Fiddling (with the Remote) While Rome Burns

I know America is falling down around our ears and the Mar-a-Lago Gaza will be opening any day now, but you’ve done all you can do for one week, including calling your representatives and subscribing to Wired, The Handbasket, whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com and other outposts of independent journalism currently covering the events in D.C., and  you’ve also let your MAGA-curious aunt on Facebook know what Elon and his literal Minions are doing with her and her friends’ social security numbers as we speak. Right? Right? Good, here are twelve movies to potentially divert yourself for a couple of hours. Self-care, people.

I've chosen seven sleepers below the paywall, but let's start with five excellent recent releases have found their way to streaming platforms, some at premium-rental prices and others at a bargain rate. They include:

“All We Imagine as Light” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, for $5.99 rental on Amazon and Apple TV) – From my TIFF review: “A poetic, almost novelistic drama, slow but sure, about two Mumbai nurses, roommates in the city’s crushing bustle, who clash and then deepen their bond during a visit to the countryside. One (Kani Kusruti) is cautious and pragmatic, the other (Divya Prabha) young and impetuous, with a Muslim boyfriend (Hridhu Haroon) no one can know about. Writer-director Payal Kapadia, making her first feature, keeps the pace almost daringly slow, attuned to the women’s inner lives while capturing the sounds and colors of the outer world with ecstatic wonder. It’s a movie alive with birdsong and a feminine luminescence Virginia Woolf might recognize.”

“Nosferatu” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, for premium $19.99 rental on Amazon, Apple TV and Microsoft) – Robert Eggers’s film may not be the greatest version of the oft-filmed Dracula story, but it’s unquestionably the most Eggers-y — eldritch and erotic and doom-laden, visually ravishing, narratively dreamlike, hermetically sealed. How much you like it may depend on where your fault line lies in separating the profound from the silly. One either emerges from “Nosferatu” as if from a trance, checking one’s pallor in the nearest mirror, or unbitten and unmoved. Gorgeous to look at, though, with a solid Lily-Rose Depp and a crepuscular Bill Sarsgård as the Prince of Dental Darkness.

“A Real Pain” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐, for $5.99 rental on Amazon, Apple TV and Microsoft) – One of my very favorite movies of 2024, and Kieran Culkin richly deserves his supporting actor Oscar nomination as that one family member who “lights up every room he comes into – and then takes a shit in it.” Director/co-star Jesse Eisenberg’s original screenplay is also up for an Academy Award, which it also probably won’t win, and it effortlessly juggles human comedy, historical tragedy and the sadness of that childhood friend of yours who never quite made it to the shores of adulthood.

“September 5” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, for premium $19.99 rental on Amazon, Apple TV and Microsoft and elsewhere) – A thinking person’s thriller that’s not so much about the 1972 massacre of Jewish athletes at the Munich Olympics as the ethical choices the ABC Sports crew needed to make as they reported the story to the world on the fly. Ace performances from Peter Sarsgaard (as Roone Arledge), Ben Chaplin, John Magaro and Leonie Benesch (“The Teacher’s Lounge”), fine-tuned direction from Germany’s Tim Fehlbaum, and lots for journalism students and regular folks to chew on. I just wish the questions posed by “September 5” had more relevance to an industry currently in free fall.

“Sing Sing” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, for premium $19.99 rental on Amazon, Apple TV and Microsoft) – A deep-hearted, dramatically lumpy tale, based in truth, about a prison theater program and the ways art can serve as a man’s way out of the cage inside him, if not the cage into which he’s been put. Colman Domingo (Oscar-nominated for best actor) is his usual fine self as a jailhouse playwright whose innate kindness is balanced by a stiff ego, but Clarence Maclin (shoulda been nominated for best supporting actor), playing a man whose aggressive self-defense system is slowly worn down by the Bard, gives a performance that stings with the truth of the former prisoner and graduate of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program that he is.

There have been a slew of back-catalogue titles recently added to Netflix, Amazon and other platforms, so, for paying subscribers, here are seven rarities and under-seen gems worth your time and attention. (And, yes, I have been increasing the amount of posts for paid subs lately, under the theory that they should be getting something for their money and under the related theory that a man's gotta eat.)

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