The handmaid’s tale dvd 4? This low-budget debut feature is a UFO movie that takes time to achieve lift off. In addition to saddling the story with a mostly unnecessary framing device, which underlines the already obvious echoes of The Twilight Zone, director Andrew Patterson and the film’s writers open the 1950s New Mexico-set story with a handful of overly precious exchanges featuring the two main characters, chatty DJ Everett (Horowitz) and young switchboard operator Fay (McCormick). In the beginning, these two might get on your nerves. But once the movie locks them in place, tampering down the acrobatic camerawork and letting the sound design take control, the material finds a more natural rhythm, drawing on the hushed intimacy of old-fashioned radio drama. Like many of the best UFO yarns, The Vast of Night taps into a deep sense of yearning. Wanting to believe is half the battle.
A few words about streaming services : The Morgan Freeman-narrated March of the Penguins is just one of the family-friendly titles on Hulu. You can also find curiosities such as Three Identical Strangers, a film about brothers separated at birth and raised under very different circumstances, and Fyre Fraud, which details the story behind the failed Fyre Festival in 2017. Our roundup of documentary streaming services should appeal to any fans of the genre. Hulu has hundreds of anime titles, such as My Hero Academia, Himouto! Umaru-chan, and One-Punch Man. Older classics, such as Cowboy Bebop, FLCL, Ghost in the Shell, Naruto Shippuden, Ranma 1/2, Rurouni Kenshin, Slayers, and Trigun are also present. Hulu only falls short of Crunchyroll in this category, with the latter hosting a much larger library of content. Crunchyroll, and by extension VRV, also has the upper hand on Hulu and Netflix in terms of simulcast shows.
Dramas don’t come much bleaker than Beanpole, director Kantemir Balagov’s wrenching story about the damage caused by war, and the exceedingly high cost of survival. In a 1945 Leningrad still recovering from the end of WWII, lanky Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), aka “Beanpole,” works as a nurse even though her military service has left her with a condition in which she becomes temporarily frozen. Iya cares for Pashka (Timofey Glazkov), the young son of her frontlines friend Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina), and when Masha appears to reclaim her child – only to learn of an unthinkable tragedy – their relationship buckles under the weight of grief, guilt, regret, resentment and need. Cruel blackmail soon proves to be Masha’s means of coping with loss, but healing is in short supply in this ravaged milieu. Shot in alternately tremulous and composed handheld, director Balagov’s long takes place a premium on close-ups, the better to convey the dizzying anguish of his subjects, who are as decimated as their environment. Overpoweringly desolate and moving, it’s a vision of paralyzing individual, and national, PTSD – and, ultimately, of women banding together to forge a new future. See additional info at the handmaid’s tale season 4.
This one didn’t open theatrically, so once upon a time it probably wouldn’t have qualified for this list. But screw it, we live in extraordinary times — and besides, this atmospheric murder thriller set in a small New England fishing village is the kind of artfully mounted, suspenseful little charmer they don’t really make anymore, so it feels extra special. Two cash-strapped sisters, struggling to hold onto their house in the wake of their mom’s death, find themselves in the middle of what appears to be an elaborate, twisted conspiracy involving the town brothel and a gaggle of old-timers with some dark secrets. The central mystery itself is interesting, but the main attractions here are the colorful cast of characters and the compelling sense of place established by writer-directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy.
Autobiographical tales of trauma don’t come much more wrenching than Rewind, director Sasha Neulinger’s non-fiction investigation into his painful childhood. A bright and playful kid, Neulinger soon morphed into a person his parents didn’t recognize – a change, they soon learned, that was brought about by the constant sexual abuse he (and his younger sister Bekah) was suffering at the hands of his cousin and two uncles, one of whom was a famed New York City temple cantor. Its formal structure intrinsically wedded to its shocking story, Neulinger’s film reveals its monstrous particulars in a gradual bits-and-pieces manner that echoes his own childhood process of articulating his experiences to others. Not just a portrait of Neulinger’s internalized misery, it’s also a case study of how sexual misconduct is a crime passed on from generation to generation, a fact borne out by further revelations about his father’s upbringing alongside his assaultive brothers. Most of all, though, it’s a saga about perseverance and bravery, two qualities that Neulinger – then, and now – exhibits in spades. Discover more details on dvdshelf.com.au.