New Movies to Watch This Week: ‘Let Him Go,’ ‘Kindred,’ ‘Proxima’

Peter Debruge
·8 min read

As if sensing that the election would provide enough nail-biting excitement to last Americans for days, distributors have largely backed off the first weekend in November.

Focus Features is releasing a solid Kevin Costner-Diane Lane thriller with serious Red State appeal in “Let Him Go,” for those with access to theaters, and there are a number of backlogged festival movies picking this weekend to open: the best of them is “Proxima,” featuring Eva Green as a French astronaut preparing to leave her son behind for her first trip to space, though Toronto 2019 premiere “Jungleland” and Sundance oddity “Koko-di Koko-da” are solid options as well.

Genre fans have a few options, ranging from “Triggered” (a “Battle Royale”-esque survival game in which old friends must kill one another to survive) to “The Informer,” a movie that opened in theaters abroad way back in 2019, but brings some excitement to a tame frame. The standout of this summer’s Fantasia Film Festival, “The Dark and the Wicked” turns the director’s family farmhouse into an unnerving backdrop for horror-movie hijinks.

Netflix has traded low-grade Halloween movies for holiday-season filler (although technically, that began with last week’s “Holidate”), and they have plenty more lined up for the weeks ahead, including sequels to “The Princess Switch” and “The Christmas Chronicles.” For non-subscribers, Jeremy Piven stars in VOD-available “My Dad’s Christmas Date,” and teens may find distraction in “Middleton Christmas,” about a small-town holiday concert.

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 in Theaters

Jungleland (Max Winkler)
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Where to Find It: In theaters Nov. 6, followed by digital and VOD release Nov. 10
In “Jungleland,” Jack O’Connell and Charlie Hunnam have a very familiar movie-sibling dynamic, playing brothers respectively “good” and ne’er-do-well, tough guys in the brutal business of boxing who’ve been knocked around a bit too much by life in general. This may inevitably recall the fairly recent likes of “The Fighter” and “Warrior.” “Jungleland” isn’t as good as those films, but it’s good enough to make you wish it weren’t just so incredibly redolent of them. It’s the kind of enterprise that has everything but a single fresh idea, or even moment. — Dennis Harvey
Read the full review

Let Him Go (Thomas Bezucha)
Distributor: Focus Features
Where to Find It: In theaters now
“Let Him Go,” starring Diane Lane and Kevin Costner as an aging rancher couple out to rescue their grandson from a clan of varmint in-laws, is set in Big Sky Country about 50 years ago, and it’s like a family-values, homespun-nostalgia version of “The Searchers” crossed with “Midsommar” on the range. “Let Him Go” isn’t subtle, but as a genre film it’s original and shrewdly made, and Lane and Costner give it their all in a casual way that only pros this seasoned and gifted can. They turn the movie into an unlikely thing: a touchingly bone-weary romance steeped in vengeance. — Owen Gleiberman
Read the full review

New Releases on Demand and in Select Theaters

Acute Misfortune (Thomas M. Wright) CRITIC’S PICK
Distributor: Dark Star Pictures
Where to Find It: Available via Prime Video and other digital providers
An engrossing house-of-mirrors study of controversial Australian grunge artist Adam Cullen and the journalist tasked with profiling him, “Acute Misfortune” adds up to a haunting, format-flouting portrait-within-a-portrait of the art-world enfant terrible, as seen through the eyes of writer Erik Jensen. Like a less meta, Down Under “Adaptation,” the movie follows along as Cullen sinks his claws into his biographer the way the jovial serial killer did his hapless film crew in Belgian mock doc “Man Bites Dog.” — Peter Debruge
Read the full review

The Dark and the Wicked (Bryan Bertino)
Distributor: RLJE Films
Where to Find It: In theaters, digital platforms and on demand
The devil is in the details in “The Dark and the Wicked,” a horror film that teases out the evil presence descending on a grieving family on a Texas farm, with the same ambiguous, psychological heft of Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw.” Bertino’s slender script translates into a low-humming, allusvie narrative (punctuated with occasional gore) of tingling terror. His evocation of a familiar, domestic world mysteriously sliding into chaos feels all the more blood-curdling because the protagonists’ distress and helplessness are emotionally relatable. — Maggie Lee
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The Informer (Andrea Di Stefano)
Distributor: Vertical Entertainment
Where to Find It: Available on PVOD
The mere opening salvo of “The Informer” contains nearly enough plot to keep many a lesser shoot-’em-up exercise occupied for an hour or two: Just 10 minutes into this undercover-mission-turned-prison-break-thriller, a family has been set on the run, an FBI bust on a Polish drug cartel has gone tensely awry, a character’s identity has been neatly pulled out from under us, and a cop has been shot dead. Somehow, this impersonal but tightly wound Americanization of a Scandi-crime potboiler then continues escalating its short-of-breath narrative for almost two hours. — Guy Lodge
Read the full review

