Here are just a few of the year’s finest indies, documentaries and international selections, available to stream at this very minute.
In what has become an annual tradition, this month’s guide to the under-the-radar titles of your subscription services spotlights films from this calendar year — movies that may turn up on the year-end lists of your favorite critics, or as nominations and winners during awards season. Here are just a few of the year’s finest indies, documentaries and international selections, available to stream at this very minute:
‘Janet Planet’ (2024)
The playwright-turned-filmmaker Annie Baker makes an astonishing feature filmmaking debut with this evocative memory piece, set in the hyper-specific milieu of early-’90s New England, but easily transportable to the time and place of your choice. The focus is on 11-year-old Lacy (a delightfully ordinary Zoe Ziegler) and her acupuncturist mother, Janet (a spot-on Julianne Nicholson); other people drift in and out of focus, mostly Janet’s romantic partners, all of whom are clearly ill-advised for one reason or another. It’s less a plot-driven narrative than a collection of moments, accumulating into a languid yet pivotal summer, captured in up-close, and sometimes off-kilter, compositions.
‘Didi’ (2024)
Like “Janet Planet,” Sean Wang’s coming-of-age movie dodges many of the traps and tropes of the form — primarily by spotlighting an imperfect protagonist, the soon-to-be-middle schooler Chris Wang (Izaac Wang), who can be quite the little jerk when he wants to be. Wang sets Chris’s story in the summer of 2008, and is uncommonly perceptive in replicating the details of being a kid online during that time: communication via AOL Instant Messenger, self-expression via YouTube, and social media via Myspace, where a punting from the “top friends” list was the most emotionally devastating act imaginable. The director is similarly adroit at capturing the nervousness of first crushes and the sound and fury of teen sibling arguments, but the most tender scenes involve Chris’s difficult relationship with his mother, played with depth and melancholy by the wonderful Joan Chen.
‘The Taste of Things’ (2024)
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