Since we know how important at-home-entertainment is for all of us – every week we do a little “what’s getting released on DVD/on demand/Netflix this week” round up for you, with nice little excerpts of our past reviews and more. You’ll love it. Trust us. In honor of Thanksgiving, we spotlight some streaming movies about food and eating with family.
OUT THIS WEEK & WORTH YOUR TIME:
- Crazy Rich Asians. Here’s what we said in our original review:
Crazy Rich Asians is a glamorous confection of a romcom. It’s basically the film equivalent of a chilled, bubbly glass of champagne on a steamy August night: a refreshing, classy party starter. It’s the kind of lush ensemble romantic comedy that the Sex and the City films wished they could be. CRA has a delightful, warm familiarity to it, and along with its all-Asian and Asian-American cast – all of whom deserve to be massive worldwide stars – it will hopefully be a guiding light towards the romcoms of the future.
- Blindspotting. Here’s Jesse Hassenger over at The AV Club:
If the recent Sorry To Bother You presents a head-trip, music-video vision of trying to get by in Oakland, California, then Blindspotting offers a more grounded tour of the city, addressing some of the same or related problems: racism, gentrification, systemic oppression. Given the proximity of the two movies both at Sundance and in general release this summer, Blindspotting has every opportunity to look more staid, earnest, and traditionalist in its approach to the subject matter. As it turns out, this may be why such a small-scale, sometimes predictable drama can still feel, at times, downright revelatory: It crackles to life without a surfeit of surface flash.
INSTANT VIEWING OF THE WEEK (eating with family edition):
- Julie & Julia (now on Netflix). Here’s Dana Stevens over at Slate:
It’s when Ephron cuts to Paris that the poulet rôti hits the fan. Streep’s incarnation of Julia Child towers, literally and figuratively, over the movie. She plays the beefy, 6-foot-2-inch Child with lusty comic verve, yet her performance isn’t broad in the least. Every word that emerges in that familiar octave-swooping voice is both hilariously funny and deeply felt. From the movie’s first scene, in which Streep and Tucci wordlessly bond over the deliciousness of a sole meunière, we understand this woman completely: She’s a sensualist and an adventurer, deeply in love with her husband and far too ambitious to settle for the life of a diplomat’s wife. Tucci’s understated performance as the wryly bemused partner of this human tornado is a treasure, too. In two brief scenes, it’s suggested that Julia and Paul, now in middle age, have missed out on their chance to conceive a child. When Julia learns that her sister (a sidesplittingly funny Jane Lynch) is pregnant, Streep makes all Julia’s reactions—resentment, joy, grief, resignation—visible in quick succession.
- Krisha (now on Netflix). Here’s Eric Kohn over at IndieWire:
More than once in writer-director Trey Edward Shults’ grimly fascinating drama Krisha, the camera slowly closes on the title character’s troubled face. With her wizened features, sunken eyes and unkept white hair, Krisha (Krisha Fairchild, the filmmaker’s aunt) wears the beaten down look of a woman baffled by a world that has slipped beyond her grasp. Shults’ dizzying filmmaking technique compliments that distant gaze, as he chronicles the alcoholic woman’s attempt to convince her estranged relatives that she has managed to stabilize her life over the course of a Thanksgiving dinner that careens into chaos. It’s no surprise that things don’t go as planned, but Krisha derives an extraordinary sense of mystery around the nature of the character’s problems — and whether she indeed possesses the ability to control them.
- Raw (now on Netflix). Here’s what we said in our original review:
One of the great things about Raw is that while it is very funny and clever, it occasionally dips into fever dream territory, giving it this profoundly surreal atmosphere. The party scenes (of which there are many, this vet school really goes hard) are more than just bacchanalian, they’re an aggressive mixture of light and sound and movement. Especially later on when Justine gains a little more confidence and fully immerses herself into the scene. Watching her try to make out with everyone on the planet while you know she is an actual cannibal is thrilling. Even more so than the partying, the school lends itself to these nightmarish visions. There are scenes where a horse is drugged and flipped upside down for some sort of operation. At one point Justine walks into a class to find her sister shoulder deep in a cow’s ass. It’s so weird.
That’s it! Now who’s hungry?
