‘Pig’, ‘Val’, ‘Adrienne’ and Other 2021 Flowing Stones


For those who aren’t in New York and LA, year-end movie catching is always frustrating—and it’s especially tricky this year when even those in big cities aren’t ready to hit the movies. Fortunately, there are many great 2021 games available on subscription streaming services right now; you just have to know where to look.

Stream on Hulu.

Nicolas Cage is gorgeous in this humble drama from first feature director Michael Sarnoski. A venerable Pacific Northwest chief who has been out of business for 15 years, Cage plays most of his scenes silently, barely raising his voice when he decides to speak; He turns his character into an enigma, leaving the viewer to wonder if he’s come out of his comfortable life or if someone (or something) has offended him. The truffle pig—and its only friend—returns to civilization when it’s kidnapped, but “Pig” isn’t the “John Wick” riff their ads were promising. It’s a rich, textured character study that features some of the best work of Cage’s notable career.

Indian director Chaitanya Tamhane tells an emotional, complex tale of uncompromising artists and the mythology they create as a Hindustani classical singer (Aditya Modak) tries to make herself an actress worthy of her mentors and influences. The classical musician’s path is a solitary path that avoids the easy money and success of love songs, soundtracks or devotional music, and Tamhane’s perceptive script beautifully complicates a simple matter of sales. Music and filmmaking are in perfect harmony, slow and often trance-like, and Modak is a real find.

Stream on HBO Max.

Frankie Faison, the wonderful and resilient character actor familiar from “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Do the Right Thing,” won a Gotham Award for her heartbreaking performance in this heartbreaking drama from writer and director David. Midell. dramatizes 2011 murder It’s about Kenneth Chamberlain (Faison), a 68-year-old Black man with bipolar disorder who is killed at his home by White Plains police officers after accidentally triggering his medical alert badge. His apathy with mutable officers is built on fear and inevitability—after all, it’s right in the title—because negotiation and understanding quickly lead to cowboy tactics and inappropriate pride. And the longer it goes on, the more heartbreaking Faison’s performance becomes as the master actor poignantly reveals the fear he felt as the walls were closing.

Stream on Hulu.

The title of writer-director Robert Machoian’s small-town drama is more like a threat than a promise, as husband and father David (Clayne Crawford) discover that his wife, Niki (Sepideh Moafi), has started an affair during a marital breakup. . Machoian’s sparse script captures the quiet desperation of such an era, the uncertainty of an end but still ongoing relationship, and how the logistics of issues like joint child custody become a high-risk, life-or-death issue. The claustrophobic framing and frustrating sound design present David as a ticking bomb, with glitches and micro-attacks playing out in long, brutally continuous shots, offering neither the characters nor the audience an escape route.

Publish on Amazon.

Val Kilmer is credited as one of the producers of this bio-documentary, so it’s not hard to brand the results as a self-mythology exercise. (Directors are Ting Poo and Leo Scott.) But in this case, self-mythology is instructive; The story the divisive actor chooses to tell tells us more about who he is. “I lived a life of magic and captured a lot of it,” explains Kilmer – and indeed he has recorded most of his career with his ubiquitous video camera. These captivating images (shot behind the scenes of movies like Top Gun and Tombstone) are skillfully mixed with home movies, rehearsals, audition tapes and contemporary footage to create an album of memories, reflections and meditations rather than a traditional documentary. .

Stream on Netflix.

Rita Moreno is currently receiving rave reviews for her performance in “West Side Story,” the remake of the film that won her an Oscar for a different role, so it’s time to enjoy this celebration of her long, versatile career. Mariem Pérez Riera’s documentary is a biography, a Valentine’s Day and a cooking session (Moreno says nothing about the colorful figures of her past), and while she did not break any ground in filmmaking, it’s just the joy of hanging out with the EGOT icon for 90 years. It is impossible to resist the minutes.

Stream on HBO Max.

shocking 2006 murder Acting-turned-filmmaker Adrienne Shelly left with the sad feeling that her career was ending just as it had begun. (Her directorial work “The Waitress” would take Sundance by storm two months later.) This biographical portrait details Shelly’s tragic death and its emotional ramifications from the perspective of someone who knows: the director and narrator is her widow, Andy Ostroy. Understandably, it’s a very personal film (sometimes disturbingly) as Ostroy and their daughter Sophie continue to grapple with their grief and loss. But it’s also a tribute to the dynamic actress and her fascinating career, which circulated in the ’90s as an independent It girl on a constant quest to find herself as an artist and person.

Stream on Hulu.

Theo Anthony makes slick, nonfiction documentaries that tackle huge topics from unexpected entry points. The ostensible theme of the latest is body cameras and the unfortunate fashion available as a one-size-fits-all solution to policing problems. But Anthony broadens his canvas considerably, taking up the very act of seeing himself as his subject—in person, in the media, in our collective imagination—and finds a thoughtful mediation on contemporary culture.



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