Do you feel like you’re drowning … but you haven’t even left your couch? Welcome to the Great Content Overload Era. To help you navigate the choppy digital waves, here are The Globe’s best bets for weekend streaming.
What to watch in 2023: The best movies (so far)
Aftersun (Crave)
One of the more affecting feature-film debuts to come along in years, Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun follows the short, bittersweet summer vacation taken by 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) and her young single dad Calum (incoming superstar Paul Mescal, who earned an Oscar nomination for his turn here). As the pair hang out by the pool of their Turkish resort, Wells produces a carefully measured, lyrical portrait of a bond that is both natural and unconventional. It also features one of the more devastating final shots in recent memory, completely rewiring the Queen song Under Pressure in the process. Read review
Past Lives (on-demand, including Apple TV, Google Play, Cineplex Store)
One of the best films of the year is finally on-demand, after an unusually (by this era’s definition) long time spent in theatres-only. Loosely based on her own experiences, Korean-Canadian filmmaker Celine Song’s film begins in Seoul, where a 12-year-old girl named Nora (Seung Ah Moon) is preparing to move with her family to Canada. She is not only leaving her home but her best friend, Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim). Jumping decades, the film finds Nora struggling as a playwright in New York (and now played by Greta Lee). Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), meanwhile, is thinking of the one who got away. Thanks to the internet, they reconnect online. Except now, Nora is married. The quiet beauty of Song’s film is that she doesn’t pretend to have any answers to the messiness of life and love. Our paths are chaotic, and destiny is ultimately unknowable. Read review
Shiva Baby (Netflix)
Before heading to the theatre to catch Toronto filmmaker Emma Seligman’s delightfully unhinged new comedy Bottoms, seek out her microbudget debut, the 2020 indie hit Shiva Baby. An intentionally awkward exercise in extreme cringe comedy, Seligman’s film focuses on a young bisexual Jewish woman (Bottoms star Rachel Sennott) whose personal and familial worlds collide over the course of one long shiva for some poor forgotten relative. Filmed as if everyone involved was in a perpetual state of squirm, the film will make you feel uncomfortable in the best kind of way.
The Belko Experiment (Prime Video)
A lean, mean, bloody comedy of the darkest order, Greg McLean’s somewhat forgotten 2017 flick The Belko Experiment is pure genre fun. With a canny script from James Gunn (yes, the man behind the blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy franchise and now DC’s cinematic overseer) and tight direction from Wolf Creek’s McLean, the film looks at one especially brutal day in the life of the Belko Corporation, a vaguely defined outfit in Colombia rife with bored expat workers (including Gunn regulars Michael Rooker, Gregg Henry and brother Sean Gunn). When all hell breaks loose, the Belko employees are suddenly trapped in the worst kind of office politics (you know, the type in which you might end up dead). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll probably gag – and you’ll likely be all the better for it.
The Wolf of Wall Street (Paramount+)
A few weeks before Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio trace the ugly history of American exploitation with Killers of the Flower Moon, there’s no better time to revisit the pair’s other epic exploration of born-in-the-USA greed. Profoundly misunderstood upon its release, The Wolf of Wall Street is a furious excoriation of finance-bro decadence, with Scorsese using the language of cinematic excess to cut to the dark heart of contemporary commerce. DiCaprio has never been funnier, Margot Robbie arrives on screen like a force of nature, Jonah Hill finds layers to his disgusting sidekick and even bit players (Rob Reiner as DiCaprio’s furious father, Jon Bernthal as a gym rat day-trader, Kyle Chandler as a straight-arrow sad-sack) score.
Barry Hertz