New Movies to Watch This Week: ‘Father Soldier Son’ on Netflix, ‘Dirt Music’ on Demand
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July 17 is the weekend that Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” was supposed to open, but in the face of the coronavirus outbreak, the world has folded back on itself like a scene from one of the director’s mind-benders. As infection rates hit new highs in the U.S., theaters postpone or reverse their plans to reopen, and movies that planned to follow “Tenet” scramble to later spots on the calendar.
That leaves streaming platforms and on-demand services to once again pick up the slack, offering a genre-spanning selection of new offerings. There are showbiz documentaries — including one spotlighting Broadway legend Kaye Ballard, and another about animation mavens Spike and Mike — as well as Sundance-blessed indie offerings such as “Dirt Music” (with Garrett Hedlund) and “The Sunlit Night” (starring Jenny Slate).
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On Netflix, there’s “The Best Years of Our Lives” meets “Boyhood” in the decade-spanning, New York Times-produced documentary “Father Soldier Son,” which observes how a family is impacted by the dad’s service in Afghanistan, plus a handful of new movies that Variety wasn’t able to review.
Here’s a rundown of those films opening this week that Variety has covered, along with links to where you can watch them. Find more movies and TV shows to stream here.
New Releases on Demand in Select Theaters
Animation Outlaws (Kat Alioshin)
Distributor: Gravitas Ventures
Where to Find It: Available on Amazon and video-on-demand services
At a time when Disney was practically the only game in town … Spike and Mike delivered the counterprogramming, encouraging indie animators to develop their more subversive side, and rewarding them with national exposure. Alioshin’s doc has a “guess you had to be there” quality, as toon creators who got a boost from Spike & Mike’s Festival of Animation say things like “It was just wonderful” for the better part of 68 minutes, while clips of their most distinctive work flash by on greenscreens behind their heads. — Peter Debruge
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Dirt Music (Gregor Jordan)
Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films
Where to Find It: Available on iTunes and other video-on-demand services
Tim Winton’s 2001 novel “Dirt Music” told the story of two haunted loners drawn into a bizarre love triangle in a remote fishing village on the coast of Western Australia. But the novel’s setting was always its most vibrant character [and] Jordan’s adaptation is faithful to Winton’s novel to a fault, working hard to provide postcard-perfect views of Western Australia. Centered on characters who act without much in the way of logic, with much of its dialogue confined to clipped bursts of unsatisfying Hemingwayisms, “Dirt Music” is a fine-looking romance that never finds the right key. — Andrew Barker
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Ghosts of War (Eric Bress)
Distributor: Vertical Entertainment
Where to Find It: Available via Amazon and other video-on-demand services
Sadistic Nazis, PTSD-afflicted Allied soldiers, angry spirits and creepy dolls make for an already-formidable pile of scare factors in “Ghosts of War,” which then topples the stack by loading too many additional elements in the final stretch. This second feature from “The Butterfly Effect” co-director Bress likewise has a trickily structured take on reality. But in this case, it’s closer to the realm of “The Cabin in the Woods” in that the initial, fairly straightforward horror tale is eventually reframed as part of something larger. — Dennis Harvey
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Kaye Ballard: The Show Goes On! (Dan Wingate)
Distributor: Vertical Entertainment
Where to Find It: Select a virtual cinema to support
A treasure trove of primarily vintage-TV appearance footage makes this documentary a worthy tribute to the versatile comedienne whose career sprawled across eight decades. Though generally known as a reliable second banana, Ballard’s skillset was considerable, and the film provides an eye-opening glimpse at the range of her talents. We also get testimony from a starry selection of coworkers, as well as running commentary from the lady herself, who has something nice to say about just about everyone. — Dennis Harvey
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Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf (Susan Youssef)
Distributor: Marjoun LLC
Where to Find It: Virtual tickets available via Eventlive
Between institutional anti-Arab bias, the complacency of suburban America, the clash between traditional values and progressive ideals within the Muslim faith, the linguistic and cultural tensions between Marjoun’s Americanness and her Lebanese heritage, not to mention ongoing child abuse, there’s enough dramatic energy in Youssef’s thematically ambitious but dramatically uneven second feature to power a small village. Yet the stakes are hamstrung by the film’s peculiar stop-start pacing, and by a notable lack of mother-daughter chemistry. — Jessica Kiang
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The Painted Bird (Václav Marhoul)
Distributor: IFC Films
Where to Find It: Available via video-on-demand services and in select theaters
Only the third directorial effort in 17 years from Czech multi-hyphenate Marhoul, this stonily imposing adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński’s contentious 1965 novel is by some measure his most ambitious and accomplished: a 169-minute panorama of violent societal breakdown, following a nameless boy through a cruel obstacle course of survival and abuse in an unidentified Eastern European country at the frenzied close of the Second World War. The extreme lashings of suffering and sadism shown here are scarcely ameliorated by the exacting beauty of their presentation. — Guy Lodge
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The Sunlit Night (David Wnendt)
Distributor: Quiver Distribution
Where to Find It: Available on Amazon and other video-on-demand services
In “The Sunlit Night,” Rebecca Dinerstein shows that she can write funny breakups, awkward Jewish family gatherings, and sweet-and-sour wedding speeches. One doubts she had to go all the way to the Norwegian Arctic to develop that skill, but at least her pilgrimage paid off in the form of the kind of personal writing sample — a twee running-from-romance-only-to-find-it comedy set at that far Northern remove that might easily score her work on the staff of a sitcom. — Peter Debruge [Note: The film has been recut since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was reviewed.]
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Exclusive to Netflix
Father Soldier Son (Catrin Einhorn, Leslye Davis) CRITIC’S PICK
Where to Find It: Streaming on Netflix
Sometimes a journalist knows in her bones when she’s tapped the motherlode. On-camera subjects go from interviewees to characters, examples to protagonists. That’s how Einhorn must have felt as she spoke with Sgt. First Class Brian Eisch, and, even more, sons Isaac and Joey in 2010, whom she featured in a piece for an ambitious multimedia project for the paper. If the Times’ blockbuster package went for breadth, “Father Soldier Son” tightens the focus by visiting the Eisches over a 10-year period, through deployment and returns, devastating setbacks and modest yet touching triumphs. — Lisa Kennedy
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Fatal Affair(Peter Sullivan)
Where to Find It: Streaming on Netflix
MILF(Axelle Laffont)
Where to Find It: Streaming on Netflix
The Players (Gli Infedeli)(Stefano Mordini)
Where to Find It: Streaming on Netflix
We Are One (On est ensemble)(Stéphane de Freitas)
Where to Find It: Streaming on Netflix
Exclusive to HBO
Showbiz Kids (Alex Winter)
Where to Find It: Streaming on HBO
Child stardom, which used to be a bit of a freak phenomenon, has also become an unabashed mainstream goal. Winter lived the life himself, and knows that we’ve seen the scandals replayed once too often. Instead, he focuses on a group of gifted former child stars, not to revel in tales of addiction and breakdown but to capture the perils of the life even for those who adapt to it with a degree of functionality. Don’t worry, there’s still lots of drama. That’s because the upshot of the movie is: The life of a child star is a little insane even when the star in question remains sane. — Owen Gleiberman
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