Best Films to Stream This Week in the UK
With the country still in lockdown, we highlight the best new streaming releases, from director's cuts to enlightening 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]
A Colony
Where to watch it: MUBI
A teenage girl from Quebec grapples with the anxieties of adolescence in this gently blazing drama from filmmaker Geneviève Dulude-De Celles, perhaps best described as Canada’s answer to Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade. Featuring an inspired lead performance from young actor Émilie Bierre, A Colony is as tender as it is truthful, a heartfelt ode to growing up that also happens to be one of the best coming-of-agers in years (read our full review).
Zack Snyder’s Justice League
Where to watch it: Now TV
The much-maligned 2017 blockbuster, recut and reshot by Joss Whedon after Zack Snyder left the project for personal releases, returns in what its original director now claims as his definitive vision: a four-hour-long (!) superhero redux that’s as inspired as it is insane. Adding a whopping two hours to the runtime, this is essentially a brand new film – and one that’s destined to divide opinion. What can we say for sure? It’s miles better than the 2017 version (read our full review).
An Impossible Project
Where to watch: Various streaming services
Austria’s answer to Steve Jobs, scientist Dr. Florian Kaps, ponders our relationship with everything analog in this quirky and thought-provoking documentary. Kaps, a keen enthusiast of retro technology, sets out to explore the future of physical media in an increasingly digital world. Whether his exploits add up to much will depend on the viewer, but – at the very least – he makes for mighty fine company (read our full review).
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[Still Streaming…]
Judas and the Black Messiah
Where to watch it: Various streaming services
Daniel Kaluuya gives an electrifying central performance in this subversive, unpredictable biopic about the life and times of American activist Fred Hampton, a film juggling multiple tones and genres to extraordinary effect. Refusing to play by the usual conventions, it’s part crime-thriller, part sincere portrait, and part action movie, co-starring a dazzling cast of actors at the top of their game, including LaKeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, and Martin Sheen (read our full review).
Cherry
Where to watch it: AppleTV+
Spider-Man actor Tom Holland gives one of his best performances yet as a former US soldier caught up in a destructive spiral of drug addiction, bank robberies, and bad romances, based on the novel of the same name. Directed by the Russo brothers, best known as the filmmaking duo behind Avengers: Endgame, Cherry marks a complete change of direction – a deeply strange film that’s both joyfully manic and utterly unique (read our full review).
Martyr
Where to watch it: Curzon Home Cinema
An unexpected harrowing incident shakes the lives of a Lebanese community in writer-director Mazen Khaled’s strange and mediative study of grief, partly set against a backdrop of beautiful azure waters. Hamza Mekdad stars as a young man whose life seems to be going nowhere, and whose spontaneously bold gesture toward freedom results in a tragedy. Moving and experimental in equal measure.
Verdict
Where to watch it: Various streaming services
Raymund Ribay Gutierrez’s powerful debut feature – weaving an urgent tale of domestic abuse with a sharp critique of the Filipino legal process – tells the story of Joy (Max Eigenmann), a young mother from Manila who is one night violently attack by her husband. To gain justice, she must contend with the country’s largely inefficient and maze-like bureaucratic systems, which seem less concerned with truth than getting the case over and done with (read our full review).
My English Cousin
Where to watch it: True Story
Documentarian Karim Sayad profiles his own cousin, Fahed, an Algerian-born man living in Grimsby who finds himself caught between two worlds – should he remain where he has lived for twenty years, or return home to be closer to his mother? An enlightening film of cultural displacement and lost ambition, it wonders how where we choose to live comes to define who we are (read our full review).
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).
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