With the country still in lockdown, we highlight the best new streaming releases, from bold biopics 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
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).
Still Streaming…
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).
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.
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.