Kindred (Joe Marcantonio)
Distributor: IFC Films
Where to Find It: In theaters, digital platforms and on demand
In his first feature, Marcantonio has laced together “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Get Out,” and he’s done it so obviously that you keep ticking off the moments and concepts the film reminds you of. “Kindred” is an infinitely lesser movie than “Rosemary’s Baby” or “Get Out,” yet on a minimalist indie level that’s more about pressure-cooker suspense than mystery, it jolts you along. Marcantonio, who co-wrote the script, knows how to raise your pulse without tricks, and how to create atmosphere out of the barest of bones. — Owen Gleiberman
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Koko-Di Koko-Da (Johannes Nyholm)
Distributor: Dark Star Pictures
Where to Find It: Choose a virtual cinema to support
When “Koko-di Koko-da” characters Elin (Ylva Gallon) and Tobias (Leif Edlund) discover their daughter Maja dead on her eighth birthday, they think life couldn’t get worse. Shockingly, it can. The film jumps ahead three years to the couple’s miserable camping holiday, which gets interrupted by three psychopaths who kill them, over and over again, with guns, knives, fists and a very hungry dog. The wicked murderers have no motive. They’re just inevitable death — as is all death — no matter how hard people like Elin and Tobias and, well, all of us try to escape. — Amy Nicholson
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Mortal (André Øvredal)
Distributor: Saban Films
Where to Find It: In theaters, digital platforms and on demand
In “Mortal,” a film plagued by assorted crises and confusions of identity, one stands out at the very beginning: It’s an R-rated superhero movie that assumes its audience doesn’t know the meaning of its title. An introductory chyron helpfully offers the single dictionary definition “a human being,” without going into any of the others. That doesn’t bode well for a wealth of words or ideas in Norwegian director André Øvredal’s allegedly original adventure, which starts on a chilly, mildly intriguing note before sinking into its own puddle of very, very familiar reference points. — Guy Lodge
Read the full review

Proxima (Alice Winocour)
Distributor: Vertical Entertainment
Where to Find It: Available via VOD and digital
An unostentatious but quietly dazzling meditation on womanhood in the largely patriarchal space race, Alice Winocour’s highly satisfying third feature outdoes many more lavish Hollywood efforts in evoking the otherworldly emotional disconnect that comes with space travel, all without leaving terra firma for the vast bulk of its running time. For Winocour, doubling down on 2015’s slinky, neon-flecked suspenser “Disorder,” it confirms that she has the sensuous imagination and efficiency for any genre project, of any scale, that will have her. — Guy Lodge
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Triggered (Alastair Orr)
Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films
Where to Find It: Available via VOD and digital
Bombastic is indeed the word for “Triggered,” a strident thriller in which youthful campers with shared guilty baggage find themselves each strapped to a timed detonating device. Not exactly horror, but with a slasher-style gory process-of-elimination gist, this is one of those films in which one can hardly wait for the character roster to shrink, if only so these irksome people stop yelling at each other. Director Alastair Orr’s South African production is slick but more effortful than exciting, with some howlers in the way of tin-eared dialogue and unlikely plot turns. — Dennis Harvey
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Exclusive to Netflix

Operation Christmas Drop (Remi Weekes)
Where to Find It: Netflix
“Have you heard of a partridge in a pear tree? We’ve got a seagull in a coconut palm!” Such is the level of quippery in this anodyne Christmas offering which faintly distinguishes itself with enticingly balmy South Pacific scenery. It’s that familiar type of romcom in which general perkiness must suffice for the “com” part, while mutual amiability stands in for any romantic chemistry. Leads Kat Graham and Alexander Ludwig are cute as can be, vying with the beachscapes of Guam for smooth, unfettered prettiness, which is how things should be in this kind of holiday escapism. — Guy Lodge
Read the full review

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