whose mother owns the titular kiosk. As both a joyful look into the day to day business that goes into running a newsstand, it also doubles as a fondly melancholic portrait of the dying world of print media (read our full review).
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